Conservatism Lives!

Congressman Steny Hoyer gets called out on on Foxnews for the fact that the Democrats elected their new leadership with a traditional secret ballot while they are at the same time preparing a push to take away the right of the average American to have a secret ballot when voting on union representation. (In fact, he says, its one of the first things they will pursue when heir new terms begin in January). Watch him dance in answering why what’s good for fat cat congressmen isn’t good for average Americans.

I am glad to see some organized opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act forming and gaining some steam. EmployeeFreedom.org just released a new ad to combat the so called “Employee Free Choice Act” or “Card Check” bill (which among other things eliminates a worker’s right to a secret ballot when voting on a union).

Despite the stance of some communist party members prior to the election that Barack Obama did not, in fact,  represent a communist agenda, the actual “Communist Party USA” recently gathered in new York to celebrate Obama’s victory and the sweeping victories of the Democrats in general. The communist backed People’s Weekly World recently reported on the meeting (full story here). Here’s the money quote for you:

What is needed to reverse this crisis, he [CPUSA National Chair, Sam Webb] said, “is massive fiscal expansion, large injections of federal money into the economy…We need to single out jobs and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, joining with others in the struggle.” The EFCA, labor’s top priority, will make it easier for workers to join unions.

The party leaders emphasized combining support for immediate and partial measures and for more advanced and longer-term reforms, along with projecting socialism as a fundamental solution, one that Americans are now open to hearing more about. The economic crisis shows that socialism is a necessity for our country, Webb said. “We need to put out our vision of socialism and how it will come about.”

I, for one, sincerely hope that the communist party’s excitement about the Obama administration is misplaced. In particular, I hope for the sake of our economy that President Obama does not sign the Employee Free Choice Act. Perhaps with the number of ex-Clinton staffers coming on board, President Obama’s tone will moderate from that of candidate Obama. Here’s hoping the commies are wrong.

Love her, hate her, wish she would go away, wish she’d run in 2012, whatever other reactions that Sarah Palin has elicited, there’s no denying that she’s made for an intriguing “character” in the Republican party. I thought it was odd that in her first post election interview with Greta Van Susteren she chose to cook while answering Greta’s questions. In this new interview Palin answers questions at a turkey farm in Alaska. Apparently she pardoned a turkey for Thanksgiving as is tradition. However, for the entirety of the interview, there is an unnamed worker in the background slaughtering less fortunate turkeys. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what Palin says in this interview. I couldn’t stop watching the guy in the background go on about his business while trying to hear what she was saying. The framing of this shot and juxtaposition of the elements is almost mesmerizing. If Todd Palin and a “snow machine” has been worked into the shot this would have been an absolute masterpiece.

As we’ve covered here in the past, candidate Obama promised to make the Freedom of Choice Act the first law that he signed into existence if elected President Obama. Well folks, we all know what the outcome of the election was. All that remains to be seen now is if President Obama fulfills his promise. Make no mistake though, we must fight the Freedom of Choice Act. This legislation isn’t about the debate when life begins or even when an unborn child should be granted human rights. This isn’t about Roe v Wade or legislating through the judiciary. This is about the Federal government telling states and local communities that they aren’t permitted to decide what constitutes common sense and destroying their wishes with the stroke of a pen. The FOCA simply eliminates ALL state and local laws regarding abortion. These are common sense laws that all but the most extreme abortion advocates can get behind; things like parental notification for minors (something required for every other surgery of any type performed on a minor including dentistry), requirements that only licensed physicians perform abortions, spousal consent, and waiting periods (ironic that the left wants a waiting period to purchase a firearm, but not to abort a child). Please, sign the petition and write or call your congressmen, Republican or Democrat and urge them to vote against this bill if President Obama pushes for it as promised.

Newsweek today reported that yet another retread from the Clinton years has been tapped for the Obama administration (full story here). Eric Holder was announced today as Obama’s choice for Attorney general. Additionally, there is speculation that still another ex-Clinton staffer, Elena Kagan, will be named as Deputy Attorney General. Holder served as the Deputy Attorney general under Janet Reno and is perhaps best known for his opposition to the death penalty and his involvement in the Presidential pardon issued by Bill Clinton to Mark Rich. (Rich had fled the country and had been  living abroad after he was charged with tax evasion and making illegal oil deals with Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis; indictments that were served by then U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani. Rich’s former wife had given substantial contributions to the Democratic party and to the foundation that was to build the Clinton Library.) I am simply amazed by the sheer number of ex-Clinton people that team Obama is pulling aboard.

