Posted on 02/28/2007 7:54:19 AM PST by Al Simmons
Wedge Issues Posted by: Common Tator in FreeRepublic.com April 16, 2002
The one thing that amazes me on this site is the belief by some that the conservative position is the majority position.
Mostly people tend to believe it could be the majority position if the right candidate ran, or if it weren't for the media or RINOs or etc, etc. They really don't have a clue.
Roughly 2/3 of the public has firm views. They have made up their minds and do not change them. This group is nearly equally split between the left and the right.
There are about a 1/3 of the population that is never sure. Sometimes it will go left and sometimes it will go right.
When a party restricts itself to its base it will be in a minority party. The "base only" party will be reduced to crying as the other side works its will. In some nations both the left and right restrict themselves to just their base. That nation then develops five or six parties. And all governments in that nation are coalitions of a major party and some of the minor parties. In that situation the minor party always has more influence than its numbers represent. For the Rino and Dino haters that is the worst of all worlds.
Many of Rino and Dino haters try to make ours a 3 or 4 party system. They never figure out that their splinter right or left party would never get much power in a government based on coalitions. They are too small. It is the centrist parties that have a 1/3 of the public as potential members that get the clout in the Multi Party system. As you can see in a 2 party or a 5 or 6 party system the center tends to prevail.
But in our two party system the center is an instrument the major parties use to enact their goals. In the multiparty system it is the center parties that use the right and left to enact their centrist goals. Such a system like those in Italy and France are RINO and DINO paradise.
This nation now and for all of the last 140 years has been roughly 1/3 left, 1/3 right and 1/3 in the middle. Those in the middle who run for office are what we call RINOs and DINOs.
When Republicans drive RINOs out they leave the party to become DINOs and take their political power with them. The Democrat party gets them by default.
Then the Democrats thanks to its Dino buddies have a veto proof house and senate. It was Barry Goldwater's greatest accomplishment. In my BRAIN I knew Barry would elect a lot of DINOs ... and he did.
If a party with most of the center wins the presidency too, they have a filibuster proof senate. That party then can do anything it wants to do. When the party leadership takes control they implement the parties core beliefs. It was what LBJ did after Goldwater drove all the RINOs into LBJ's camp. It let LBJ do the "Great Society." LBJ had to have Barry's help to do it. And Barry did what it took to give LBJ the support he needed... LBJ had all the left. Barry gave him all the center.
To win control a party must keep its base and get over half the middle. If the Republicans have more RINOs than the Democrats have DINOs the Republican agenda prevails. If the Democrats have more DINOs than the Republicans have RINOs the Democrat agenda prevails.
Those that demand the defeat of RINOs are doing all they can to enact the leftist agenda. They are the most valuable asset the left has. One of the most effective tactics in politics in the negative campaign.
Negative campaigns are not about getting votes for your candidate. They are about getting the other side's base to not vote for their candidate. Thus if you can get the right to vote against a Rino or not vote at all, you can elect a very liberal candidate.
If you can force the Republicans to nominate a right wing candidate so right wing he can't get the center voters, you elect the left candidate.
That's exactly right. Those who thought Jeb Bush should break the law or bring in the National Guard to *save* Terri hurt the GOP more than they have yet realized.
Go read post #385, it might show you where many of us are coming from.
I wish it were that simple Jim, but political realities dictate that refusal to come to compromise in our form of governance results in political defeat which leads, in our case, to democrat control and eventual loss of both liberty and freedom.
All political parties have extremes, and they will gravitate to those extremes when there is nothing to balance them out.
Liberals move toward aggressive socialism which leads to Stalin, or Hitler.
Conservatives tend to lean toward autocracy and theocracy, which are equally dangerous to freedom and all four lead to eventual chaos and civil disruptions.
Political balance is critical and if one faction takes it's self out of the game, the other will dominate.
A statement of non-compromise, or political insolence as some call it, will cause the public to vote you off the island and allow the other to achieve control and shift left or right, as the case may be.
This is what will happen if we cannot come to agreement.
The pendulum will swing, and it is hell to get it back where it was, much less get it to change direction..
