At what point does complacency end and panic set in for the members and leaders of the Republican Party? When will they notice the empty hour glass and recognize wickedness for what it is? The hordes of satiated simpletons shouting in rhythmic cadence, “Oh we love, the O-One … Oh we love, the O-One” is not the Winkie chant of guards entering a castle in a scene from a classic fantasy film. The ill winds of the 2006 and 2008 elections that uprooted the GOP House and Senate leadership and sent Republicans spiraling downward were not flash-in-the-pan Kansas dust devils but full-blown Category-5 whirlwinds.
The party of Ronald Reagan has been victimized by disorganized thinking, held spellbound, and led astray by the siren call for moderation from its left wing, which by nature votes for progressive governance. Before Republicans begin their assault on the castle to douse the progressive Democrats’ power grab, the party’s conservatives and libertarians, i.e., Conserva-tarians, must come out from under the spell and cast out the treacherous progressive element from the positions of power in their own ranks.
Caught up in the tidal wave of the ’94 election, Republican exuberance soon gave way to a heightened sense of self-importance; instead of governing on principles and fulfilling their Contract with America, Republicans
lost their way and spent the next 12 years trying to convince the electorate that their compromises were smart, courageous, and compassionate. Now, it’s up to Conserva-tarians to rise to the occasion, accept the challenge facing them, and move the party in the direction of limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, greater economic opportunity, and respect for this nation and its heritage.
For more than a decade, the far-left progressive movement has been
advancing its socialist ideas and positions through an all-out war against conservative and libertarian principles. The
movement’s agenda includes a massive income redistribution scheme from corporations and the wealthy to low-income workers and the poor; a substantial reduction in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; the implementation of universal healthcare; the adoption of living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; the execution of strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the acceptance of the
Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and use income taxes to fund abortions.
Through the years, middle-class Americans were not mesmerized by progressive socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism; but now, many in the middle class have become captivated by the mainstream media’s image of Barack Obama and the agenda championed by the progressive Democrats in Congress. They seem to have traded the American Dream for the empty promises of yellow-brick road infrastructure and merry old land tranquility.
Progressives no longer make up a small percentage of lawmakers; in fact, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is the largest partisan caucus in the House of Representatives, boasting 71 members, nearly one-third of House Democrats.
Until 1999, the CPC worked openly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the country, to strengthen the Democrat Party’s left wing. DSA also
helped to organize the CPC.
Progressives have turned the American political arena into a no-holds-barred war zone, where laws and rules are suspended arbitrarily for the greater good. Doubters need look no further than Joe Lieberman, who was out-of-lockstep with the Democrats on one issue only, but one was enough for the progressive elite to force him from the party.
In contrast, Senators Olympia Hiss-Snowe, Susan Ames-Collins, and Arlen Rosenburg-Specter have continually adopted the progressive positions of the opposition party and abandoned their own party’s positions on issues central to its survival, and have done so with impunity. "
Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!” If the GOP has any hope of veering this nation away from socialism’s road to serfdom and back to its founding free-market ideals, it can no longer tolerate such treacherous acts inside its ranks.
In the 2006 and 2008 elections, naïve Republicans brought a knife to a gunfight. As a result, the party now lies flattened, its stuffing ripped out, strewn asunder from a full-scale progressive assault. Grass-root Conserva-tarians must have the courage to brush aside any tinhorn leader who lacks the steely resolve to rid the GOP of Republicans in name only (RINOs).
Though stalwarts Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and William F. Buckley are gone, their ideals and dreams for America remain, for they mirrored those of the Founders’ before them. Only Conserva-tarian values and principles can restore the GOP to consequence. Otherwise, America will have but one major political party and a host of lesser parties with no real political power, and suffering humanity’s hope for self government will have ended a failure.
Jerry A. Kane works part-time as a technical writer and editor. He has spent almost two decades as an adjunct English professor and over a decade as journalist. His commentaries have appeared on WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, and in daily and weekly newspapers in western Pennsylvania.
