There was power in the air, and I have a hunch that exactly what needed to happen, happened.
Was it what we wanted? No. But it was what we deserved.
On another gun blog this morning, I saw someone post a comment that he would never bother voting again.
We did it to ourselves and got what we deserved.
According to this morning's news, overall Republican turnout was only 32%, an all time low.
We did it to ourselves and got what we deserved.
Didn't vote because the Republican party fielded a lame candidate? Whose fault was that lame candidate? Somebody elses? Sounds like abdication of personal responsibility to me, and that's a Democratic Party tactic.
We did it to ourselves and got what we deserved.
Voted for some third-party candidate with no chance whatsoever as a "statement?"
We did it to ourselves and got what we deserved.
This morning when I came in from doing outside chores, one of my dogs had knocked a book, "Acheron" by Sherrilyn Kenyon, onto the couch. When I picked it up, it fell open to a page where one of the characters says, "Sometimes things have to go wrong in order to go right."
We who know there are no coincidences, and pay attention to what happens around us, listen to the subtle messages.
Had McCain been elected, it would have been too easy to forget he was actually a RINO and fall back into apathy. Now we must get off our collective posteriors and do something. If we don't, if we repeat the mistakes of history, then we will lose our black rifles and AKM's and ability to defend ourselves effectively from violent crime. We will end up with Chicago-style gun control and crime non-control, and will be expected to roll over and die for it. We will end up with socialized medicine and all the waste and intrusiveness it entails.
A quote from Dr. Ignatius Piazza's Front Sight blog post, "The Life Cycle Of A Nation:"
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:Personally, I think Professor Olson is being generous here putting us at Step 6. I'd put us more at 7 headed for 8. You want to see Step 8 in all its glory, look at the bubble-wrapped, nanny-state, socialist nightmare that is formerly-Great Britain.
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.
"During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
"1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
"2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
"3. from courage to liberty;
"4. from liberty to abundance;
"5. from abundance to complacency;
"6. from complacency to apathy;
"7. from apathy to dependence;
"8. from dependence back into bondage."
So WHERE are we, citizens of the United States in the historically proven Life Cycle of Nations?
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:
Number of States won by Democrats: 19, Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by Democrats: 580,000, Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by Democrats: 127 million, Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Democrats: 13.2, Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Republicans won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare . . . "
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the complacency and apathy phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
We have two years to work toward breaking the back of the Democratic majority in Congress. Two years after that, we need to revitalize the Republican party so a truly viable candidate ensures Obama will be a one-term President. While it's a pleasant fantasy to expect people like Peggy The Moocher to turn on their great savior when he does not in point of fact make all their nasty bills go away with a snap of his fingers, we cannot afford to depend on it.
Alexis de Tocqueville said, "In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve." Well, we got it, folks. If we don't like it, we have to fix it ourselves.
8 comments:
Good post, and pretty much right on the mark.
31%? That's outrageous. Under the circumstances it's not even understandable.
I voted for McCain but I understand the temptation to skip it. Obama's playing the siren call of bi-partisanship while McCain began setting up Sarah Palin as the fall guy almost immediately. Hell I told my wife last week that if McCain loses the day after the election they'll blame palin, and sure enough while watching Fox there it was.
What bothers me more is how we picked McCain in the first place, then when we saw he was behind spent no time trying to take back seats. By the gos the party abandoned Michelle Bachman a week before the election for voicing an opinion.
My wife and I are already contacting our state GOP to get to work, making us a big tent again where we stick to the values of Lincoln and Reagan and win elections by making the case to the American people that Republicanism, not "change" or "reform" is the best thing for America.
Rob, I guess I slept through the part where "we" picked McCain in the the first place. Maybe I was dreaming, but I thought the party insiders picked him long before the convention, and certainly long before the end of the primary season.
Wasn't the "big tent" argument the one that McCain and the moderates were making with their "I'll reach across the aisle/I can work with the other side/I'll nominate Democrats to my cabinet" lines? "Republicanism" is what got us to where we are today with massive debt, wasteful spending, and a bigger, less responsive and more intrusive government than ever!
Homeland Security, TSA, an anti-gun head of BATFE, an FBI director who doesn't think that the Second Amendment is an individual right, and the nationalization of the banking and mortgage industries (with more to follow) -- all these came about on the Republican watch. "Going along" with liberals only furthers their socialist agenda.
