The Real Nightmare
night·mare
Pronunciation: \ˈnīt-ˌmer\
Function: noun
1 : an evil spirit formerly thought to oppress people during sleep
2 : a frightening dream that usually awakens the sleeper
3 : something (as an experience, situation, or object) having the monstrous character of a nightmare or producing a feeling of anxiety or terror
There it was in black and white. A “report” from the Politico news service claiming anxiety or terror on the part of Republican leaders. The opening line read “In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican officials, conservative activists are gearing up challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010.” A nightmare you say?
To be sure there will be some elected Republicans that might have a few restless nights. My guess is that many of them will already be working on how to spin the actions they took while in office to look less like the spend-crazy Democrat pacifiers they have been. As I have told every Republican organization fundraiser that has called my home for the past few years “when the Republicans quit acting like Democrats, I’ll start supporting them again.”
The nightmare is not in what is happening but in what has happened. The Republican Party is unrecognizable to many of us conservative voters. The media would have us believe that if Republicans are to be successful they must adopt a “big tent” mentality. The reality is that the party I supported for lo those many years folded up their tent long ago and simply annexed onto the Democrats. Oh sure there was talk of conservative principles during the congressional campaigns but after the votes were counted you couldn’t tell a D from an R without a program.
Many have pointed to the rapid decline in conservative principles in the national Republican Party as a reason to form a third party. I disagree. We don’t need a third party, we need to return the Republican Party back to what it once was when results mattered more than rhetoric and principles mattered more than appeasement. A recent poll confirmed that by a margin of over two to one Americans consider themselves conservative over liberal. This includes many who claim to be Democrats. If the Republican Party can align itself with the conservative principles that founded this country and allowed it to become the greatest nation on earth there would be no need to look for another political option.
Much has been made of the recent withdrawal of Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava in the upstate New York Congressional election. Liberals point to this as proof that Republicans cannot elect a moderate. But Dede was anything but moderate and her blatant liberalism was in full view when she endorsed the Democrat over the Conservative Party candidate for the position.
The nightmare is not in conservatives taking back control of the government but in what has happened since conservatism has become a dirty word and conservative voters became silent. The nightmare is a President that plays politics while tens of thousands of brave military men and women battle terrorists in Afghanistan desperate for additional support. The nightmare is in a national debt that has tripled in under 10 months with absolutely no sign of abating in the largest spending spree in the history of mankind. The nightmare is in a deficit that is forecasted to be in excess of 10 trillion dollars in the next ten years. The nightmare is in the government control of our healthcare choices and in the government control of our health insurance. The nightmare is in the government nationalization of the banking industry and allowing the same economic morons that created the problem to cause even greater harm to the recovery. The nightmare is in a President that feels he has the power to dictate what Americans should be paid by private industry. The nightmare is in a President whose number one visitor in the White House, logging 22 visits in just under 10 months, is the president of the SEIU union that sends hired thugs to beat up Americans attending tea party rallies.
There are plenty of nightmares to go around.
Conservatism isn’t one of them.
