Posted on 11/10/2006 7:27:00 PM PST by outofstyle
Election Day is over, the votes have been counted, and it's clear that conservatives took a beating. I have always maintained that Christian leaders should not make partisan endorsements — and I never have. But I am unashamed to say that I am a conservative.
In one sense, I think, all Bible-believers are conservative, because we believe in governing our lives by revealed truth rather than by man-made, utopian ideologies. Modern liberalism wants to remove all restraints on people's behavior. Conservatives believe in the moral law. So Bible - believers might be liberal on a lot of issues, at least in the common sense of that word, like helping the poor, but they would be fundamentally conservative in their disposition toward life.
House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rejoices with House and Senate leaders as the Democratic Party takes control of the House of Represetatives at an election-night rally at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill in Washington Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006. Pelosi is regarded as first in line to become the next speaker of the house. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) So, what happened in Tuesday's election? The economy is strong. And it's true we're in an unpopular war, but people vote their pocketbooks most often. Yet the conservative movement, which had been gaining ground, has blown it. It has been defeated. Why?
The answer is one that may startle you. Conservatives lost because they deserved to. They failed to live up to the high standards of personal behavior they preach about. And that's what brought them down.
Is there a double standard here? Why should the case of Mark Foley have helped bring down the Republicans? After all, twenty years ago a Democratic congressman, Gerry Studds, had an affair with a male page, disclosed that he was a homosexual, got his wrist slapped by the House, and then got re - elected! Why has Foley's indiscretion turned into Foley-gate?
The answer is because it's just the tip of the iceberg. Look at how the conservatives for years railed against the Democratic liberal establishment and all of its money, the lobbying establishment, the junkets, the payoffs. The conservatives campaigned against it in 1994, only to take over Washington and do exactly the same thing. This is what is known as rank hypocrisy.
Is it unfair that when conservatives do things liberals do, that they, the conservatives, are labeled as hypocrites? No.
According to that great conservative thinker Russell Kirk, the first tenet of conservatism is the preservation of the moral order. True conservatives don't look at government as a plaything by which they can impose their latest ideas on the country; they look at political power as a guardianship, what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead. In other words, we have a debt to those who have gone before us, and the primary debt is to preserve the moral and constitutional order that our forebears fought to defend.
So when a conservative has a much - publicized affair or is outed for improper sexual behavior with pages, or digs into the congressional budget pot to hand out earmarks to his own district, he is a hypocrite to be scorned.
My hope and prayer is that conservatives in America will do some serious, sober soul - searching. We need to get our own act together before we can preach to others, or before we deserve to hold power. And if we break trust, we are breaking trust with the very essence of who we are. Our own character is at stake.
You can talk all you want about the unpopularity of President Bush, or the Iraq war, or immigration. But what this campaign really boiled down to was, well, when it comes to conservatives, it's character, stupid. If conservatives don’t learn that lesson, they will spend a long time in exile — and deservedly so.
"There is no connection between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and Saddam Hussein"
So?
Everyone, (except the UN, France, Germany, and Russia because they were scamming millions from the oil-for-food-program in direct partnership w/ Saddam) thought there was a connection b/w the two.
I can care less that there was no connection, we went to war with Saddam in '91 and we should of took care of him back then but we finally took care of it after 8 years of weak Carter-like leadership under Clinton...call it delayed gratification.
Did you agree w/ those phoney sanctions that were imposed upon Saddam...where everyone got rich, including Saddam and the Iraqis continued to be tortured, starved and murdered.
And BTW Saddam's butcher-factory would've still been entrenched and the (4) corrupt regimes above would've still been making their millions off those phoney sanctions if...WE WEREN'T ATTACKED ON 9-11.
re: Conservatives cannot slink away without fighting when lies are spewed
Amen and amen!
