We Blew It

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal

and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

When you look at leaders like Newt - the thought occurs to me why Sarah got such a welcome - Newt cheated on his wife and on the conservative principle of smaller government. The first time in each case it is shame on you - Newt - the second time shame on me. Tom Delay fits into the same category...spenders and cheaters (he took the gifts and trips and golf outings) - even if legal they had been a violation of the public trust.

When Sarah showed up she was someone who had broken the back of these people in Alaska and might clean house in Washington. We all knew that the house needed cleaning that is why we lost the congress and then the Presidency.

People like Jeff Flake, Mickey Cantor and Tom Coburn are smart but they have all the style of the label on a jelly jar. Sarah has the message delivery that could actually change the culture of politics. That is too much to ask of one person, but that is what happened with Reagan and maybe she can start a school of change.

We are doomed as long as people like Newt continue to dominate Fox news - we need people that are beyond smart - they need to be free of the taint of scandal. Newt thinks he was wronged, but it is we who he wronged. He has to leave the airwaves and return to PRIVATE life. We need a new school and new leaders.

Not so long ago, 2006 to be exact, on this site many people were telling others to stay home and not vote to teach us a lesson. Now look who’s been taught the lesson?

Yeah, but is an absence from an election teaching them the wrong lesson?

What if your causation/correllation assessment of what they will learn is wrong?

What if the pols learned in 2006 that a conservative base is too fickle to trust, and that the only way to stay in office was to run left?

What if the lesson learned from McCain was that Obama Marxism is what the majority of the country wants??

Do we really believe there were 8 million voters out there who voted for Obama because he wasn't conservative enough?

Or...do we really believe that there were 8 million more voters out there who didn't bother to vote because Palin, the most compelling pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Washington conservative since Ronaldus Magnus wasn't at the top of the ticket?

I'm afraid that the only thing you teach a pol in Washington when you stay home is that you cannot be counted on.

Freepers have at various times thrown McConnell and Boehner etc under the bus for whatever "man-the-phones" initiative of the moment.

There is no power in Washington without a reliable base.

Pelosi has power from the nutters in SanFran because everyone knows she will win her elections as long as she's there....supporting war, taxes, handouts to corps....doesn't matter. She CANNOT lose her base.

"Conservatives" gladly pull the rug out from under their players with any single misstep....and they have no power to fight SanFranNan's because of it.

Remember, we threw Gingrich out just 4 years after 1994. The leftists would've never conceded defeat like that.

Thus, they take messy victories, we take "principled" defeat (see Goldwater, 1964) and we all move ever leftward.

What's with P.J.'s tirade against the pro-life movement? And abortion's "the people's choice"? Wrong, P.J.

The whole point of the 1973 USSC decisions was to REMOVE this matter from the arena of democratic choice. It wiped out 50 sets of laws which were to some degree life-protective in all 50 states --- yes, ALL the states, even liberal MY and CA, curbed abortion to some extent--- and instead placed all pregnancies in a free-fire zone extending from coast to coast under the dictates of the Federal Court.

The polls have stayed remarkably stable: maybe 10-12% say No Abortion No Way, another 10-12% say Sure Abortion at Any Time by Anyone for Any Reason, and the enduring majority, 75- 80%, want SOME degree of restriction on this still-divisive, still-controversial, heartbreaking practice.

State legislatures have attempted hundreds of pieces of legislation to rein in the lassez-faire slaughter. Despite frequent setbacks in Federal appeals courts, we the American people have demonstrated, decade after decade, our desire to place our legal protective arms around our beloved daughters, sisters, mothers and babies.

If we had an actual democratic choice the laws would vary from state to state, but I daresay within 10 years the death toll would be cut in half.

And if it weren't for the fact that some of us perceived McCain, and still more, Palin, as the ONLY available pro-life alternative, McCain wouldn't have gotten 47% of the vote. It would have been more like 27%.

Mr. O'Rourke, if you don’t realize that, you truly haven’t been paying attention.

Your point about abortion is apposite because it crystallizes the realignment the party must undergo before it can come back. Abortion is an issue where I think there can be very little room for compromise if one is a social conservative. I cannot imagine the Republican party retaining its soul if it sells out on this issue. I am trying to offer an accommodation to both social and fiscal conservatives where that can be done. I don't expect my solution to be accepted but my duty is to offer it. Here's what I wrote in a couple of other posts:

I think we should see this article for what it is, a ranging shot by the fiscal conservatives in the initial skirmishes to establish party dominance. The fiscal conservatives who fancy themselves intellectuals want to establish their primacy in whatever new order emerges in the aftermath of the election debacle.