For someone who built his entire campaign on the words “hope” and “change” and the promise of a new era of politics, Obama is putting quite a few Clinton era retreads in place. In fact, the most recent buzz surrounds the possibility that he might actually appoint Hillary herself. So far Obama has named several lower level ex Clinton staffers and a few high level one including ex Clinton Senior Advisor Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff, ex Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta as his transition team leader, and ex Chief of Staff for Vice President Gore under President Clinton Ron Klain has been named as Vice President Biden’s Chief of Staff. Now, I’m sure many people are comforted by the fact that Obama is pulling in people with some experience, and I’m not making a judgement call about that either way. I’m just curious how those Democrats who fought long and hard against Hillary and bought into Obama’s promise of a fresh, new day in Washington feel about him tapping Washington insiders who did time in the Clinton administration instead of blazing the new trails he promised. I would also like to offer the following suggestion for our revisionist historians. Perhaps, we ought to amend the official record of Obama’s now famous words:

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Perhaps what he meant to say (and what the historical record ought to reflect) was:

“We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for to bring the Clinton’s back. We are the change back to the Clintons that we seek.”

I am often fond of saying that I don’t actually know anyone. I just happen to be fortunate enough to occasionally know people that know people. Such is the case with Oliver North. I don’t know North. I’ve never met him or even seen him in person, but I happen to know a guy who knows North well. By all accounts, including (and most importantly to me) my friend’s account, North is the real deal; an honorable man, a student of history, a patriot, and a soldier through and through. North weighed in today on the current economic situation and offered his take on what lies ahead. Any time someone that I respect offers an opinion, I try to listen. His full piece is here, a couple of highlights are below. Enjoy.

For the last seven years, according to Congressman Jim Moran, “we have been guided by a Republican administration that believes in the simplistic notion that people that have wealth are entitled to keep it.”

Actually, that “simplistic notion” has been the lynchpin of the American system of free enterprise for the past two centuries. It has served to make the United States the most bountiful, wealthy and charitable nation on earth. Yet, Mr. Moran says that system “doesn’t work in the long run.”

My fellow Americans, welcome to the long run.

Among the G-20 “official representatives” are those like Brazil’s socialist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — who blame the United States for the current economic downturn.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who claims credit for having come up with the idea for this confab, has said that there is urgent need to “regulate capitalism” and that the G-20 gathering is a “great opportunity” to “build the capitalism of the future.” Among other things, he wants to eliminate “offshore tax havens” and is pressing for the means to enforce new international “codes” against “excessive risk-taking.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others in the European Union are advocating creation of a global regulatory agency for financial oversight and “international transparency” for banking activities. He supports giving the IMF unprecedented authority for surveillance over transactions by borrowers and lenders.

In the rush to establish “adequate regulation and oversight” over financial transactions, too many G-20 leaders are willing to sacrifice national sovereignty and personal privacy.

“In the long run,” to use Mr. Moran’s words, that’s too high a price for Americans to pay.

(Intercepted Document from the New Democratic National Committee)

—— !! CONFIDENTIAL !! ——

If you are not a card-carrying member of the Democratic National Convention, an affiliate of the cabinet of the current President-Elect, an employee or editor of a national news organ, then stop reading immediately and destroy this document.

OFFICIAL STANDARDS AND PROCEDURES FOR CONTINUED DEALINGS WITH ROGUE CONSERVATIVE THINKERS AND POLITICIANS (IF ANY ARE TO BE FOUND).

On the heels of our smashing victory in the recent elections, we, the new Democratic leaders of this country, have cause to rejoice. We must not, however, be lulled into a false sense of security. Our foes are still out there, and they may be even more dangerous in their current, defeated state. After all, the last thing their cause needs is martyrs. The work of destroying our opposition has only just begun, and that work can be summed up in two, all-important words:

CHANGE NOTHING.

It will be tempting to adopt an attitude of magnanimous reconciliation with our opponents, or to soften the viciousness of our attacks. This is a sign of lingering humanity in many of our members, but under no circumstances should these primitive instincts be indulged. That which we have used to defeat conservative (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Republican) ideologies must be continued verbatim, with no break and no exception. “Change” may be an extremely effective mantra for wooing the proletariat, but it is the last thing we wish to implement in terms of our ongoing manifesto. Our new President Elect has shown his understanding of this by peopling his cabinet entirely with our best old-guard liberal warriors, so let us all follow his example and remember the basic principles which have carried us thus far.

Here, in brief, are the guiding axioms that should continue to define our attitude toward the remaining conservative underground and any recalcitrant Republican politicians who dare not defect to our side, if in ideology only:

NUMBER ONE: REPUBLICANS ARE STUPID.

