This is a MUST-READ article from RedState.com.
Cheers!
Hamilton was a big government climber. Jefferson had a way with words, but wasn’t so good at backing them up. I don’t really look to either of them for very much.
Jefferson, maybe - he tried to build bridges as much as he could. But I doubt Hamilton ever shook Patrick Henry’s hand.
BTTT.
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.
"This gap has to be fixed, and you (your governor) needs to set about fixing it. We all do. And it has to be conservatives who reach out. After all, we claim primary ownership of “”the handshake”. (***1 Tell me where I’m wrong here. This is a major divide with the Blue GOP, i.e. how we both view the Enemy threat, and whether the threat is to us, America, or just to us, the Party.)"
Conservatives have CONSTANTLY "reached out" and supported the "Blue GOP" positions "for the good of the party" forever, and gotten slapped in the face at every turn when ever they looked for even a tiny bit of reciprocation, and WE ARE DAMNED SICK AND TIRED OF IT.