Posted on 06/22/2002 9:46:05 AM PDT by quidnunc
This summer will mark the 47th year since I took my first Republican job: as public relations director for the party in Minnesota. Since then I have rarely strayed from politics, or my party. I served as a staffer to two GOP congressmen, to a GOP governor, as a federal appointee to Richard Nixon and as a corporate executive who supported in Washington and Springfield much, if not all, of the Republican agenda.
You can describe me as a conservative. Thus I am qualified to say that although I dearly love conservatives, they tend to be querulous, disagreeable and threaten revolt when Republican office-holders don't please them. So it is now with George W. Bush. Here is a president who has surprised us all with the firmness and resolve he showed after 9/11. I must tell you I voted for him with less enthusiasm than I had for many of his predecessors. But his administration has pleased me often most notably on two issues: defense of America and social policy.
Yet, Bush has to get re-elected in a country that is evenly divided on philosophy. Thus he must occasionally on matters that sometimes offend conservatives dip into the other side's ideology for support. He has done so on three notable occasions: on the issue of steel protectionism, where he departed his free-market proclamations; on the signing of a campaign finance bill tailored by his enemies, and allowing his attorney general (in the words of Libertarian Nat Hentoff in the Washington Times) "to send disguised agents into religious institutions, libraries and meetings of citizens critical of government policy without a previous complaint, or reason to believe that a crime has been committed."
In a perfect political world, where conservatives are in the majority, these things would be sufficient to encourage a boycott of the polls. Either that or a protest vote for the Democratic opposition. But we are not in a perfect world. We conservatives have a president who didn't receive a majority of the votes, and has one house of Congress against him. He must make compromises to get re-elected. Conservatives who do not understand the nature of politics ought to stay in their air-conditioned ivory towers and refrain from political activity altogether. If they cannot adjudge the stakes in this election and the difference between Bush and an Al Gore or a John Kerry (D-Mass.) or a Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), they are foolish indeed.
-snip-
To read the remainder of this op/ed open the article via the link provided in the thread's header.
You're an unappeaseable. Roeser calls you "foolish indeed."
You're a one-issue voter, so you'll never be happy.
Why don't you ask your congressperson why he/she hasn't introduced another pba ban? Bush would sign that in a heartbeat.
And who would "our" be?
Yellow Alert. This Thread has been invaded by the Axis of Whining Weasels!
No, it's a "You can't do jacksquat if you're on the outside looking in while the Democrats govern" speech.
Cripes, I never realized that my fellow conservatives could be so jackass-ignorant.
Many conservative voters are ideologically dogmatic and politically stupid.
It may be a pathology of being happiest when being the most discontented.
And you're the first to start with the ad hominems.
You've been here a little over two months, so you'd think by now you'd have learned some manners.
AMAZING
So, do you care to enlighten the rest of the forum about your 'list', sir?
Yep, and the biggest bitchers on the Internet are right here, on Free Republic. Many, like flies, have already descended on this thread.
Myopia reigns supreme among the unappeaseables.
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