Sorry, I cannot agree with you.
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
OK....I respect that, and i want you to equally respect my position which is based on what i think is the wisdom of history.
We, and I use the collective "we" meaning Republicans, have a long history of growing pains and political mistakes. The other side, the "they", have a equal if not longer saga that we exploit.
The democrats made the very same mistake that we are making now, when we exploited their arrogance and the resulting House Banking Scandal. This caused them to self destruct from within and we took all their territory, as you well know.
But then we became arrogant, and they exploited our error. They now have us on the defensive and we are self destructing from within, just as they did.
They gathered themselves together by simplifying their credo and they launched a political war against bush and everything they chose him to represent.
one of those representations is Social conservatism which they have successfully boxed up nice and neat and labeled dangerous and EVIL.......Just ask the people of Missouri what happened when Rush Limbaugh got into the stem cell debate. What happened in New Mexico as we attacked our own president and shelved the Immigration bill? What happened to Santorum and co. as a result of his stupid attempt to usurp States rights, a direct violation of long held Republican beliefs?
State after State after State held primary elections where the party was infighting, but that was not the problem. the problem was that when the general election was held, the party remained split like rotten log. it did not come back together as it should have, because the issues were not political, they were emotional and divisive.
So now, you give me that same list of issues, and you expect a different result because we were not somehow Conservative enough to win!
I respect your opinions on all of these issues, and I share many of them, but they do not belong in the political debate at election time during the general election. They need to be put aside after the primary and the elections cannot be solely based on this sort of social argument.
Even the immigration debate, having failed to sell it's self as a national security issue, became nothing more that a repeat of the hundred year old divisions regarding immigrants and the populations that they reside in. It was joined by every riff-raff advocacy group from skin heads to Azatlan nut cases, and it destroyed the legitamacy of the debate by connecting us to these groups. You know this because you saw it happen in our Arkansas FReeper group.
Speaking of Arkansas, I know that few people even know what happened here during the election, but it is sufficient to say that this southern state no longer has a viable Republican Party. We lost everything down to the local mayoral elections, and as a republican, I no longer have anyone to vote for. The ballot is likely to remain blank for the foreseeable future.
Please understand that when I see comments that indicate a repeat of the same tactics used in 2006, for the 2008 elections, it gives me much distress and the reality is that we cannot afford to do that again.
Not unless we have a suicidal wish.
There is a better way to handle this, and you need to listen to the moderates who have their hand on the pulse of this seemingly confused country. It is important that we remain in the game. We must, or the they will run amok and uncontrolled again.