Category Archives: 2016

Preliminaries to 2016

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I hadn’t intended to write about this subject, but…it…it just irritated me. If you’ve read any of my postings during the past election, you’ll find I’m no fan of Ron Paul. The labels of being an isolationist was earned. When it comes to national security, the best I can say about Ron Paul is that he’s naive to extremes.

That does not necessarily extend to his son, Rand Paul. I’ve been watching him. While Rand Paul has made his own errors in policy, he’s not gone to the extremes as has his father.

The article posted below, purported about Representative Peter King and a run for President in 2016, paints both Pauls, and Ted Cruz, with the same brush. In essence, it’s the opening shots of the next Presidential election.

Rep. Peter King aims to save GOP from Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz

By Ben Wolfgang – The Washington Times, Friday, July 19, 2013

If he ultimately decides to run for president in 2016, Rep. Peter King will do it for one reason: to save the Republican party from the “isolationist” policies of Sen. Rand Paul and others.

“It bothers me when the leading Republicans out there — someone like Rand Paul seems more concerned about an American being killed in Starbucks by a CIA drone than he is about Islamic terrorism,” said Mr. King, New York Republican, during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “We are the party of Eisenhower and Reagan, which believes in a strong national defense. I’m willing to be out there and be a spokesman.”

Mr. King said he’s being encouraged to run for the Republican nomination for president because of his strong positions on national security.

While the race is still three years away, it’s widely assumed that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Ted Cruz also will seek the GOP nomination, and Mr. King believes the two freshman senators simply don’t represent true Republican views on national defense and security, Mr. King said.

“A number of people in the last several months, particularly in New York but also from around the country, were concerned about the lack of a real defense policy and a real defense debate among Republican candidates for president, focusing primarily on Rand Paul and Ted Cruz,” Mr. King said. “We have real national security issues. … We can’t have an isolationist trend, which I think is being pursued by Rand Paul.”

Peter King, like all to many members of the ‘Pub establishment, can’t tell the difference between external national security and internal federal tyranny. The more I read about this topic, and other quotes from King, Boehner, and the ‘Pubs in Washington, the more I believe they’re trying to find something to be a campaign issue against conservatives. The fact they’ve accused Ted Cruz with Rand Paul is telling.

To paraphrase Peter King, no one should be concerned about the CIA targeting Americans anywhere in the world—if it is for ‘national security.’ Domestic surveillance is the same as surveillance outside the US. It’s all about subversives and terrorists.

No, Mr. King, it is not. We have a document called the Constitution. It has an amendment, the 4th one, that protects citizens from intrusion by government. We only need to watch the police riot in Boston, turning people out of their homes without warrants, to see what can happen when that Amendment is ignored. The incident just brought to light in Nevada is also pertinent. That last one is a possible violation of the 3rd Amendment. It is certainly a violation of due process.

That does not mean Americans cannot be targeted outside of the US while actively committing treason. There should be, and is, I believe, existing procedures to provide due process in those cases. It does not mean, however, that we should give free rein to any federal agency, inside or outside of the US, to target US citizens for any reason—or, as it is appearing more often, for no reason that can be supported.

I fully support the use of drones to maintain our border security, to interdict illegal drug smuggling on land or at sea. I would even support some domestic use of drones—providing that use follows the issuance of a valid search or other warrant. I approve domestic use of drones as long as the use follows the due process provisions in our Constitution.

The establishment and Peter King seem to think such things as warrants and due process to be ‘flexible’ if circumstances warrant. I do not.

If this is to be a nation of laws, it cannot waive or ignore law at any level. To do so invalidates the primary premise. If warrants are deemed unnecessary, due to circumstances, the country is not, then, a nation of laws. It is whatever the governmental elites want it to be. A lawless tyranny.

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Malaise

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It’s gray outside at 9am. The temperature is hovering at freezing and we’re expected to get some light snow/freezing rain at any time. In two more days, it will be Spring. Today, however, it’s still Winter and the blahs are here.

The condition is accompanied by a local election in a month for city mayor and some councilmen. With one exception, the candidates are dems, dem-wannabees, or RINOs. From conversations with a number of folks-in-the-know, the long knives are out and betrayals has broken several friendships.

A pox on them.

No, I don’t mean that. A part-time ‘Pub, even one who only gives lip-service to conservatism, is still, marginally, better than dems who are blatant with their schemes to steal our wealth and squander our hard-built fiscal reserves.

The malaise extends from local ‘Pub politics to the state ‘Pubs to the national committees. The establishment believes they can retain, retrieve their national power by becoming democrat-lite. Reince Priebus presented his marketing plan to sell the “republican” brand by adopting all the social initiatives of the democrats. They released this plan just as CPAC was ending.

Reince Priebus gives GOP prescription for future

Posted by Rachel Weiner on March 18, 2013 at 9:39 am

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus gave a blistering assessment of the GOP’s problems on Monday based on the results of a months-long review, and he called on the party to reinvent itself and officially endorse immigration reform.

Referring to the November election, Priebus said at a breakfast meeting: “There’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; and our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

“So, there’s no one solution,” he said. “There’s a long list of them.”

Among the report’s 219 prescriptions: a $10 million marketing campaign, aimed in particular at women, minorities and gays; a shorter, more controlled primary season and earlier national convention; and creation of an open data platform and analytics institute to provide research for Republican candidates.