It should fill you with outrage to think that "Republicans" set the stage for President Obama's "Civilian National Security Force" by creating a Department of Homeland Security. When the brownshirts -- oops, CNSF -- break down your door to "collect" your outlawed guns and "escort" you to the re-education camps, think back on how much "Republicans" did to pave the road to hell by reaching across, collegially, to the Left.
The principles of Lincoln and Reagan are embodied in conservatism -- an unyielding adherence to the principles and words of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Not "Republicanism," which any more seems to embody corporate welfare at the expense of individual rights, and an occasional "red herring" to crowds which believe that the Bill of Rights is really a vehicle for banning the deviant behavior du jour.
Reagan said, "I didn't abandon the Democratic party; the Democratic Party abandoned me!" That's the way I feel about the GOP today.
Hecate's right that we got the government we deserve. I blackened the ovals for all the Republican candidates, but the individual and corporate moochers won the day because Republicans didn't offer an alternative.
The Republican party does need change and reform if it's ever going to be more than the "loyal opposition" in a one and a half party system.
It needs to start at the grass roots, in the school boards and in the universities, in city councils, in the bureaucracies, in the charitable foundations -- all the places that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and Barack Obama and ACORN co-opted over the last few decades. And maybe it needs to borrow a page or two from Saul Alinsky's tactics manual to do it. But without a clear message of individualism vs statism, and rights vs privileges, it's going nowhere.
Sorry about the soapbox, Hecate!
No problem at all with the soapbox. That's why we're here.
Now is absolutely the time to get grassroots activism going so we have a real candidate running next time around.
And start working on evening the Congressional balance two years from now. All the state and local pro-gun candidates won in my area, but there are plenty of other states to address.
Next time we need a candidate that will go for smaller government, less taxes, and more freedom. I want to see someone actually talk about getting rid of waste in government like the TSA and Homeland Security. we already have folks to do that thank you. . .
I hope people get pissed enough in the next two years to take back congress. . . then on to the White House
Actually Chuck Republicanism literally means adhering to the idea of a Constitutional Republic where individuals are protected from the tyranny of the masses. That's the Republicanism I am talking about.
Reaching across the aisle and having a big tent are two entirely different things. One involves compromising with the opposition (which isn't always a bad thing unless it compromises our core principles) while the other unites diverse people under the banner of the GOP the way Reagan got many cold-war Democrats to vote for him.
Like I said before you jumped down my throat I dislike McCain. I was a Thompson man but I damn sure would have preferred McCain to Obama. And the GOP should be for smaller government and smaller taxes, but I'm a Reaganite myself and I'm also for strong interventionist policies that sap the strength of our enemies prior them being able to strike us.
I think Bush's mistake is ignoring Latin America and the Bolavarian revolution. That chaos is spreading into our southwest and will eventually need to be dealt with. You and I may disagree with that, but would it help the GOP retake any seats to throw one or the other of us out? As long as we both agree to the same principles of liberty shouldn't we be able to disagree on policy and still remain in the same party?
Or should we do what the left did to Zell Miller and now Joe Lieberman and fight the new brownshirts with brownshirt tactics of our own?
We let the left and the media pick our candidate. We let the left and the media dictate our positions and frame our arguments. What we need now is to stop blaming a few people for what we are ALL responsible for and support candidates for local state and federal positions that are pro-freedom, pro-individual rights and will fight against socialist policies. That also means replacing the leadership of the RNC (I've always wanted Michael Steele there anyway) and drawing in JFK Democrats, Libertarians and Palin conservatives to our big tent, united under basic core principles but allowing for differences of opinions.
Rob, I didn't jump down your throat, I took issue with your terminology. We probably agree more than we disagree, since your second comment on Hecate's blog clarified what you really meant to say. Your literal definition of classic "Republicanism" is correct, but it's not the way it's perceived today, nor is the way it's used in contemporary parlance. GHWB was a "Rockefeller" or "patrician" Republican who lost the support of Reagan conservatives, and his presidency, when he reneged on the "no new taxes" promise.
