Reasserting Conservative Principles
January 27, 2009
Now John McCain is about as far from being a conservative
as a Republican can get, so in a real sense we conservatives didn't have
a horse in the presidential race. Indeed, with regard to the facility
at Guantanamo Bay, nothing President Obama has done in his first days
in office is any different than what McCain would have done had he won.
The order to close Gitmo would have been issued in any case, and I can't
imagine McCain's staff being any less bumbling than Obama's has been in
managing the presidential transition.
So it's not necessarily, as so many have been saying,
that conservatives have abandoned the principles we know in our minds
and hearts we must uphold if our country is to regain its moral and political
footing. What has been missing, though, is leadership below the Presidential
level that recognizes the ever-present need for us to mount a principled
opposition against the impending "state creep" that threatens
our own democracy and democracies around the world. There are several
of these principles that must continually be reasserted by our congressional
and state leaders at every opportunity.
First, our leaders must constantly remind the American
public that to the degree that they are nationalized, economies slow,
stagnate and die. We've watched as many European economies fell victim
to socialist takeover by their governments and created societies where
entrepreneurism and invention withered, leaving behind populations dependent
on those governments not only for direction but for handouts that enable
them to survive. The Obama administration threatens to create the equivalent
of a chronic class of what amount to street beggars dependent on federal
largesse with its "spread the wealth" policies.
We know that it is the market, and the market alone, that
is the proven successful means for economic success. The process of our
government's taking ownership positions in many of our largest financial
institutions is something that we must work tirelessly to reverse. As
we all know, but as the Obama administration and Democrats in general
persist in denying, governments are lousy at doing business. Even Bush
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, who had success in the private sector,
has floundered so badly in overseeing the current U.S. takeover of financial
organizations that it's been embarrassing, not to say disheartening, to
watch. With Congress's feckless approval, Paulsen managed to give banks
hundreds of billions of dollars without asking for a single concession
to insure that the money is being spent wisely, or, indeed, that it is
even being spent at all.
While most argue that the banks had to be bailed out so
that the borrow and spend policies that brought us to this pass could
be reignited, the strategy has produced no positive results, as the market
continues to have its way. It was not the market that triggered the "housing
crisis" that was the triggering event in the current economic downturn,
but it is the market that will enable us to deleverage the economy and
regain sensible footing. This is the message that our leadership must
continually present to counter the inevitable perpetuation of a downward
economic spiral in the wake of the proposed "stimulus" program.
Second, we know that the abandonment of Christian moral
principles has led to a cultural sewer to which we're becoming increasingly
inured, a glut of decadence and moral callousness the like of which we
haven't seen since the postwar Germany of the 1920s. It's not that we
must impose censorship to silence the purveyors of ugly smut, but that
we must continue to promote the alternative. From a President (Clinton)
who will likely be remembered more for his dalliance with White House
intern Monica Lewinsky than for any good done during his administration,
to a corrupt U.S. Senator (Barney Frank) who promoted the unsound housing
debacle that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been discovered to be while
carrying on a homosexual liaison with Herb Moses, Fannie's Assistant Director
or Product Initiatives and while allowing a gay-sex-for-hire prostitution
ring to be run from his apartment, we've allowed corruption, degeneracy,
and immorality to become the norm.
Indeed, our government and our media have become unindicted
co-conspirators in the war against morality. It is time that our Republican
and conservative leaders again assume the high ground and actively promote
a moral code based on Christian principles while having the courage to
denounce those who would flout that code, to the detriment of all Americans.
And we must continue to place the highest value on human
life, including especially the lives of our unborn children. We're fighting
a political movement that cares more for the safety of baby seals than
it does for that of human babies, and we must constantly reassert the
primacy of human life. President Obama, by issuing an executive order
that reverses the "Mexico City" policy and once again allows
U.S. aid dollars to go to organizations that fund abortion, has, as he
did during his term in the Illinois State Senate, come down firmly on
the side of taking human life, especially the lives of our youngest and
most defenseless.
On his radio show, The War Room, Jim Quinn recently recounted
an incident in which a class of first-graders was charged with creating
a list of things they wanted to see President Obama do as President. One
girl wrote that she'd like to see the President stop killing babies. She
was ridiculed and made to feel ashamed for this suggestion by her teacher
and her classmates. Democrats' callous disregard for human life and its
perverse and misdirected valuing of so many other forms of life over our
own is a fundamental flaw in its ideology and we must at every turn make
the case that it weakens our country.
In the wake of the egregious abdication of journalistic
responsibility by most of the media, it is up to the political leadership
of the Republican Party, from Sarah Palin to Tim Pawlenty to Bobby Jindal
to John Boehner to step forward and continually reassert the positive
moral and economic principles that have been abandoned during the past
several years. It is only through resisting the pressures to accede to
Democrats' lack of those very principles that we will once again be able
to regain power and reverse the inevitable decline with which the Democrat
majority threatens us.
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