Is The GOP Too Extreme For Reagan?

June 18, 2012 Leave a comment

The Democrats have spent the better part of the last 50 years calling Republicans extreme. It’s expected that Democrats attack Republicans, accusing them of waging war on women, children, the elderly and anyone not earning over $250,000 a year. The Democrats are good at name calling, it masks the weakness of their arguments. Our ears perk up though when Republicans start calling our party extreme and not just turncoats and RINO’s like Joe Scarborough and David Brooks.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush claims Ronald Reagan is too moderate for today’s GOP. The left-wing media ran with the story last week, which isn’t a shock at all. The media loves infighting in the Republican Party, especially when it involves a Bush. In order to believe Jeb Bush and the liberal media, we have to suspend all logic and critical thinking skills. What Jeb said simply isn’t true and we can see it in the history of the Republican Party dating from 1980. In fact, we could even go back to Barry Goldwater in 1964, after all deep in your heart you know he was right.

If Reagan is too moderate to get the GOP nomination today, then we must be nominating even more conservative candidates for the White House. We’re in the process of nominating Mitt Romney, a man who a decade ago called himself a progressive. He’s a man whose belief in the conservative cause seems to have begun around six years ago when he ran for President. He didn’t run Massachusetts as a flaming liberal but he hardly ran the state like a bona fide conservative. At best Romney was a moderate governor who perhaps became more conservative during his four years in that office by becoming pro-life. But if Jeb Bush is right, Mitt Romney must be to the right of Reagan. That would be news to Reagan, not to mention Romney.

In 2008 our party nominated John McCain for President. McCain is a lifelong moderate who has always been more comfortable working with liberals against conservatives. He’s the author of McCain-Feingold which unconstitutionally limited speech. He barely qualifies as pro-life and hasn’t met a tax he wouldn’t like to raise. McCain is a media darling, largely because he’s so critical of conservative Republicans. Jeb Bush seems to think McCain is to the right of Reagan, it’s a comical fantasy that even McCain wouldn’t truly buy.

George W. Bush is as close to Reagan the party has nominated since 1984. He lowered taxes, though not to Reagan’s level. He did have a strong interventionist foreign policy, not unlike Reagan’s though with clearly different enemies. Where they differ is that Reagan didn’t come into office proposing massive government programs such as the Prescription Drug law Bush supported. Reagan went along with domestic spending increases to get military spending increases which he used to destroy the Soviet Union. Bush is more moderate than Reagan was but he’s nowhere near as liberal as McCain or Romney.

Bob Dole was a moderate, just like Jeb Bush’s father. Dole never advanced conservatism during his years in the Senate. He ran a dreadful campaign largely because he couldn’t distinguish himself from Clinton. Bush 41 ran as a Reagan conservative and governed as the moderate he ran as in 1980 against Reagan. He broke his promise not to raise taxes and got snookered by the Democrats who never cut spending in an equal amount. These guys are to the right of Reagan? Hardly.

Looking at Congress, are we to pretend that John Boehner is to the right of Reagan? He isn’t even to the right of Newt Gingrich when Gingrich was Speaker. Surely Dennis Hastert isn’t an extreme right-winger. In the Senate, Bob Dole led the party from the mid 80′s to the mid 90′s followed by Trent Lott, Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell. These guys are extremists? Jeb Bush is either living in a fantasy land or he’s been hanging out in the Florida sun for too long.

Since 1980 the Republican Party hasn’t nominated a Presidential candidate more conservative than Ronald Reagan. Surely no one believes Mitt Romney is to Reagan’s right. If we look at leadership in the House and Senate, is there any of them since the 80′s to Reagan’s right? The notion that the GOP has become an “extreme” party is the figment of the left-wing media’s imagination. The Republican Party hasn’t become extreme, we don’t nominate candidates more conservative than Reagan. If Reagan cannot get the nomination in 2012, perhaps it’s because we’ve become too moderate a party that cannot stomach a conservative. But of course you won’t hear moderates like Jeb Bush say that and you can bet the media will never say it.

