The Jefferson-Hamilton Handshake, Bridging the Republican Divide

*** (When I make this mark ***, I am noting a place a Blue GOP centrist sub/urbanite is apt to disagree and hang up. Instead, I invite you to comment and/or disagree, or at least reconsider and continue reading. I promise not to say anything petty about your side…or tell a Mitch joke…but do try to put your whole mind to this. I’ll admit you’re my betters if you’ll admit you have a real short attention span.)

I was at a party Friday with an old friend and long time Virginia Republican Party insider. A strong conservative when the party is out of power, he is down-the-line all-business when his party is in. He (McDonnell, Cuccinelli & Co) is back in power, and that’s that. His conservatism is now policy-driven, not philosophical. So, for the life of their terms, which he sees as eight years at least, the festering divide between Red and Blue Republicans in Virginia is moot. It will all be settled with political arm-twisting and executive fiat…and “his people” will be doing the twisting.

This is why the GOP always keeps one foot in the water bucket during a thunderstorm; never fixing that hole in the roof, because, when it’s raining, it too wet to go outside, and when it’s sunny, hell, there ain’t no leak. For a century this view of politics has held sway in state capitals and in Washington alike, but today, it doesn’t take into account that the Obama’s and others have every intention of turning Virginia, and the rest, into little more than administrative accounting units over those next eight years, or that the only real defense against this takeover will be a bridging of that divide between the Red and Blue GOP.

It's thought provoking, but I disagree with a few things. For one thing, there have been lots of high-profile left-right defections since Whittaker Chambers. Take for example, David Horowitz.

Jefferson is unjustly distrusted and maligned by conservatives, at least of the NR variety. And I love my regular fix of NR. But about Jefferson they're wrong, and always have been. Very, very wrong. In this respect, I think the author has it about right. He is mistaken about the role Jefferson had in the shaping of the Constitution. Through his cat's paw, Madison (a genius in his own right, and much more mature than TJ), Jefferson had an enormous impact.

But these are, I guess, minor points. The purpling of traditional Republican strongholds has come about by class association, and I would also say educational level (which correlates highly, though not perfectly, to class.) The RedState author gets this right.

I actually believe when a lot of conservatives deprecate Sarah Palin, it's for this reason. I suspect that when squishy Republicans get into the whole "cultural issues are a turn-off" as their reason for shifting left, they're really saying: "upper class educated people don't concern themselves with these things." It probably also correlates to church attendance, to some degree. How smart is Sarah Palin? I don't really know. Clearly she's smart enough to be president if Barack 0bama is. Is she as smart as say, grey_whiskers? I highly doubt it. But you probably reconciled yourself to the fact that most Presidents weren't going to be as smart as you are a long time ago. And class and intelligence are -- quite properly -- not qualifications under our system of governance. Buckley, the intellectual, understood this perfectly, preferring to be governed by people chosen randomly from a phone book over the Harvard Faculty. His son, a much less able but much more elitist individual, does not.

One point the author touches on but does not slam home and needs to: there are altogether too many limp-wristed Republicans who think that because their Democratic counterparts share their class, agnosticism, and education that their differences are minor. Thus we get the spectacle of supposedly deep conservative thinkers writing dreck about the kewlness of 0bama in the late autumn of 2008. This is a point we must not mistake: If FReepers took over the country, poor Christians, well-educated, successful, agnostics/atheists, as well as Muslims and everybody else in-between would be perfectly safe. But if the Leftists get the kind of control they want, they will be sending people to gas chambers. That's not right-wing paranoia: it's their history. And it makes them different from us.

Much, much, different.

The author's so-called Blue Republicans do not really understand this danger. We must strive to make sure they never get close enough to it to see its horrors.

Whoa. You need to pen your *own* screeds.

This is hugh and series.

This is mostly true, with one grand exception: abortion.

As Rush Limbaugh is fond of pointing out, most of the blue-blood Republicans (and for that matter, virtually ALL of the Senate) are full of scorn towards conservatives, by virtue of their wives being strongly pro-choice: the whole "spoiled dingbat" syndrome we see from (say) Meghan McCain to the trust-fund children of all stripes (why have almost all the philanthropic foundations gone left-wing, infiltration aside?) I even saw an article within the past week that Laura Bush was pro-choice.