This cannot be emphasized enough. This is our first and most effective attack, and it should be repeated above all others. Did it matter that George W. Bush scored higher grades than Al Gore? Not at all. Does it matter that he reads more books in a year than the typical Democrat voter will read in his lifetime (although, in all fairness, he does not watch anywhere near as much television)? No, it doesn’t matter. As we so importantly learned during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a decade ago, it isn’t the facts that matter, but rather the seriousness of the allegation.

Calling someone stupid works on the grade school playground and it works in the world of adult politics for the same reason: calling someone stupid means that their words can be legitimately ignored. THIS is the point. The last thing we want any of our people to do is start listening to the arguments of the other side. As we have long known, debate does not help our side, for the simple reason that our rank-and-file are, in actuality, rather ignorant themselves. As we know, eighty-percent of our own people do not know who Harry Reed is, and only slightly more can name the current vice president. Historically, our members do not vote on issues or ideology; they vote on emotion. They vote on what makes them feel “cool”, or “caring”, or “broad-minded”, or “sexy”. It has been said that Barack Obama is the first “MTV” President, and we are not ashamed of this. This is, in fact, the pinnacle expression of how our Party has always worked. We must, if anything, continue to craft our Democratic brand to represent this strength. This means assuring that our voters continue to vote based on emotion and cool-factor, rather than on boring intellectual facts. We must do everything in our power to prevent ideas from cluttering our voters’ judgments. In short, our best tools involve stifling debate, but under the guise that we’d love to have a debate, if only our opponents weren’t so stupid. This way, we can allow our members to continue to feel smart, while freeing them from the burden of actual thinking.

NUMBER TWO: REPUBLICANS ARE HICKS, RUBES, REDNECKS, HILLBILLIES, HOOSIERS, HAYSEEDS or whatever synonym is colloquially relevant.

This is second only to the first in application, and it is mostly the purview and responsibility of the entertainment media to spread this attack. Our own politicians must continue to be viewed as above making such degrading accusations, but it should be made obvious that they are thinking it, and simply being too gracious to say so. Late night comedians in particular are granted free reign in spreading the rumors that:

• Conservatives enjoy incest at every opportunity.

• Conservatives own guns, leave them lying around their shacks loaded, and fire them at every opportunity, usually at cuddly animals and homosexuals.

• Conservatives are religious whackos that handle snakes, pronounce “God” as “GAWD”, and include country and western music as a central tenet of their faith.

• Conservatives are terrified of black people, and, in fact, people of any other color, and have probably never seen or spoken to one.

• Conservatives subsist entirely on Twinkies, deep-fried sticks of butter, and buckets of gravy, which they both drink and bathe in (often at the same time).

See? The jokes pretty much write themselves, mainly because we’ve been making them for so long. It does not matter that the jokes are unoriginal, cliché, or even knee-jerk obligatory. All that matters is that they demean and belittle our enemies in a way that works.

Many of our members feel a twinge of dishonesty about this tenet for two reasons: one, most Republican politicians are, in fact, wealthy upper-west-side urbanites with nary a gun cabinet or a pick-up truck in sight, and two, most of our rank-and-file constituency are gun-toting, pickup driving, rednecks, rubes, hicks, hayseeds, hoosiers, hillbillies, etc. It must be emphasized again that these mere “facts” must be ignored for the good of the Party. It does not matter that our political opponents are possibly more urbanized and intellectual than we are, simply because the allegations stick. We have been making them for so long that the idea of a redneck conservative politician is an absolute institution: people know it before we even say it, furthermore—and this is the main point—they know it not because it is true, but because we’ve been saying it for so long that people simply see what they expect.

Secondarily, it does not matter that the vast majority of our constituency is, in fact, rednecks, hicks and hayseeds, because of one very simple thing: they do not acknowledge it. They refuse to think of themselves as such, even though they know they are. We provide for them the important service of giving them someone else they can look down on, someone whom they can feel is even less backwards and inbred than themselves. Voting for us becomes simply a nominal evidence that they are not what we’ve claimed our opponents are. After all, what is more important to the redneck than fooling himself into thinking he is better than the “redneck” who might rule him?

