You Want Reasons?

Kim du Toit
May 15, 2008
11:00 AM CDT

Apparently, the Stupid Party has woken up and smelled the coffee—or, to be more precise, woken up to the smell of the house burning down while they were sleeping:

For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.

Suddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.

The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.

Things are not particularly more hopeful on the Senate side, where most analysts say Democrats have a strong chance of adding five or more seats to their current majority.

Panic and blame-casting for the dire condition were flowing in equal measures Wednesday inside the House Republican Conference and among party elders and operatives outside.

Yeah, panic, you little shits. You support RINOs like Arlen Specter and John McCain, and you wonder why you lose conservative seats like the one in Mississippi?

Your party’s standard-bearer going into November is the senator who has stabbed the party faithful in the back more times than we care to remember, and you wonder why he has no coat-tails for the Congressional elections?

You introduce legislation which is a “compromise” between a Republican and a liberal Democrat like Ted Kennedy, and you wonder why we don’t support you?

You talk about “immigration reform”—which we all know is really a disguise for an amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants—and when over 70% of the country’s voters tells you that such legislation is repulsive, you wait awhile, and reintroduce almost the same legislation?

You made no serious attempt to reform the iniquitous tax code, and replace it with a fair and simpler one.

You allowed your original mandate of smaller, frugal government to be corrupted into a free-spending, licentious and lawless atmosphere, where anything was acceptable as long as it wasn’t as bad as what the Democrats were promising.

The current President (a man who promised to be conservative, and then turned out to be anything but) did not groom a successor while in office, and replace the current Vice-President with a younger version of Dick Cheney (an outstanding man and conservative), thus leaving the Election 2008 field open to a bunch of RINOs like McCain and Romney.

Did you think we were asleep while you were doing all this stuff?

Conservatives are not the Republican Party’s “base”, no matter what the smart boys and consultants tell you. We are not the same as the Democrat Party’s Black voters or union leaders, who will vote for the party without regard to what they do, or how many times they compromise their principles.

We are conservatives. We don’t like change, especially the kinds of change which can undermine the principles and Constitution of this country. We don’t like “compromise” when the people on the other side of the negotiation get almost everything they want, and we get almost nothing.

We do not march in the streets with placards and puppets. We do not write hysterical screeds to the newspapers. We do not say ugly things about our country to foreigners and strangers.

We vote. We vote either with our ballots, or, if the choices are that unpalatable, we vote with our feet and stay away.

You think we have nowhere else to go? I have news for you. We have plenty of places to go, on Election Day. We can go to the library, we can go to the bar, and we can go to the shooting range, to name just a few.

You have precisely three months to come up with a plan, a roadmap to the future, which will not compromise our country’s future, and which will not undermine the Constitution any more than you have done already.

Conservatives are not your base; they are your foundation. And unless you start reaffirming your commitment to those principles which have made this country great, you will find out, like you just have in Mississippi, that you have no foundation left.

Here’s your blueprint. Get back to these bedrock principles, and you’ll win everything.

• The Constitution, strictly interpreted
• Smaller government
• Lower taxes
• Armed citizens
• Frugal spending
• Robust foreign policy
• Law and order
• Conservative judges.