Here's one:
To: kritikos
You all of these references to "damn the principles" are really presumptious.
The flaw in your argument is that someone who votes for Arnold is going against YOUR principles, not theirs. Obviously, conservatives who support Arnold see it as a principled act to vote for the candidate who will actually stand a chance to win the election so that he will be in a position to push liberalism back, if only a little.
By voting Arnold, those people are standing by THEIR principles, and frankly, YOUR principles are and should be meaningless to them.
78 posted on 10/06/2003 9:22 PM EDT by alnick (The truth shall set you free.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]
BTW, I have one of "yours" saved. :-)
...my point is that if one's action give victory to the enemy...
I understand your point, you misunderstand mine.
There are many ways for my "enemy" to gain advantage over me. Some are overt and some are more covert. There is the overt means of having an absolute 180 degree bassackwards ideologue (like Hitlery or Bustabutt) in power over me. There is also the covert means of continually giving me "the lesser of two evils." Over the years, as the bar lowers with each "lesser", I have to accept less and less. Somewhere, I either stand up for my beliefs or I never get the opportunity to vote for them again.
Conservatives should take great notice of this election. The Republican party decided to swing left to "win" this election. Those who thought we stood for something bigger than that, were apparently wrong.
The absolutely outrageous thing in this election is that there was a choice who wasn't the lesser of two evils but a near carbon copy of what we claim to want here on FR. However, we on FR chose to be pragmatic and turn our backs on "our" candidate out of fear of the bogeyman. Does anyone here feel they were led around by the nose by the media we so hate? THEY chose Arnold. THEY declared Tom unelectable. THEY gave all of the election oxygen to Mr Schwarzenkennedy. Those of you who said they would only vote for Tom if he were ahead in the polls on election day doomed him to failure by the very "tainting" of polls you routinely decry. YOU GAVE THEM THEIR AMMUNITION.
Your principles tell you to vote pragmatically, pushing the better choice to the side in favor of the one you've been told can actually win. Who told you this? The very party leaders and authorities we continually rail about on FR? The very media establishment that canonized Arnold as the Republican frontrunner (like Wesley Clark) as soon as he announced his candidacy?
Why is it that Tom can't win? Well, let's first see what it takes to win... To win, Tom needs more votes than his opponents. It takes us to vote for him. What will it take for us to vote for him? We have to know what he believes and see if it jibes with what we believe... he has to get his message out. What will it take to get his message out? It will take a lot of support. What does he not have? Support--not from the party, not from the media, not from you. Why? Because he's unelectable... it's a circular argument.
It's all moot now but my principles as an American say to vote my conscience. I shouldn't worry about my neighbor's vote. To game my vote or to vote strictly party line is to vote like a Democrat and a political lemming--not a man of principle.
At the end of the day, I will be who God called me to be. You can be what God called you to be. However, I am not less than you because I choose the better candidate and you choose to vote with the pack.
P.S. I'm not in CA anymore. I care about it's future and it's politics but my issue with this whole affair has been the subordination of conservative principles to a lemming pragmatism better suited to totalitarian regimes. It's not about Tom, it's about our future as a conservative voting population.