Ted Cruz Extends the Buckley Rule (lengthy article)

spectator.org ^ | 9/26/13 | Jeffrey Lord

[Redmen4ever]

I don’t know whether Rove is a neo-con, like Krauthammer, or merely a “party man,” but here is the problem with being a party man:

Winning by moving in the direction of your opponent assumes that your base has no alternative but to vote for your guy because he is after all the lesser of two evils.

This is wrong on three counts:

1. First, the Republicans need (small “l”) libertarians as well as conservatives to win; and, libertarians don’t view Republicans as less evil than Democrats. Libertarians view the traditional political spectrum as having bad social policy on one side and bad economic policy on the other. So, libertarians will either vote for the (capital “L”) Libertarian Party candidate or stay home.

2. Second, conservatives might view losing some elections as acceptable if this means when we win we have conservatives (and libertarians) in charge, rather than having RINOs when we win and Democrats when we lose. So, the party’s conservative will stay home.

3. Third, over time, the country will drift in the direction of the party that has an agenda, not for the party that merely opposes the agenda of the other party.

2012 is a prime example. Our people did not show up to vote (or, in Colorado and elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain west, voted for Gary Johnson).

Even 2004, Rove’s claim to fame, is illustrative (of point 3) as what happened two years later?

Rove was and is a political operative. How did he become an advisor to the President on domestic policy? Talk about a directionless party. At least the neo-cons at the Weekly Standard know what they want (the U.S. getting involves in wars all over the world).

George W. Bush and Condi Rice said that would be stupid back in 2000. Those guys have to fess up that they didn’t react to 9-11 as smartly as they should have. Our attempt to use the transforming power of democracy or whatever the heck the neo-cons want to characterize their foreign policy, didn’t work.

We were right to go into Afghanistan with special operations and B-52s and kick the Talliban and their not-so-secret Pakistan allies out of Kabul. But, the idea that we could then “reconstruct” a country that had never been “constructed” in the first place was ridiculous.