More thoughts on the unprincipled RINOs from Mike Walsh:
For decades, conservatives have been gnashing their teeth as one Glorious Revolution after another is co-opted by the “Washington establishment,” and a crop of scrubbed virgin freshmen is quickly seduced and corrupted by whorehouse pork-barrelism and, worse, programism.
What the Tea Party and other conservatives are saying is simple: Enough. Stop. No mas. Don’t we already have enough laws, enough regulations, enough encroachments on liberty and — more important — isn’t it about time we rolled them back, striking useless laws from the books, eliminating some or most regulatory agencies and severely (and permanently) constitutionally hamstringing the others? Conservatism can be “progressive” too — back to the future. But we’ve let the “progressive” Left push us around for so long that now they openly mock and question the Constitution itself, and regard conservative fidelity to it as a kind of cultism.
…even when the socialists get what they want, they can’t hang on to it. Their beloved Forward-leaning Soviet Union, collapsed in less than a century, taking most of international communism with it. Seismically speaking, the same thing is happening here. As my colleague, Victor Davis Hanson, notes over at PJ Media, “The temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling.” That temple, too, will come down; the only question is whether our nation will go with it.
And that’s why the RINOs like Lugar and Hatch have to go. The GOP cannot offer a credible alternative to the destructive hate and social division of the Democrats — the party, let us remember, of slavery, segregation, secularism and sedition — unless it cleans out its own Augean stables first, removes the collaborationists and rejects “bipartisanship” as an absolute good in itself, instead of an occasional, pragmatic means to an end.
Yes.
Bipartisanship is the idea that you can wash your hands with crap and have them come out clean.
The elites know that lovers of liberty are the enemy and fight accordingly. It’s time the enemy (look in the mirror) figures that out. This is an existential fight.
Before you can fight effectively you’ve got to clean your own house. When the left says that’s bad policy you know you’re on the right track.
Cross-posted this over at NRO, too. I feel compelled to point out the obvious:
Prescription for a Very Short Majority:
1) Ride a wave of popular discontent into power and mistake it for a mandate.
2) Purge your majority of any ideologically impure veterans that actually know how to legislate.
3) Use your cadre of shiny new–albeit incredibly naive–ideologues to put forth an agenda that, however well-intentioned it may be, is easy for your opposition to parry into a stalemate while portraying your platform as loony–and scoring points because You. Can’t. Get. Anything. Passed.
4) Feel an austere sort of pride as your party gets its clock cleaned in the next election because, while you’re out of power and/or out of a job, your ideology remains untarnished.
Even to create the most libertarian paradise that we can imagine, a country the size of the US must still have an enormous governmental infrastructure, one that has to be run by bureaucrats that actually know what they’re doing and corrected/reformed by legislators that have the subtlety necessary to horse trade the unimportant things to get the important things from the opposition in return. It’s the rare freshman legislator that has that innate subtlety–most of them learn it on the job from their peers, specifically from the old hands. When you purge the old hands because they seem to be insufficiently suffused with virtue, you don’t get a governmental utopia. Instead, you get something akin to “Lord of the Flies”.
veterans that actually know how to legislate
Which is the cause of the mess. You do not compromise certain core values. Doing that is a loss, no matter how well you play the game.
Experience is important, but that can be learned. Getting the old hands to unlearn their sell out ways has not and will not happen. It’s like McCain saying, “I get it. I get it. I get it.”
He doesn’t get it. He can never be relied upon to get it. It’s impossible for him to represent those he thinks he gets. The RINOs need to be replaced even if it takes a dozen elections. There is too much at stake.
We don’t need utopia. That’s a problem of the other party. We need to hold to our founders principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility. On that there can never be compromise. There is no end to less limited govt. and less fiscal responsibility. Every move in that direction becomes the new norm until we have our present situation. We should be calling for all of their heads. They should all be in fear, every time, for every next election.
They don’t have that healthy fear, but they should. If the tea party keeps at the ground game in local elections they will.
Of course you compromise core values. If you have one version of a bill that gets you 100% of the goal implied by your core values, but which is guaranteed to fail, and another version that only gets you 10% of what you want to advance your cause, you vote for the 10% version. You may need to go home and take a shower afterward, but you do it anyway because it’s a win.
The system is set up to make it hard to do anything, and what you can do takes a long, long time. That’s a good thing, because it protects you from your opposition when they’re in power.
It took us eighty years to get into this mess. Expecting to get us out just by stamping your feet and declaiming that all of the answers have been delivered to you is lunacy. There’s a reason why ideologues who actually get stuff passed sound less like ideologues after a while–they learn how to work the system.
Lugar, Hatch, McCain, et al. are necessary evils, even in a GOP majority Senate. Not only are they at least somewhat sympathetic to libertarian and small-government goals, but they know how to bargain with the other side to advance them. Furthermore, they’re experts at knowing which way the wind is blowing. You don’t vote these guys out; you pressure them instead. They’ll adapt. Replacing them is like swapping a rocket propelled grenade for a peashooter because you don’t like the funny smell that the RPG exhaust makes.
That’s conventional wisdom… and it’s wrong.
Here’s what your missing. The way to compromise is to give up things you don’t really care about. Not the things you do. It works too. Not only that. Let the other side compromise on things they don’t care about as well, even if you don’t care either. It’s about getting momentum going.
Most people have no idea about how to get what they want. Giving it up is the first mistake. We’re paying for it today.
Bottom line. If the people know you’re fighting for their principles you can be firm about it.