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.