How smart is Sarah Palin? I don't really know. Clearly she's smart enough to be president if Barack 0bama is. Is she as smart as say, grey_whiskers? I highly doubt it. But you probably reconciled yourself to the fact that most Presidents weren't going to be as smart as you are a long time ago. And class and intelligence are -- quite properly -- not qualifications under our system of governance.

That's true: but that raises three separate important issues. First being, even with whatever intellect I *do* possess, I'd be worse than ~~Jimmy~~ Dhimmi Carter. I have the right values, but no political sense to speak of: and so I'd be susceptible to one manufactured gaffe after another. Sarah Palin, after being thrown under the bus by Steve Schmidt and the other RINO handlers (if some weren't out-and-out Dem moles), has overcome this.(*)

And this leads directly to the second point: the skills necessary to get elected (charisma, saying the "right" right thing at the right time, deftness) are not the same as those needed to govern or to guide the country. So many of the dirtbag politicians (particularly in the Senate) are there because they have idiot-savant level skills in socially outmaneuvering and crushing any individual opposing them, in a small setting: they effortlessly know, in a manner as second nature to them as breathing is to us, how to manufacture, seize, and attack from the social high ground on virtually any topic, in a real-time basis. So they tend to get their way. The key, if one cannot elect a conservative, would be to get inside the social circles from which politicians get persuaded: and the left has seized those long ago.(+)

The other thing, is that intelligence is over-rated for two reasons: the first is that people in academia tend to measure themselves against hoi polloi on their own specialty, forgetting that it is they themselves who form the consensus on their own specialty: there are very few "black swan" events, no "unknown unknowns" are allowed to poke their heads up. Real life, once you're in office, doesn't do that. (No matter how smart Obama is, he doesn't know *squat* about crystallization of hydrates in deep-sea drilling. And it is those damn hydrates which are determining the fate of BP. Posturing only gets you so far before people want "REAL" answers and not spin. Even more true for unemployment.) The second, related reason, is that if you are used to being at the top of the heap intellectually, you overestimate your own prowress: so by both habit, and fear of looking weak, you don't WAN'T to call in experts to solve the problem. People who are merely bright, but not geniuses, are much better at assessing a problem instantly, and deciding whether they need help, and getting the *right* (efficacious) help in time to make a difference. And Sarah Palin is obviously very comfortable in that role -- which is why she'd make an EXCELLENT President, despite the mewlings of the intellectuals.

Cheers!

(*) but the Press and the Left are skilled at manufacturing crises and gaffes, even where none exist: and they only do it to people on the right. Even if they have to lie through their teeth. This is why the internet, BreitbartTV, and cell phone cameras are so important, and why Obama wants to eliminate or control social media: their lies are exposed faster than the Central Committee can organize responses, the interwebs are inside their OODA ("observe-orient-decide-act") loop. ("It's a series of tubes.")

(+)The question is whether we need to "saw off the branch" or create our own institutions. Look at Kagan. Lezzie dyke, affirmative action promotion at Harvard, intellectually not worth cleaning Robert Bork's cat litter with her tongue. Openly argued for government censorship, openly tried to keep ROTC off of Harvard's campus, wants "hate crime" speech (with white males guilty *even if* proven innocent ensconced as Constitutional in scope. But the RINO vermin in Congress promise "a fair, hard, hearing." Look what open, explicit, lying-through-their-foul-teeth behaviour was inflicted on Bork and Clarence Thomas: and how the Dems VERBATIM said they had to keep Miguel Estrada off of the high court *because* he was Hispanic. But the scandals all attach to the right's nominees because of the Marxist moles in the press. (Bork had an IQ and training to eat even Laurence Tribe and Dershowitz alive, so they didn't even dare to call him "unqualified" -- instead they went to the alternative meme, "dangerous". Back-room abortions, segregated lunch counters, and all that. Which brings up a final segue: the left has figured out that in any system there must be some point, some feature, whose word is final, and which is not subject to internal checks. Take over that, and you can run the ballgame. For the US, that is the Press and the Courts: and in order to keep their farm team full, to continually fill the Press and the Courts with *their* useful idiots-cum-tyrants, they have taken over the schools; and want to finish off free speech.

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