I don't know what having "In God We Trust" on our coinage has to do with "religious...imposition of dogma on (our) society", and I certainly don't understand how we got from that to the Patriot Act, but at least you've tacitly acknowledged that there are some extremely unattractive features of Anarchatarianism. BTW, are you implacably opposed to Federal imposition of martial law and states of emergency, because, like the Patriot Act, those are temporary measures designed to protect us in times of deathly peril, though I suppose that some might refer to them as "sacrificing liberty to gain security". I think of them as proving that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
I agree with much of what Chuck Colson says, but I also find it very strange that with Chuck Colson as one of the major players in the Watergate Scandal that he should be the one talking all about one's "character"! It's just like Senator Ted Kennedy discussing all about the wrongs of "water torture".
According to that great conservative thinker Russell Kirk, the first tenet of conservatism is the preservation of the moral order. True conservatives don't look at government as a plaything by which they can impose their latest ideas on the country; they look at political power as a guardianship, what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead. In other words, we have a debt to those who have gone before us, and the primary debt is to preserve the moral and constitutional order that our forebears fought to defend.
Moral order is too vague a phrase, it is weasel words. It isn't moral order that conservatives should preserve, but the specific order, the folkways, laws and traditions of the culture. Communists have moral order. Conservatism is irrelevant in the face of immigration so vast that it will make the "natives" a minority in their own homeland. It's a change so big that it makes conservation impossible.
If we are to survive in an age of Muslim assertiveness, is is only Conservative and Christian principles that will win the battle. Multiculturalism's a loser.
I was thinking the same thing. You are exactly right.
Not everyone has time to read or listen. They have children and jobs.
We lost to the Media. Not too the Dems or the slimy Libs.
The Media caused our losses. And I Know it for a fact.
MaxMax.
I am a conservative. My views are less effectively represented after this election. My guess is that other conservatives feel the same way. So in that sense conservatives lost. That is not the same thing as saying conservatism lost/
Yes, the liberal media was a big problem. But there has been a noticeable loss of quality leadership at the top.
We need articulate people capable of speaking and persuading people, and who know how to handle the media as Reagan did.
I like this reason better why we didn't win:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/HughHewitt/2006/11/08/the_road_not_taken__forfeiting_a_majority
And then sit back and say republicans deserved to lose.
I see hypocrites here, but not the people who voted republican, the ones who sat home and are now gloating.
Even God fearing people sometimes don't think or vote smart. I think there were at least some of those type people who had an impact on this election. The question now is What are we going to do about it moving forward.
Also worth mentioning is that we gave them cannon fodder as a direct target.
Unless we redirect our party from being fodder for the media,
we'll never take back the House or Senate.
They get away with murder, and we run away like punks for
throwing stones at a girls window.
Or (God forbid) a pages window.
The Republican party is a party of punks!
Imagine the kid in school who couldn't take a joke. What happens?
Everybody piles on and jokes on the kid for life.
Remember that person at work who couldn't take a joke? Either they caught on
or QUIT!
The media is treating us as the party who quits for walking into a WALL!
All while the bully pulpit (MEDIA) keeps drumming on.
/Salute
MaxMax.
They want their influence to count so they make demands that cannot be met and then withdraw their 'favors'. (votes)
Our President did not deserve this, our troops did not deserve this, and our allies did not deserve this tantrum.
BUMP!
You're up late, young lady.
But it seems to me, in the body of the piece, the author is saying that conservative leaders were hypocritical which is the reason they lost the election for themselves and the rest of us. I believe it is more accurate to propose that Republicans leaders in general, some of whom may be conservative, were hypocritical and lost the election for the rest of us, if you are going to make the argument to begin with.
Yep, the squishy middle. We always vote GOP, the left always votes dem, with few exceptions. This isn't one of them.
Fence sitters listened to incessant bad news from the media, tired of war in Iraq, and tired of high gas prices, even though they had come down quite a bit.
We always have to play to the fence sitters, and this time lost that battle. Stupid fence sitters...
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