I’m going to try to make my reasoning clear here.
Sarah Palin was my first choice for president, but the left, the GOP-E and many right here on FR wouldn’t have it. They trashed her and her family relentlessly with some of the unholiest filth and lies imaginable. Even so, I did little about it. I felt it was best to let the debate run its course and the best hard ass conservative would rise to the top. Well, they drove her completely out and she didn’t run. Didn’t want to subject her family to such suffering.
Then one by one, they did the same thing to Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Santorum driving their support numbers down and Perry, Cain and Bachmann out of the race. As each one took their turns as our leading non-Romney conservative they were relentlessly attacked, trashed and driven out.
Looked like we were repeating 2008 and were going to be stuck with a loser RINO again. We’re running out of conservative candidates and I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow Free Republic to be used to drive out our last remaining best conservative shot of defeating both Romney and Obama!!
Then a funny thing happened. Newt Gingrich, whom they’d left for dead, arose from the grave and began smiting the heathen. He’s back as a hard as nails, no nonsense, bad ass, battle scarred, conservative veteran of two conservative revolutions, the Reagan Revolution of the 80s and then his own Republican Revolution of the 90s. And they were both hugely successful for us.
I’ve looked at Newt’s plan. It’s Reagan’s plan on steroids. Radically reduce government, regulations taxes and spending, restore constitutionally limited government, restore states rights, restore individual rights, restore economic freedom, restore American excellence, whack and dethrone the liberal activist judiciary and get the government the hell off our backs, out of our lives and out of our religion.
Securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity!!
Now what is there not to like?
We are rebels trying to take back our freedom or aren’t we?
Rebellion is ON!!
Join or die!!
Don’t tread on me!!
And I mean **REALLY** appreciate it. The background explanation helped on this a lot. What you say makes lots of sense.
Mitt Romney must be stopped and after South Carolina, it looks like Gingrich may be the man to do it. I strongly believe that if Gingrich is going to be the nominee, we've got some really hard work to do in the next few months. We've got to deal with the social conservative part of the Republican Party, of which I count myself a member, having made a very deliberate decision decades ago, despite being the son of a Republican politician, to reject the ties I inherited to the Ford wing of the party.
After I posted the (now deleted) link to an article from World Magazine last night that is considerably less critical than this link to American Thinker, I checked again this morning and saw the comments section at World for that article is now filled with really nasty stuff. Even worse, there's lots of unrealistic stuff posted there saying basically that it doesn't make any difference whether a candidate wins or not, we just need to vote for the most faithful person regardless of the consequences.
That's the way to lose elections, and too many of my brothers and sisters in the Christian conservative movement simply don't seem to “get it.”
I have attended church with Janie Cheaney for half a decade and I know she doesn't believe the things being written in the comments section of her article. I dealt with Joel Belz nearly two decades ago in church work, I've read Marvin Olasky’s writings, and I know they and many others on the World Magazine management team are masters at both ecclesiastical and secular politics, and they know better, too.
But that doesn't mean the people in the pews do — South Carolina voters notwithstanding.
we've simply got to get those votes this November. Numerous key states depend on razor-thin margins in which lower-middle-class or blue collar evangelical voters have socioeconomic reasons to vote Democrat and need a strong religious reason to vote Republican. That's the old Reagan Coalition of northern ethnic Catholic Democrats, combined with rural white evangelical Southern Democrats. Too often they stay home on election day, and that's a big part of why McCain lost.
In hindsight, maybe what I need to do is spend a lot more time arguing with my fellow evangelicals on the World Magazine website and similar forums than doing it on Free Republic. That's where the problem lies, and many of those people are not reading Free Republic anyway since it's “not spiritual enough” or “uses bad language.”
Well, sorry. Politics is war, and because our enemies aren't nice, we can't be either. I learned worse language growing up at Republican Party meetings that I've ever heard around an Army installation, and while I don't encourage bad language, I do encourage aggressive behavior against an enemy who wants to destroy us.
That enemy is Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney is, at best, a lousy candidate to put up against him. At worst, he's Obama-lite, and that's where I think he really is based on past policies.