We all worked hard to elect a Republican majority in 1994, and within three congressional terms they had abandoned much of the "Contract with America." Senate Majority Leader Lott, for instance, could always be counted upon to be a Principled Conservative -- until you tied funding for the Pascagoula Shipyard to, say, an "assault" weapons ban. They threw away the remainder in 2000-2006. That's the way "Republicanism" is perceived today, and that's not Reagan Conservatism.
I didn't see anywhere in your first comment that you "disliked" McCain, merely that you were uncomfortable with him. I don't dislike him -- in fact, I admire him -- but he doesn't represent my view of what this country needs from a president (or my Senator -- which he isn't). Fred Thompson did, but I think we all have to admit that Obama out-organized any potential rival. That's where we take the lesson from them and apply it to the future.
My reference to "brownshirts" was to Obama's proposed Department of Domestic Thuggery, not an internal party purge. On the other hand, how do you deal with the RINO's who consistently support legislation that erode our rights?
As for the "big tent," isn't that the term the moderates use to be "inclusive" of all the special rights and other "victims" groups?
You write: " What we need now is to stop blaming a few people for what we are ALL responsible for and support candidates for local state and federal positions that are pro-freedom, pro-individual rights and will fight against socialist policies."
We're NOT all responsible! Those decisions were made before most of us had an opportunity to exercise our responsibility, and they were made by those few people! And, yes, they should be made forfeit so we CAN have pro-freedom, pro-individual, anti-socialist candidates.
I'm sick of all of them -- from the dunce who thought he should be our Senator after arguing before the Supreme Court that state law didn't really mean we'd ever DO that, to the guy who never held any public office or military service but was rich enough he thought he could buy a Senate seat, to the Congressman who voted on principle against the bailout the first time, and who panicked the second time. They all had the unswerving support of the current RNC. To whom should we expect them to be more responsive?
That's WHY it means replacing the leadership of the RNC and drawing in JFK Democrats, Libertarians and Palin conservatives to our common cause, LIBERTY, united under basic core principles but acknowledging differences of opinions ( I despise the words "ban" and "allow," which should have no place in a democratic society or government), because the current leadership is beholden to interests other than ours. That's why THEY end up with partisan zealots, and WE end up with clowns!
So, Rob, that's why I cringe when you write: "My wife and I are already contacting our state GOP to get to work, making us a big tent again where we stick to the values of Lincoln and Reagan and win elections by making the case to the American people that Republicanism . . . is the best thing for America."
Hope you understand.
The triple threat of an Obama presidency and a Reid Senate and a Pelosi House means we have at best 2 years to "get it right" and to change the balance. Beyond that, and I fear that our next "constitutional scholar" president's view of judges replacing the Bill of Rights with "empathy" on an individual case basis and "social justice" trumping individual liberty will doom any hope of returning to basic core principles.
The coalition you're talking about IS the Big Tent philosophy I'm talking about. Running the party on the basics; anti-Communism, a strong military and a small but effective government.
That requires some compromise on things that are actually quite inconsequential in the long run, like Civil Unions for gays which I support because every American has the right to designate who will inherit his or her property but I don't think government should be able to tell Christians, Jews and everyone else that gay marriage is the same as a religious marriage.
I think that's a good compromise and one I supported when Bush tried to get it done. The gay lobby rejected it but the average gay person could have been wooed to the GOP because of other issues (many I know own guns and like taxes low) if we clarified our position as a Federalist position and not one being pushed through by social cons.
But McCain's "compromises" were always worse. McCain-Fiengold was the single worst attack on free speech in our lifetime, his vote against tax cuts was made just to appease the left leaning media etc. I respect his service but I don not respect today's John McCain.
I guess where I'm not getting you is why my wife and I getting more involved in the SC GOP and trying to get more people to join who share the values of small government, strong defense and individual liberty should frighten you? Libertarians fantasy based foreign policy ideas about people not bothering us if we didn't bother them (I guess Black Africans have been "bothering Arab Muslims for the last thousand years, and the Jihad in Buddhist Thailand is based on muscular Buddhist interventionism)is more frightening to me than a hundred Guillianis but I'm always willing to work with and listen to them and I think they add more to the party than they take away from it.
The elitists you're most concerned with are self-purging now and jumping on the Obama train. We need to expand numerically or prepare for a civil war where we'll still be outnumbered.. It's really that simple.
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