I want all flavors of conservatives to try to do this even though I believe that somehow fiscal conservatives must be brought one way or another to an accommodation with Social conservatives. I want to do this because the only way the party as a whole will hammer out a definition of conservatism which can be subscribed to across-the-board is to argue about it. In fact, I hope the arguments get ferocious and bitter before they are finished. One side or the other must capitulate, or there must be a mutual accommodation, but there can be no uneasy armistice leaving wounds festering and suppurating as we traipse about in the wilderness. From a previous post:

As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.

The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie.

In the last couple of days I have been prompted to comment several times on the sense of embarrassment the fiscal elitist conservatives seem to have for at least one third of the party. Before the election I wrote this:

I believe that the big battle in the party will not be between conservatives and moderates but between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives who are primarily libertarian. Both flavors of conservatives find common ground in strong defense. Fiscal conservatives are generally not as enthusiastic about Second Amendment rights, but the issue is not a dealbreaker. Social conservatives are almost universally fiscal conservatives but not all fiscal conservatives share social conservatives concerns about abortion and the ancillary issue of the morning after pill, education, religion in the public square, homosexual union, stem cell research, and pornography, marital fidelity as a prerequisite to public service, and evolution.

I consider myself to be a social conservative with a pesky libertarian reflex. In other words I am ferociously opposed to abortion but I am less exercised about what homosexuals are doing to each other in private. I am very concerned about the war being waged against Christians by our own governments but I'm not very exercised about adult pornography. I recite all of this because I think the way I resolved my apparent dilemma is the way everybody should do it: look for the victim and protect him. The classic arguments in support of legalizing alcohol, drugs, prostitution and gambling all point to the "absence" of a victim so the traditional conservative bias towards individual liberty weighs very heavily. But I sure see a victim in partial-birth abortion so I don't give a damn about the mother's convenience. Indeed, I see no reason to grant exceptions to prohibitions against abortion for incest or rape because those circumstances do not justify victimizing innocents, that is, to kill babies. Life of the mother exception, to the contrary, makes sense to me because one can identify the mother now as a victim. So if all conservatives would only just do as I do, (you know, be as reasonable as Henry Higgins and I) which is to weigh the balance in behalf of an identifiable victim but otherwise to respect individual liberty, we would find much overlapping common ground upon which to build long-lasting compromise.

If social conservatives would accept formulations of public morality the organizing principle of which is the protection of an identifiable victim rather than the vindication of a moral precept, fiscal conservatives and libertarians would be much more comfortable in the party. Fiscal conservatives, for their part, must go to bat for Christians when they are embattled by the secularists who would rob them of their faith through the arm of government. Fiscal conservatives owe Christian conservatives one more consideration, they must stop their smug condescension and their eye rolling whenever Christians express their faith in public. Consider for example the execrable figure of the son of William F. Buckley Jr. abandoning the McCain/Palin ticket for ill disguised abhorrence of Palin's faith. This is probably the last kind of bigotry that is socially acceptable in America but it must no longer be acceptable among conservatives. Buckley claims that he is a "small government conservative" but I claim that no matter how small his government, he is no conservative at all but something quite alien to us.

If the conservative movement is to be salvaged, this dichotomy will have to be resolved either along lines that I suggest or some other way. The alternative is a further splintering of the party and that would be very, very unfortunate.

What most people don’t understand, the problem liberal vs conservative, but nations vs globalism.

Over the last several decades, politics have become increasingly global, and the policies and political ideologies now becoming ensconced in our society are global and socialist. This isn’t springing from native born Americans, but is being brought to us through both political parties, conservative or liberal doesn’t matter.

The flooding of the country with illegal immigrants is promoting global socialism, and both parties support it. “free trade” and the globalization of our economy is a purely socialist tool to control the world’s economic resources. The corruption of our election process with motor voter, absentee voting allows illegal and ineligable people to vote. Uncontrolled campaign donations by transnational corporations, and foreign agents and citizens via web, all corrupt our government for the implementation of the globalist viewpoint and the destruction of American independence. Finally both parties have contributed to the unconstitutional regionalization of our government, both participate in the unconstitutional nascent global government called the G8.

With a media that is partly owned by foreign corporations and foreign governments, no message of American self government is allowed. “Interdependence” instead of independence is the word you hear from both parties.

It’s a mess , and we have allowed it to happen on OUR watch.

Time to get of the time wasting liberal/conservative bandwagon and start protecting America from the globalists slavering to have their turn at the carcass of the United States.

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