Mississippi Committeeman Henry Barbour, Florida strategist Sally Bradshaw, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico Committewoman Zori Fonalledas and South Carolina Committeman Glenn McCall authored the report.

The report was received with a resounding “thud!” of dropped jaws from conservatives. The report was supported by those in the Washington establishment , such as Karl Rove and Ann Coulter, while attacking the ‘Pub conservative base. The divergence of views was so divisive that some well-known, conservative observers speculated that the end of the republican party was on the horizon.

Trouble Brewing in GOP

David Limbaugh, Mar 19, 2013

For the first time, I am wondering about the long-term viability of the Republican Party. I say this not as an advocate of its demise or restructuring but as an observer of troubling signs.

The Republican Party is thought to be the institutional vehicle for the advancement of conservative policies, but for decades, the conservative movement has been frustrated with the party’s deviation from conservative principles — its refusal to live up to its decidedly conservative platform.

I believe that the disappointing results for Republicans in the 2006 elections and probably the 2012 elections, as well, were in no small part attributable to frustrated conservatives staying at home.

The thinking among many conservatives has been that the party has consistently fallen short by failing to restrain the growth of the ever-expanding federal government and by failing to nominate sufficiently conservative presidential nominees. That is, if we would just nominate and elect Reagan conservatives and govern on Reagan principles, we would recapture majority status in no time.

The main opposing view — call it the establishment view — holds that Republicans need to accept that the reign of small government is over, get with the program and devise policies to make the irreversibly enormous government smarter and more energetic. In other words, Republicans need to surrender to the notion that liberalism’s concept of government has won and rejigger their agenda toward taming the leviathan rather than shrinking it.

I’d feel better if the ongoing competition between Reagan conservatives and establishment Republicans were the only big fissure in the GOP right now, but there are other cracks that threaten to break wide open, too. Our problems transcend our differing approaches to the size and scope of government and to fiscal and other economic issues.

Reagan conservatism is no longer under attack from just establishment Republicans; it’s also under attack from many inside the conservative movement itself. Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool of fiscal, foreign policy and social issues conservatism. But today many libertarian-oriented conservatives are singing from the liberal libertine hymnal that the GOP needs to remake its image as more inclusive, less tolerant, less judgmental and less strident. In other words, it needs to lighten up and quit opposing gay marriage, at least soften its position on abortion, and get on board the amnesty train to legalize illegal immigrants. I won’t even get into troubling foreign policy divisions among so-called neocons, so-called isolationists and those who simply believe we should conduct our foreign policy based foremost on promoting our strategic national interests.

One might reasonably assume that President Obama’s abysmal record would usher in an era of GOP unity, but ironically, his policies have put such a strain on America that they seem to be exacerbating, rather than alleviating, the divisions within the GOP. I see my more libertarian-oriented conservative friends on Twitter, for example, wholly frustrated with conservatives who refuse to surrender on the social issues and thereby, in their view, jeopardize a coalition that could successfully oppose Obama’s bankrupting of America. It’s as if they believe that all social conservatives have morphed into Todd Akins.

Maybe it’s just from where I’m sitting, but it appears to me that momentum is building among Republicans to capitulate on the issue of same-sex marriage, no matter what negative consequences might result from society’s abandonment of support for traditional marriage. Likewise, it seems that many Republicans are determined to surrender on the immigration issue on the naive hope that Republicans will instantly shed the ogre factor and be on equal footing to compete for the Hispanic vote.

I belong to the school that believes the Republican Party must remain the party of mainstream Reagan conservatism rather than try to become a diluted version of the Democratic Party. This does not mean Republicans can’t come up with creative policy solutions when advisable, but it does mean that conservatism is based on timeless principles that require no major revisions. Conservatives are champions of freedom, the rule of law and enforcement of the social compact between government and the people enshrined in the Constitution, which imposes limitations on government in order to maximize our liberties. If we reject these ideas, then we have turned our backs on what America means and what has made America unique. What’s the point of winning elections if the price is American exceptionalism?

I refuse to acquiesce to the cowardly notion that conservatives are intolerant or mean-spirited because they oppose discriminant treatment for groups and classes of people, because they support the rule of law, because they oppose a runaway entitlement state and because they adhere to traditional values, including the protection of innocent life.

But my personal preferences as to the future of the conservative movement and the GOP aren’t really the point. The point is that no matter what I prefer, the hard truth is that the movement inside the Republican Party to abandon social conservatism is nothing short of a political death wish. Denying it will not alter the reality.

David Limbaugh is a well-respected, conservative writer. He is as much a conservative as his brother and, like his brother, he is not a member of the establishment—The Ruling Class, as Rush has labeled them.

If the split does come, we can kiss goodbye winning the 2016 presidential election. The new party hasn’t time to seize control of the state party organizations, or, where the establishment retains control, to build their own state organizations. They need local, state and national organizations, well-managed and organized political infrastructure, to win the necessary electoral college votes and the election.

I’m not sure which is worse, the dems winning again in 2016 with Hilliary (gag!) or another dem, or having the establishment continue in control of the ‘Pubs. In either case, our chances of winning in 2016 has taken a nose-dive.

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