Get Off Your Backside: Conservatives Must Rise Up or Become Irrelevant

Welcome! This blog/forum has been created to serve as the Skagit County headquarters of patriotic conservatives working to rebuild and revitalize the GOP from the grassroots up. Our goal is to: build a network of activists, each contributing in his or her own unique way; connected by traditional ideas and ideals, policies and principles; to disseminate core Republican beliefs to fellow Americans; and, to support and elect candidates to office who will implement our agenda in the public arena.The work begins today and it begins right here in Skagit County.

We are not alone. Conservatives in neighboring counties, across Washington, and around our nation are coming together to get their houses back in order. For too long, we've allowed moderate and progressive Republicans to move away from the core values that have always defined The Grand Old Party. It has taken our party down a path of mediocrity to defeat. The legacy is that we now live in a county, a state, and a nation that is overwhelmingly run by Democrats with a liberal agenda. We can no longer support or defend the status quo within our party.

Our mission is clear. We must begin here, at the grassroots, to rebuild and revitalize the Republican Party one precinct, one city, and one county at a time. In the process, we will insist that our state and national party leadership reaffirm and work for the traditional Republican principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, justice, individual liberty, defense of life, to foster peace, and to promote freedom around the world.

In 1985 speech, our beloved President Reagan said, "Republicans were not defenders of the status quo but creators of the future...we're lucky not to live in pale and timid times. We've been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something -- for liberty and freedom and fairness. And these are things worth fighting for, worth devoting our lives to. And we have good reason to be hopeful and optimistic."

He concluded that speech with these words, "So, let us go forth with good cheer and stout hearts -- happy warriors out to seize back a country and a world to freedom."

Today, we ask conservatives in Skagit County to heed the call. Let us go forth, happy warriors, to rebuild our party and seize our nation from the edge of the abyss. We will stand together, united, and emboldened by the words of our late President Reagan:

"Let us go forward from here not with some faint hope that our cause is not yet lost; let us go forward confident that the American people share our values, and that together we will be victorious."

There’s a label problem here. “Conservative” means just that, people who do not want radical change in any direction. They want to be society’s inertia, not its momentum. Putting the “conservative” label on everyone in the “right wing” makes as much sense as a football team that only plays defense.

Let’s face it, the “conservative” side plays enough defense. We need part of our side that plays offense, and need an appropriate label that isn’t “conservative.” They are the momentum of the right.

We are still suffering from the days of Barry Goldwater, when the right wing was vilified by the left. Any and every other label for those on the right was turned into an invective, a curse. The most common was “reactionary”, which had a bizarre context, like they wanted to return to the Stone Age and live in caves (something only Al Gore would want.)

This happened because, while the left has no problem calling anyone on the right a “Nazi” or a “fascist”, the right has always been hesitant about calling out the radical leftists, even when the label was dead on accurate, and even when the left was proud of being called “communist” and words like that. The right was abashed to call anyone a communist, because communism was so evil and filthy.

And, of course, Hollywood spent years to convince the public that the right was far more evil and filthy than anything the left, even hard core communists could do. Communists were never, ever bad, in their image to the public.

So here we are. The vast majority of the right, and truthfully, of the public as a whole, is “conservative”. The other factions in the Republican party are not philosophical factions, but are founded on other ideas.

Like the “Country Club Republicans”, who we now call RINOs, who are more liberal, and preferred to be in the minority party for years of Democrat rule. They liked the policies of the Democrats, but detested them personally, seeing them as lower class. But they see most people, right wing too, as lower class.

Then there is the “Business Republicans”, who are fixated on big business and want to ignore social policy. There is *so* much to thank them for right now.

Then there is the extreme right, right wing, that would be a lot easier to get along with if they weren’t so isolationist. Or at least able to distinguish internationalism, which most of us don’t like, from a strong overseas military presence and engagement, which the rest of us do. Let’s face it, closing our borders won’t keep enemy missiles out, and global thermonuclear retaliatory war is not a reasonable alternative to lesser means used before things get out of hand. We have no choice but to kick tyrant’s rear ends periodically.

So how do the “conservatives” split into two teams? We all agree that we need an offense, whose purpose is *not* just to “hold that line”, but to push the left back to their goal line.

We can’t just stop socialized medicine, we have to privatize those parts of medicine that have already been “governmentized”.

We can’t just live with the leftist infiltration into the State Department, the CIA, the National Weather Service, NASA, etc., blatantly corrupting public offices for partisan political goals. Those people have to be kicked out and replaced with others who will do their job.

Perhaps 25% of the US government has no constitutional authority to exist, so it should be discontinued. Almost all of the western lands taken by the federal government should be returned to the States. etc., etc., etc.

And the right wing “not conservatives” who do this need a label to rally around.

I’m getting rather bored with these nebulous let’s take back our party threads. I’m all for optimism, however I think that there is a fundamental lack of understading of who we are and what we are facing.

The Democrat party is willing do anything to gain and keep power. They will cheat, steal, assault and as we saw with the Weather Underground and FALN, will murder to get what they want.

We have election fraud taking place right in front of our faces. Obama supporting District Attorney’d decree that they will prosecute anyone criticizing Obama. What in the world makes Conservatives believe that the Demcorats are just going to simply let us back on the field for a nice fair game of political football?

If Democrats thought they could get away with it they would kill the lot of us.

I don’t think rhetoric is going to be enough. Some of us are going to have to give up our freedom for the rest.

Of course the RINOs don’t want this. Tough titty. I’m more willing to work to rehabilitate the GOP than to walk away and poor money and sweat into a third party that will have almost zero chance of electing anyone to office for the next 40 years. What I find encouraging about this grassroots movement is that they are focusing on local party politics with the aim of developing and electing solid conservative candidates for city councils, county councils, school boards, port districts, and state legislative districts. It’s at the local level that the future leaders of our state and national government learn how to campaign, get elected, and govern. Moreover, if conservatives can hold a majority in local and state governance, they more likely to hold a majority at the national level.

One final point, one of the biggest failings of the Republican party is that moderates and RINOs have muddled the message about the core values and ideas of the party to such an extent, they have been unable to deliver a coherent message to the voter on how Republican ideology differs from Democrats, why Republican candidates deserve their vote, and what Republicans intend to do for the people when elected. Worse, yet, these RINOs who’ve been elected have become no better than the tax and spend Democrats, once in office. They neither talk the talk, nor walk the walk of true, conservative Republicanism. They are frauds - to the Party of Lincoln and to the American people. The conservative base of the Republican Party allowed these frauds to grab power and has even helped elect them to office. The base giveth and the base can taketh away. I believe it should and it will.

The thing about grassroots movements is that they effect bottom up change. It make take 8 years for conservative Republicans to regain a majority in Congress or reclaim the White House. In the interim, however, solid Republican officials can make a difference and positively impact the everyday lives of Americans in their cities, their counties, and their state. That, I believe, is worth fighting for.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.