So is a losing the Senate races in Delaware, Nevada, and, effectively, in Alaska. My point is that so long as we conservatives focuse blame on elected representatives for doing what they perceive to be the in their own electoral interest and thereby excusing ourselves of fault for failure to support them, we will find ourselves in this trap that we were in last night. The problem is not in the stars, Horatio, but in ourselves.
Liberals have been winning the war from the ground up since I was indignant about the firing of McArthur. They have taken over the churches, schools, universities, the newspapers, public radio, television, virtually all of our eleemosynary institutions, federal and state bureaucracies, unions, and generally everything politically correct.
We then send the few elected representatives we can cobble together from ever shrinking electoral and demographic landscape to Washington and expect them to do at the top of the pyramid what we ourselves are unwilling to do at the base. When they falter in the face of overwhelming odds from every quarter, we blame everybody, especially these politicians, but ourselves.
Now this is generally the point in the argument in which it is asserted that if only the conservatives would be conservative they would win all the elections. We have seen in the above noted Senate races that that ain't necessarily so. There are many secular forces arrayed against us and to be a pure conservative is almost to stand naked before one's enemies. But I do not carry the motto, "attack, repeat, attack" at the foot of my posts because I believe in passivity in the face of evil. I believe we are in a mortal conflict not just for the soul of the nation but for its very existence. This is a fight not just worth winning but it is a fight literally for survival. It must be won!
All this is by way of predicate to articulate a unique point of view on this thread: we did well to avoid shutting down the government this time because we were not ready, we had no plan, we had not brought the country along with us. It was the wrong battle fought for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. If we had won our victory would not have worked any significant good effect on a budget out of control with 2010 deficit at $1.65 trillion it was a feel-good gesture. The victory likely would have been pyrrhic.
Make no mistake, I want this damn government shutdown, I want the EPA financially starved and shutdown, I want Planned Parenthood bankrupted, put out of business, and it's bloody abattoirs shuttered and shunned as if they were as radioactive as Fukushima. I want to win. I do not want to stake all feel-good or face-saving gestures.
Above all, I do not want to give Barak Hussein Obama the opportunity to turn the tables on reality and accuse Republicans of torpedoing his plan of economic recovery just when it was starting to work. I do not want him to drag the Republicans down to his level. I want the electorate to see this reality: the economy is Barak Obama's economy; let the voters judge him on his economy. If we shut down the government, the media and Barak Obama will convince many of the unwashed that everything was coming together when the Republicans, who put us in this fix in the first place under George Bush, got power again and resorted to their old tricks.
It is the job of a politician who would be a statesman to lead the people in the style of Ronald Reagan. Alas, we do not have our side of this issue effectively articulated by our conservative leaders. We have our talk radio hosts who are our spokesman by default. We have Bachmann, Palin and Senate DeMent but the first two have been marginalized and, anyway, they are not enough. Marco Rubio is excellent but not in the presidential race and those in the presidential race have not caught the imagination of the people. Now comes Paul Ryan who might be a shining star who might, just might, become the statesman conservatives desperately need. A shutdown last night would have continued to pull the spotlight away from Paul Ryan and his plan.
Yes we must shut down the government but we must shut it down for a better reason than mere pique, it must be shut down in support of a plan that tells the people that here is the solution, here are your jobs, here is the future for your children, here is the light at the end of the tunnel. Shutting down the government to save 2% of 2010 deficit fails utterly to offer the people such a vision. It risks all for no advantage and threatens to exhaust our momentum for no better reason than to save face.
Let's get to work from top to bottom and articulate why a plan like Paul Ryan's is worth mortal combat-because it saves us all from mortal peril. Let us pick our fights as Machiavelli would have us do. Let us fight to win, let us fight to kill off the enemy, let us be sure of our tactics and strategy, let us rally the people to the colors.
Soon we will have a replay of last night's crisis in the struggle over the authorization of the debt. Will we be ready?
