The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

Spinning RINOs

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While I sit in awe at the super-sized egomaniacal ignorance being displayed by Democrats, His Transparency in particular, trying desperately to justify their kamikaze crash-and-burn midterm election failures by actually saying out loud that Americans simply weren’t “pursuaded” enough by misunderstood “arguments” for the thinly-disguised slavery this administration and Democrat-majority Congress forced onto them, my other half is fascinated with the post-election spinning that because Angle lost in Nevada and O’Donnell lost in Delaware and Miller may have lost in Alaska the Tea Party is some sort of “failure”.

My reply is that this is little more than the smoke & mirrors of RINO guilt attempting to distract anyone with even one brain cell firing on 1/2 a cylinder that the reason Angle and O’Donnell and Miller lost is because the GOP refused to acknowledge that we, the people, had made our choice of GOP candidates and therefore refused to provide them with any real support. A guilty distraction that is, of course, glommed onto with great glee by the smacked-down Democrats to salve their soundly-whipped little egos.

Rush had it right on his radio show yesterday. Just where was the RNC while these so- called “Tea Party” candidates gave career politicians a real run for their money? Did, for examply, Democrat-lite RINO Lindsay Graham lift a finger to help what the people had said were now effectively his party? Nope. Nothing but the sound of crickets.  Because of the GOP’s failure to honor the will of the people, they must now attempt to marginalize and criticize so as to not lose their precious lobbyist support (read:  get rich off your tax dollars) and self-perceived importance in the old boy’s club; even threatening Senator Jim DeMint with a “co-opting” of his conservative freshmen.

Obama and Pelosi and Reid apparently demoralized the Democrat base so much that many of them didn’t even bother to vote. (Though based on CNN’s exit polls that show Democrat voters think Congress’ highest priority should be on even more spending instead of reducing the deficit and cutting taxes it’s perhaps a good thing they found other things to do.)  But on the flip side, Graham and his ilk are the reason many voted for the GOP while holding their noses. Snake-oil salesmen soil seats on both sides of the aisle in Washington but I have two words for them:

November 2012

The RINO Message: “We want your votes but not your candidates”

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In an email today from Jim DeMint:

As you know, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary to her conservative challenger, Joe Miller, in a fair fight. But instead of graciously conceding and endorsing the Republican nominee, Murkowski announced that she will continue her campaign as an independent write-in candidate.

Senate Republicans held a closed-door meeting yesterday afternoon to elect someone to replace Senator Murkowski as the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Or so we thought.

Rather than taking away Murkowski’s leadership position on the committee, Senate Republicans decided to let her keep it. One senator after another stood up to argue in favor of protecting her place on the committee — a position she will no doubt use in her campaign against Joe Miller, the conservative Republican nominee.

It was bad enough to watch my colleagues work to support her in the primary after she had built a record of betraying conservatives principles. But watching them back her after she left the party and launched a campaign against the Republican nominee was more than I could bear.

I spoke out against the motion and I voted against it. But the good ol’ boys Senate club, which always protects its own, prevailed. The motion was adopted by secret ballot and the final tally was not disclosed.

More from Marc Thiessen:

In an interview, [Joe] Miller told me he is confident that he can win with Murkowski in the race: “She was given her job and now she thinks she deserves it. She has disrespected the will of the Alaskan voter. We had the largest turnout of any Republican primary in the history of the state of Alaska. The race was won fair and square. And then in the wake of that, she claims that the election was ‘hijacked’ and that it was a group of ‘extremists’ that voted for me. It gets down to the fact that she perceives herself as entitled, and she can’t let go of the power she’s held for the last eight years.”

In that sense of entitlement, Murkowski is not alone. All last week, we heard the GOP establishment complain how the Tea Party is threatening Republican unity by pursuing “ideological purity” at the expense of a “big tent” party. But Tea Party-endorsed candidates are the ones who have stayed within the GOP tent. Rather than launching destructive third-party bids, fiscally conservative insurgents have contested GOP primaries — and when they have lost, they have endorsed their establishment opponents virtually without fail.

Contrast that with the record of the establishment candidates. When it became clear Charlie Crist would lose to Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race, Crist bolted the GOP and decided to run as an independent. When Arlen Specter saw he would lose to Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, he became a Democrat. And, after losing the GOP nomination in Alaska, Murkowski is running as an independent write-in candidate. And yet, we are told that it is the Tea Party that is dividing the GOP and threatening party unity. For establishment candidates, unity seems to be a one-way street. The message to Tea Party activists across the country is:  We want your votes but not your candidates.

Read that last sentence again:  We want your votes but not your candidates.  That, dear readers, is the root of all angst (or should I say “disgust”) now being demonstrated by the average American voter.  The average American voter who, when push comes to shove, is conservative and pragmatic, common sense and bottom line.  Sure, a majority of these folks voted for “hope” and “change” but paying for other people’s mortgages, abortions, and business miscalculations (not to mention padding the personal bank accounts of unrepresenting representatives a la Rangel, Dodd et al) wasn’t exactly how they defined it and the sea change being demonstrated by RINO and progressive liberal losses to “nobody” conservative candidates is the manifestation of their buyer’s remorse. 