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Attacks On Palin Expose Leftist Hatred Of Thinking Women

March 12, 2012 14 Comments

HBO recently premiered a movie about Sarah Palin called Game Change. It more or less mocks Palin, showing her on the verge of a nervous breakdown among other things. The left hates Palin so a movie like this isn’t surprising in the least. John McCain is surprised though. He can’t figure out why the left continues to disparage and attack Palin. And we wonder why this guy didn’t win. Once again McCain shows us he simply doesn’t get what the left is up to.

The message the left is sending with their attacks on Sarah Palin is very loud and very clear. If you are a conservative woman don’t you dare run for high office because we will attack you without mercy. It matter if the attacks aren’t true, the left is making it very clear they will not tolerate a female Republican running for President or Vice President. In fact, they barely tolerate female Republicans at all, especially if they’re conservatives. Palin has suffered the worst attacks but Michele Bachmann was also ruthlessly attacked when she became the GOP frontrunner for a month or two over the summer.

The left views these women as heretics to the left-wing cause. They view these women as voters against their own interests. Because in their mind the default pro-woman position is the left-wing position. Anything else would be a vote against interest. It’s a nice little scam they’ve set up for themselves. Sarah Palin threatens the default position because she offers a pro-female viewpoint that is the polar opposite of the left. As such the left feels compelled to savage her, even long after she’s run for high public office. Or any office for that matter.

The worst part of the left-wing attack machine is that they’re doing exactly that which they allege men do. They  have long accused men of demeaning women and calling into doubt the intelligence of females. All of the attacks on Palin have to do with her intelligence. She’s constantly portrayed as an idiot, a simpleton and a moron. The left spent the 2008 campaign portraying her as unintelligent and they’ve spent the last four years continuing on with the attacks. The left has gone so far as to pretend like a joke made on SNL was actually said by Palin.

To a lesser extent they’ve done this to Michele Bachmann. Had she won the GOP nomination, you can bet the attacks on Bachmann’s intelligence would have been ramped up by 100. The left has done the same thing to black conservatives, attacking Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas as the stereotypical sex obsessed black man who is a threat to white women everywhere. Cain and Thomas are heretics to the left-wing cause. Blacks aren’t allowed to oppose the left, just like the women.

Palin and Bachmann aren’t going to be silenced so easily. The left knows this. They know conservatives will rally behind Palin in particular. Completely destroying Palin is only a secondary part of their goal. Their goal is to silence conservative women. They know that their ruthless attacks on Sarah Palin will have a chilling effect on other conservative women. As such they hope that fewer conservative women will run for office, thus limiting the number who can run for high office.

These are the goals of the self proclaimed champions of women. If you disagree with them, they’ll ruthlessly attack you as a dumb woman on the verge of a hysterical hormonal breakdown. At the same time they have the audacity to claim Republicans hate women. The left is afraid of strong conservative women, their ruthless attacks on Palin four years after she spent two months running for Vice President prove it. The message to all other women is clear, don’t think for yourself. If you do and if you run for office, we will attack your intelligence and everything else about you whether its true or not. Truth matters not to the left, only the outcome matters.

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GOP Establishment Machine Out In Full Force Yesterday

January 5, 2012 4 Comments

Yesterday was one of the more interesting days in recent political memory. We had the opportunity to see the establishment Republican media machine in action all day long. In watching this machine it’s clear they operate in much the same way as the Democrat media machine. Truth doesn’t matter to these people, smears are the name of the game.

We start the day off with several articles in publications like the National Review declaring Rick Santorum a “big government conservative.” While it’s true that Santorum’s record includes support for some big government programs, what these articles ignore is all of his work to reduce the Federal budget and the size and scope of government. Isn’t it interesting though how these articles magically appear the day after he comes in second in the Iowa Caucus? There were at least three articles from conservative outlets yesterday and the liberal outlets picked up on them and ran wild.

