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.

I wear the appellation of conservative with pride. But the fact that I am also a realist means that I don’t feel the need to think or even agree with all other conservatives all the time. On a general basis I can understand the thought process of conservative thinkers without mandatorily adopting their particular point of view and making it my own.

I believe that abortion is the single worst plague infecting the very soul of America. Once a people are willing to accept the killing of their unborn there is very little room remaining to sink lower. It is a moral tragedy of epic proportions. Every great society throughout history that was brought to destruction failed on a moral level long before it failed politically or militarily. It was indeed their moral failings that led to their eventual downfall in every other area.

I have heard the pro-abortion arguments about the cases of rape and incest and some of them are compelling. As a man I cannot possibly pretend to know or understand the level of violation that occurs during such an act of violence. And to exacerbate that horror with a pregnancy is beyond my ability to conceive. But I do know that regardless of the circumstance under which a child is conceived, it’s not the child’s fault. Yet he or she is the one that pays the ultimate price. I have profound sympathy for the victims of these crimes and would support the creation of a non-profit organization that dealt solely with making adoptions of babies conceived through violence. Special care could be given to the expectant mothers and special care could be given in placing the children into loving homes with the adoptive parents aware of the circumstances involved in the conception. There may in fact need to be some additional psychiatric treatment provided these children as they develop. I’m not a doctor but I do believe aggressive behavior can be genetically passed down. Perhaps a dedicated effort directed at these children could break this chain. I would rejoice at seeing my tax dollars go to this effort rather than to abortion clinics and would not hesitate to make personal donations.

Perhaps because I view life as a gift from God, or perhaps because I have very little faith in the justice system, I am also profoundly opposed to the death penalty. I know most conservatives are rolling their eyes and looking to burn my conservative card so I can no longer carry it. But as a realist I am simply not that sure that the court system is infallible. I am however sure that death has no mulligan.

It’s not that I don’t believe that there are people who don’t deserve to be put to death. I truly believe that there are. It’s just that I don’t believe our court system, which has been proven corruptible time and time again, is competent to make that decision.

We claim we have the right to be tried by a jury of our peers. But the reality is that rarely do any of the jurors have even the slightest clue as to the rules by which the legal system is actually played. It used to be much simpler, but nowadays the legal wrangling and maneuvering have taken what should be uncomplicated and made it more complex than Chinese algebra. If you don’t know and understand the rules you simply cannot make a life or death decision. It is also plain that those who do know the rules are not the least bit interested in justice. The defense attorney is only looking for an acquittal or to plea to a reduced sentence, the prosecutor is only looking for a conviction and the judge is mainly concerned that the constitutional rules of the process are followed so the case cannot be overturned on a technical appeal.

But more than anything else I am a realist when it comes to the cost. It costs twice as much to sentence a man to die, carry through with the mandatory appeal process and finally execute him as it does to sentence him to life without parole and let him languish for the rest of his days in prison. No more hearings, no rehabilitation. Just one prison day leading into the next. I can honestly think of no greater punishment than to have no freedom, no hope and no future.

It may seem like I have compassion for the victims of violence that end in pregnancy and none to the victims of violence that end in murder. I just do not believe we as a public are any safer having killed John Wayne Gacy than we were before he died. I understand the families want and deserve closure but I truly believe they can find it somewhere other than a death chamber.

Does having these views make me less of a conservative? I don’t think so. You may disagree.

If you listen to the Washington DC bureau of the Chicago Tribune you couldn’t help but think that the conservative right was falling apart from the inside out.

Tribune writer Frank James was apparently able to pull himself away from checking Sarah Palin’s underpants receipts from Victoria’s Secret and typing his story with one hand to write a piece quoting Mort Kondracke.

James seems to relish in reporting that Kondracke recently wrote a column for Roll Call, a DC newspaper for which Kondracke is executive editor, calling for conservatives to “fire Rush Limbaugh and his ilk” as the national voice of the conservative movement.

Calling Kondracke a Republican, James goes on to state that calls for Limbaugh’s removal have happened in the past but to no avail. “Maybe this time will be different” said James.

It is apparent that Mr. James has spent too much time checking Palin’s expense report to have seen Mort Kondracke on his regular appearances on Fox News, or perhaps he doesn’t know what channel it’s on having never seen it. Anybody who has watched the discussions involving Kondracke knows that he is far from a Republican. Mort Kondracke is an avowed centrist who supports just about any fence sitter from either party. He regularly gets his fanny handed to him in the closing segment of the Fox News show because he frequently misstates actual events to support his ill-conceived hypothesis.

I don’t dislike Kondracke. As a matter of fact there are times when I actually feel sorry for him going up against such bright minds as Charles Krauthammer and looking completely foolish. The argument Kondracke uses in his column to oust Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are equally as embarrassing.

In his article titled “First Steps to GOP Recovery” Kondracke makes it sound as if the conservative movement in America has lost its relevance and is headed for a bleak and painful death. Then again he said the same thing about the liberal wing of the Democratic Party a few years ago. That, of course, was before the Democrats were able to elect the most liberal President in the history of the country.

Kondracke notes that Republicans lost minority and Latino voters this past election without taking into consideration the fact that a minority was running as the Democrat. As I’ve said before, the Republicans could have run Abraham Lincoln against Obama and lost minority and Latino votes. The story also goes on to show just how ridiculous supposedly smart people can be when they think that by silencing the messenger they will silence the message.

If conservatives didn’t agree with the ideas of these commentators they wouldn’t support them. Limbaugh is the most listened to radio host in the country; Seam Hannity has his national radio show along with his now solo one hour show on Fox News television. Laura Ingraham has a nationally syndicated radio show and according to tracking polls is the 5th most listened to personality on the radio. Limbaugh alone makes tens of millions of dollars every year from advertisers looking to get a piece of the Limbaugh pie. These people are not paid by tax dollars. They are all paid by advertisers because they have huge audiences. Does Mort think that by pulling them off the air the audience’s viewpoints will magically change?

The whole thing would border on the preposterous if Kondracke actually believed it, but I have some serious doubts about his sincerity. I think it is far more likely that Kondracke saw an opportunity to get his share of national attention and sell more newspapers. And to that end he was probably successful.

Why would I doubt Mr. Kondracke’s veracity?

Here is a look at the headline from the piece he wrote today – “Believe It or Not, Rush Limbaugh Was Right on Stimulus”.

I’m guessing Mr. Frank James and the Washington DC bureau of the Chicago Tribune missed that one.

They’re probably busy with inspecting Panty-gate receipts again.