We have plenty of politicians in Washington.  What we want and what we need are representatives of we, the people.  Despite those claims of honor among thieves it is apparently asking too much of either the GOP or the DNC to face the firing squad squarely; it appears they’ll wake up November 3rd looking like proverbial deer in the headlights.  Doesn’t say much for their claims of being the “best and brightest”, does it?  Particularly when the warnings signs are clear.  A friend of mine recently received a solicitation from the Republican National Committee and sent it back; in the space for an “other” donation amount they noted they had made a nice-sized donation directly to Sharron Angle’s Senate campaign in Nevada.  Other shots like this are being sent across the bow every day; I told my local GOP House candidate just last week that if, when he gets to Washington, he becomes what we’ve come to expect as a stereotypical politician I would personally kick his butt.  But therein lies the task that faces us:  we must become personally involved in governing this great Republic and we must remain personally involved.  It is complacency that is the biggest reason America now faces such an uncertain future, therefore it is a return to vigilence that is our personal and individual responsibility if we wish to bequeath something better than federal slavery to our children.

We Need A Party Of “NO”

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Though the GOP continues to be portrayed by the mainstream media (as egged on by the Democrats) as a bunch of mean-spirited, miserly old white people whose favorite pasttime is saying “No” just for the sake of saying “No”, the polls show clearly that even the most average of Americans now feels that the federal government is way out of control and a clear majority disapprove of Congress.  Everyone in Congress.

So it seems to me that just like any good employer whose employees have taken to holding open-bar tailgate parties and hosting strippers in their cubes, funding them out of the petty cash or charging them to their business credit card, the correct response to any further requests for any kind of non-essential spending is “No.”  In fact, I’d to so far as to say, “Hell no.  And while we’re talking, pack your personal things and don’t let the door hit you on the ass as this nice security guard escorts you out of my building.”

And as every a astute parent will tell you, “no” is a perfectly fine word.  It is what shapes our world by helping us define our boundaries, it is part and parcel of the rules of any game.  In the same way you don’t let your teenager head off in a car full of their friends if those friends are drunk by using the word, “no”, so, too, should the GOP and any reasonably sane Blue Dog Democrat be saying no every time the far left-wingnuts propose more “I won”-drunken and therefore dangerous spending.

One example is the so-called “jobs bill”.  It’s nothing more than Obama’s coveted “second stimulus” in populist clothing.  While our economy needs a big shot of tax breaks, cuts, and even those stinky little taxpayer loans to the feds euphemistically referred to as tax “credits”, these are easily accomplished by simply writing them up as such and passing them through Congress.  It’s so simple even a child could do it. 

Instead, what His Transparency has set forth is just one more charge against the already-unfathomable national debt.  Sure, there are tax credits and a few tax breaks, but when the first unstimulating stimulus hasn’t even been spent, what the hell do we need to spend billions more for now on “shovel-ready” projects that mysteriously didn’t manifest the first time around?  Particularly troubling is that some of it comes as a direct attack on the insurance companies, paid for with the tax dollars of future generations.  He’s building then riding a wave of angst over what are in truth rather justifiable health insurance premium increases in a state so broke due to the expansiveness of its coddling entitlement programs that include illegal immigrants that even its IOUs aren’t any good any more in order to sneak into place another piece of the puzzle being put together to socialize American medicine.  And if that’s too hard to get your brain cell around, just what does regulating the insurance companies have to do with creating jobs, anyhow?  If anything, this will kill jobs in the insurance industry, aka the private sector and replace them with yet more federal bureaucrats.

I don’t know about you, but it makes my head spin.  The one thing of which I am certain, however, is that if America is to survive we must have the word “No!” ringing out loud and clear.  Every time something is proposed that requires more government employees (meaning, it costs money), the GOP and Blue Dogs should be standing up and shouting “No!”.  That is what the majority of we, the people, desperately want.  That is what this beloved country desperately needs.  Contrary to the affirmatively-graduated Ivy League stated opinion that Americans somehow just don’t understand the elitist prattlings teleprompting their way down to the great unwashed masses from the upper levels of the federal government, the majority of American people are not stupid.  Even if Congress doesn’t bother to read the legislation they slap together under cover of darkness, we do.  And no matter how slowly you state your case, no matter what pretty words you use to try and put a positive spin on it, if it costs money and especially when it infringes on our privacy and our liberties, the bottom line is that we don’t want it.

That’s the big mistake that Scott Brown made.  While no one expected a true, Constitutional Conservative to come out of the state of Massachusetts, his vote to end debate over President Walking Eagle’s “jobs bill” showed clearly that he doesn’t get it.

What we, the American people, want is NO.

  • No more spending
  • No more taxes
  • No more pork
  • No more entitlements
  • No more closed-door deals
  • No more special interests
  • No more federal bureaucracy

And more importantly, no more lies.

If members of the GOP were wise, they would clean up their act and then wear every single “NO” as a badge of honor.

News Or OpEd? It’s All The Same To The Mainstream Media

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Newsweek’s latest issue carries an article criticizing Alaska governor Sarah Palin as its draw to dissect what’s wrong with the Republican party.  Regardless your opinion of her or about the charges made against Republicans in general, there is an important point about the piece and the choice made by its editor, Jon Meacham, that must be understood. 

The author, Rick Perlstein is a “pot, kettle, black” left-wing blogger who spent a great deal of time and effort writing for a liberal site called “Campaign for America’s Future.”  One of his “interests” is listed, by him, as “conservative failure.”  In 2007, Perlstein wrote, “I’ve just become a proud Fox [News] attacker.  Now, you can too.  It’s not a boycott.  It’s simply calling advertisers and informing them what Fox says.  Fox can’t survive that.”

Unfortunately, for all his wishful dissing of FOX, they’re now hauling in the overwhelming majority of ratings as average Americans begin to question what’s really behind all the “hope and change”.

But the point is that Newsweek is posting the work of an opinion writer in the guise of journalism.  They aren’t telling you that the “analysis” presented wasn’t done by a reporter, but instead by a self-perceived political pundit with an agenda and an ax to grind.

This is why Newsweek and so many other mainstream publications are gasping in their final death throes.  And rightfully so.