This is clearly a coordinated effort by the establishment to tear down Rick Santorum. Why else would these articles appear so suddenly? Apparently we conservatives are supposed to flee from Rick Santorum because he supported No Child Left Behind and Bush’s Rx drug program. Where exactly are we conservatives supposed to flee to? The establishment likely believes that if they can expose Santorum as a conservative heretic we’ll be less likely to oppose Romney. That Romney is a serial flip flopper and moderate doesn’t matter to these people.

While the establishment orchestrated a coordinated attack on Santorum, John McCain magically came out of his shack to endorse Romney. Not only did he magically appear, he just happened to be able to make it to a campaign rally in New Hampshire and he just happened to find time to appear on Hannity with Mitt. We’re supposed to think this was all sudden and rather spontaneous. The campaign rally felt orchestrated and forced. The appearance on Hannity was awkward at best.

Is there any doubt that McCain decided to endorse Romney months ago and the establishment saved this announcement for what they thought was the most opportune time? It sure felt that way yesterday. What the announcement did was push Santorum and Newt Gingrich to the back burner. It made Romney the focal point of the afternoon and evening when most people are consuming news. In other words, it was planned and orchestrated. Very well in fact, other than the forced and awkward appearances.

But is this even good for Romney? John McCain isn’t exactly well liked by conservative Republicans. In fact, he’s not liked by many Republicans at all. Keep in mind, this is the bozo who couldn’t beat Obama who is now endorsing the guy who couldn’t beat him. What does that say about Mitt Romney? Nothing good.

But the McCain endorsement serves its purpose even if it doesn’t itself propel Romney to the nomination. It got Santorum and Newt off the top of the news the day after the Iowa Caucus. For Santorum it’s potentially devastating to have the news media talking about McCain and Romney rather than his stunning second place finish. For Newt it perhaps matters less but it wiped him off the news channels completely.

The lesson from yesterday is clear, the Republican establishment is lined up 100% behind Mitt Romney. The day starts out with a coordinated attack on Santorum’s conservative credibility and it ends with Romney on stage with McCain pushing all the other candidates out of the media spotlight. It was all coordinated, it was all orchestrated, it was all highly planned. Not only that, it was successful in doing what it intended to do. The question is whether voters will fall for it. We’ll find out in South Carolina.

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Obama Can Win In 2012

January 18, 2011 Leave a comment

Dick Cheney recently gave an interview wherein he discussed the Obama administration at length. Cheney believes that Obama has adopted many of the Bush administration’s positions on terrorism because he’s been learning on the job. I can see some merit in this argument, especially considering that Obama has more or less continued forward with the War on Terror.

What caught my eye though is Cheney’s declaration that Obama will be a one term President. Cheney believes Obama’s big government policies, particularly Obamacare, will cost him a second term. While I would like to believe this is true, the fact is that Obama has another 18 months to prove he deserves a second term. Let’s not forget that Bill Clinton sat in the same position as Obama in 1995. He spent his first two years pushing a far left agenda and lost Congress because of it.

Clinton was able to win a second term in two different ways. First, he played ball with the Republicans and triangulated them. He essentially stole the GOP’s extremely popular welfare reform plan and declared it his own. When he and Congress couldn’t agree on a budget, he had a much better strategy for blaming Congress in the media than Congress had in blaming him. Second, Clinton won because the Republicans nominated the worst, most liberal candidate since Gerald Ford.

Obama can win next year, there’s no doubt about it. If the economy picks up, he’ll be in much better shape. But he has to either play ball with the Republicans or come up with a media strategy to blame the GOP for everything under the sun. Obama also needs to be the recipient of a very poor Republican nominee. He needs to run against another liberal John McCain in order to cruise to victory.

 But make no mistake my Republican friends, Obama can win in 2012. It’s going to take a lot of hard work in Congress and on the campaign trail to set the GOP up for victory. We need to pick the right candidate. It has to be a conservative. We cannot afford another progressive liberal like John McCain. We need a conservative. It could be Mike Huchabee, it could be Haley Barbour, it could be Jim DeMint, it could be Herman Cain. But it can’t be John McCain’s twin if we want to win.

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