His words are as dead-on accurate now as they were twelve years ago. And they fit in this discussion.
You get A for effort; you've asked it every single way it can be asked.........LOL.
The individual right to life supercedes all party considerations.
Not to mention he'll be getting in the race soon.
"Most of the ones here claiming to be social conservatives are not members of the Republican Party."
SSSSSURRRREEEE they're not. And what party are they members of? The Libertarian Party? Hah, I think not. Oh, wait, that's right. They're really secret undercover Democrat(ick) operatives. It's tin-foil donning time!
And there is plenty of stuff going in both directions.
The level of anger is increasing because there is not just a clash of minor political views--it is a clash of world views...
Sorry, I cannot agree with you.
The last two would go a long way toward satisfying me, but trust me, he is not going to promise anything like that.
As for judges, he's already blown that with his own televised remarks this month about the Second Amendment. He wouldn't know a strict constuctionist if one bit him on his bald head.
Not everyone who posts here is honest about identity. If you don't know that, you haven't been paying attention.
In addition, Stormfront people post here when they can get by with it, and they are pretty close to Nazis, not Republicans.
Guliani would appoint his lawyer friends fromt the DOJ.
A bastion of left minded big governmnet lawyers.
The 60 / 40 public sector vs private sector lawyers would get WORSE.
And we look back on that record, and I want you to consult with yourselves, because we're being told many things these days. These folks keep asking me, every time I turn around I have some journalist asking me, "Where are you going to get the twenty million dollars, the forty million dollars, the fifty million dollars, the eighty-five hundred million dollars that is required these days to run for President of the United States?" Does it bother you a little bit, that they have decided that the office of the Presidency is an office to be bargained and bought and sold on the auction block in a marketplace, as it were, not of ideas and values, but the simple bartered marketplace of dollars and cents?
Is that true? Is it really true that we have reached the point that the only thing we can hope for in this country is the best President money can buy? Because, I have a feeling that a lot of those candidates didn't have much money in the bank, who stood forthrightly for Republican principles, and the courage and the loyalty to the values of the American people that no money can buy. I have a feeling that that courage and that spirit and that loyalty hark back to many other Americans -- who fought on battlefields in Korea and the First World War and the Second World War - Americans who marched to their certain death during the Civil War and who understood that there are certain things that money cannot buy. There are certain things money cannot sell. There are certain things money cannot influence.
And that when you think about it, those are the things that make us one nation, one people under God. They are the values and the principles of justice and injustice -- of right and wrong -- that bind us together as a nation. And I think we've reached a time, when it has become seriously practical for us to look at how those principles have been applied and misapplied in our day.
And one great area where they have been misapplied, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. I think that it's quite clear that somewhere along the line, they succumbed to those liberal premises that said, "There really is no God. There is no morality. Everything is relative." At the end of the day, we only have one criterion for everything we do and that is the choice, the arbitrary whim of individual wills. And that arbitrary will -- and that choice -- that is our great god now, is it?
But I think that if we take that road, that we fail to appreciate what our founders set down at the beginning. A very simple logic it was. We have our rights and our freedoms as an endowment from God. Out of respect for the authority of God, no government, no power on earth, no individual, has the right to violate the individual rights and dignity of any human being.
Some people say -- the journalists are always out there and the pundits are out there saying, "oh, so what? You restate the principles of the Declaration. What does that matter to us? We've got practical problems to attend to." They don't understand what relationship this could possibly have to welfare reform, and crime in the streets, and education in our schools. They don't understand this.
But I think you and I do understand. We understand that when you corrupt the basic concepts of freedom -- when instead of freedom meaning that we live with respect for, and under the rule of law -- acknowledging the limits on choice which we must respect if we are to retain our freedom.
Alan Keyes
Austin Texas, 31 March 1995
Well, thanks for the answer. I am just trying to figure out a way out of this constant conflict. It's not very edifying to read all of this vitriol.
Do you sleep with his photo under your pillow?
? To you, no doubt.
No. But I live day by day with overwhelmingly the same principles in my heart.
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