Who Really Runs Washington and Why Americans Lose on Every Issue

"Tell me again, how secular and atheist are two different things, when concerning politics, and where in the world they have not been tied directly to mans desire to rule over men, in socialism or communism?"

Nothing could be simpler:

1. According to the Constitution the US State is secular: citizens are free believe and not-believe in God/Gods but the specifics of these beliefs should have no impact when a citizen is dealing with the state or when the state conducts its business.

2. The FSU was atheistic: it did harshly discriminate against believers in any God/Gods.

"You are full of bull and don’t even have the good sense or honor to admit when you have been exposed."

If you unable to see the difference with your own eyes and prefer to trust some dictionaries written by unknown pinkos, I suppose you are way too thick in your skull to have any intelligent discussion with, which BTW nicely correlates with you moronic rudeness and overall degradation of FR in the last 10 years.

You can't have been here long to confuse me with a Paulean, since I am reading them the riot act daily and have been for years. But it is typical of your sort to dismiss more intelligent conservatives with baseless ad hominem smears. Now to substance.

A similar minority support making abortion illegal in all circumstances, and the mushy middle can't make up their minds and believe they can sound reasonable by saying they are against the "on demand" question but also against the "in all circumstances" question. As a fact, they are clueless and there is nothing moral about the position of this mushy middle. You can point to the more than majority that oppose the opponent's policies and the more than majority that oppose the conservative one, and both are correct. As usual, polls can be made to say whatever you want by spinning the terms of the question, but it is no way to decide policy, and no assurance that people will actually support you in a vote that actually counts.

Similarly, you can get a majority to say they are against "socialism" or any other swear word. But they will also say they are against touching social security or medicare, want new prescription drug coverage, want bank deposits guaranteed by the FDIC, etc. They simply will not acknowledge that that entails "socialism", which to them means something from eastern Europe in the cold war.

And the American people are not impressed with your judgement as to when our military is defeated and where it is needed, or the soundness of your judgments in the matter. Or Rumsfeld's, for that matter, more to the point. They want victory and they want it yesterday, not having delivered that combination, they will hold it against you not in your favor.

"But that isn't a reasonable expectation", "on any reasonable analysis, they 'should' support my positions and policies". Well they aren't reasonable and they don't. They judge us by the consequences of our period in power, which to them are a messy continuing war that isn't as pressing at the moment, but still is keeping their sons on far flung battlefields dying for ingrates; and economic crisis complete with the largest fall in household net worth in more than a generation. They don't much care how you spin polls, they just look at that overall performance and declare it utterly unacceptable.

Which doesn't mean they won't get worse, and declare that unacceptable, too. They well might. They are empirics, not philosophers.

The real lesson to draw from the last 8 years would be items like (1) arrogantly deciding to win Iraq on the cheap with a "go small" military solution, opposed at the time by all the experienced brass as inadequate, but pushed by Rumsfeld and his braintrust, failed spectacularly after the initial breakin. (2) Picking immigration as the biggest priority for a second term political offensive was Stupid with a capital S. (3) Letting Lehman fail in a disorderly manner to avoid a charge of "bailout" for about five days cost $10 trillion and counting and was criminally insane.

You don't get to mess up policy calls that big and have another go because you are in favor of puppies. Blow those and you get booted. Period.

Conservatism means facing facts...

The art of picking political issues is to split the opponent coalition not your own, and to mesh the issues selected with policy needs at the specific moment they are pressed.

For instance, you can fight your own base over immigration, or split the Dems over school choice. Instead we got a first term "me too" Kennedy education bill. For instance, at the top of a business cycle you reduce spending to balance budgets. Instead we got a "me too" giant new middle class entitlement in the form of medicare drug benefits. For instance, the blue collar labor left is abandoned on trade and we had a massive current account deficit. While I'd never advocate protection, it is a political loser and economically stupid, we could have pressured China over the Yuan in the upswing, and we could have taken other measures to raise the savings rate (e.g. lift contribution caps, raise the income limits on saver matching incentives, etc) and so reduce the trade deficit.

The main focus of the second term should not have been any of that minutae, however. It should have been winning in Iraq fast enough to bring everyone home by election day. Bush did do Fallujah after the 2004 election, to his credit. Then they went right back to the Rumsfeld small footprint idiocy. The only other major item to be on watch about was the business cycle, and it is entirely clear by now they were asleep at the switch. The Fed did its job, none of the rest of the regulatory apparatus did theirs.

Superior economic stewardship and smarter military strategy were the major Republican "brands" since Reagan. Bush the younger's second term comprehensively trashed both, with our army and Fed barely saving either situation out of sheer professional competence. Despite being handed ridiculous situations and working conditions.

The American people's standards are higher than what we delivered. Conservatives have to acknowledge that to recover and succeed in the future. Pretending we were always right all along and only those dastardly Dems undermined us, won't cut it. There were too many "own goals" along the way.

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