“That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties...” I would add the forces of international Islamic Jihad to this line. Our leadership has pussyfooted around for too many years now, while fighting wars on 2 fronts against that enemy but not identifying them.
Lets stick to the constitution and call ourselves all geniuses.
I do not think that the Mount Vernon Statement is quite what we needed, but we needed something. The Sharon Statement is great, but it could not have played the needed role in the conservative movement, right now, for two main reasons: first, too many “conservatives” since 1960 have shown us that they can claim to believe in freedom and the Constitution but use definitions, qualifications, and excuses to avoid supporting either of these in real life, other than when they feel like it; and second, a statement of principle that refers to international communism as the most dangerous threat that we face could not have been actively presented to new or potential conservatives, at least without putting it into the right context. The Mount Vernon Statement is not quite what we needed (anything created by a committee of people representing different parts of the movement and which needed to be something that each of them could get away with signing was not likely to offer much in the way of clarity or specificity), but if it and the Sharon Statement accompany each other, in the future, the Mount Vernon Statement probably could be useful.
I think I have ended up promoting this in most of the threads where I have discussed the Mount Vernon Statement, but the Twelve Points are more detailed: http://the12points.com/p/twelve-points.html. The Twelve Points are not quite the new “Sharon Statement,” either, but there are some similarities, and my intention was for the Twelve Points to be able to correct a lot of the philosophical confusion in the conservative movement.