NUMBER THREE: REPUBLICANS ARE RACISTS

This must be handled delicately lest it back-fire, but it is one of the deadliest bullets in our arsenal. As with the previous two points, it does not matter if the allegation is true, but merely that it be made, seriously and with absolute assurance. You must trust your own indignance, even if it is baseless. If we have been able to convince the voters of this country that the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Underground Railroad is, against all probability, a racist party, then you must trust your ability to make the accusation stick as well. Fortunately, today’s voters’ understanding of history is apocryphal at best, thus they actually believe that Republicans were the party of segregation, rather than Democrats. We have not yet had the sheer audacity to imply that Governor George Wallace, who enlisted the militia to block entry of black students into an Alabama high school, was actually a Republican, but we’d venture to guess that most people probably believe it anyway.

It may seem ludicrous on the surface of it, but it is absolutely essential to maintain the appropriate sense of outraged indignance whilst making accusations of racism, lest the accusation be seen for the farce that it is. One must not smile or giggle, even if the accusation is made against a conservative candidate who has adopted or married a person of a different race, supported racially-harmonizing issues, or is even of a non-white race themselves. There need be no supporting facts or evidence in the least. In fact, the more the accuser relies on actual evidence, the less convincing the accusation will probably seem. As any race-racketeer knows, racism is best accused on terms of “instinct”, rather than evidence. As we’ve learned in this country, if a person of color accuses a white of racism, it is true, period. Argument or denial by the accused will only deepen their apparent guilt. If handled well, there is no escape from the accusation of racism, as evidenced by the legions of conservatives who have been buried by it in the past.

Now that we have a black President in the White House, some of you may feel that this tool has become somewhat ineffective. To repeat the main point of this dispatch: CHANGE NOTHING. Accusations of racism have been a lethal tool against our opposition in the past, and they remain so today. The fact that we now have a black President in the White House simply means that, as far as we are concerned, forty-seven percent of voters are still racist. You must use this angle to its fullest effect.

NUMBER FOUR: SHOW NO MERCY

Joe Lieberman spoke before the Republican convention, supporting John McCain. Now that we have won, is this the time to welcome the Honorable Senator back to our camp with open arms, exhibiting our respect of his dissenting views in a country that purports to value freedom of thought? Recent events give us the answer to that question. Just as we have convened to see how best to punish, belittle and excommunicate the traitor, Joe Lieberman, we must not allow ourselves to show the slightest compassion on our enemies now that they are down. They will attempt to reorganize, even in their decimated state, and just as we have arisen from the ashes of the George W. Bush years, unified and unstoppable, they will surely attempt to rally themselves for 2012 and beyond. We are now in the perfect position to crush them utterly.

Our first tack must be to further the idea that Conservatism is dead, the Reagan years are over, and that Republican ideology must be redefined to conform to modern reality (i.e. liberalism).

Further, we must support and fast-track the Fairness Doctrine, shutting down on-air expression of conservative ideas. We must continue to redefine dissenting thought in all its forms as hate speech. We must inflame our base into threatening their conservative associates into silence. We must make our members believe that it is good and just to crush the opposition, with threats and shouts if effective, and with violence (such as the glorious displays at the Republican Convention earlier this year) when necessary. We must continue the campaign, consistently rallying our troops to avoid the temptation to debate issues or engage in polite discourse. Conservatives remain our enemy, and like a virus, they must be destroyed utterly, lest they return in the future, rallied and immune to our opposition. Now is the time to complete the work we have begun, ever vigilant, and more dedicated than ever.

That which has worked so far will continue to work. Our voters do not really want change. They want what they have always wanted: to be told they are smart and good for voting against the purported conservative dimwit redneck racists. They want to be promised things, even if we never really follow through with granting those promises. They want to be convinced they are victims, that the evil conservatives have held them down, and that it is time to make those conservatives pay, figuratively and literally.

Despite the apparent landslide of this last election, our majority is slight. Now is the time for us to create further dependence on the government, greater desire to be coddled and provided for, and even less belief in the potential for success. If we accomplish this mission, fully cementing a majority in this country who will vote entirely on emotion and on who promises the most goodies, rather than ideas and what is best for the country, then we will never again have to fear losing power. The few remaining conservative Republicans will become, quite literally, a party without a country.

Only then will we be able to rest.

Say hello to the new Democratic Regime. Just like the old Democratic Regime.

A lot of conservatives, including friends of mine, have been talking about Governor Bobby Jindal for a while now.  There was some thought that he would be more heavily involved with the Republicans in this year’s Presidential campaign. In the end, however, he really wasn’t used that much. I suspect, in retrospect, that he was simply too conservative for the more "moderate"  McCain camp. As a conservative, so far, I really like what I see with this guy. I hope he is as he seems and that he sticks around and helps revitalize the Republicans from the inside out. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get the Constitution Party defectors back. Check out his interview with Greta Van Sustren that aired earlier this evening.