Thursday, April 21, 2011
Sarah Palin emerged upon the national stage as a popular governor from the state of Alaska at a time when the John McCain campaign was becoming dull and dreary. A war weary nation was becoming disenchanted with the Republican Party, particularly after the American Left was able to shift our focus from winning the War on Terror to carping over the Iraqi war when it was discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the liberals found their way to distract the public by using this to attack the man who just brought us through the 9/11 crisis with flying colors.
Barack Obama was sending thrills down the legs of audiences and news media pundits with a message of hope and change. Speaking as a moderate and an outsider, the two year Senator from Illinois was convincing a willing public that he would govern in a fiscally responsible way and that he would restore our standing on the world stage – even going so far as to say he would sit down with our enemies and convince them to like us.
For far too long, the traditional news media controlled the information which influenced public opinion. This conduit of information once used by Thomas Payne and Samuel Adams to free a nation from the shackles of tyranny was now being used to convince the American people to unknowingly elect a president and a political party which would over the course of the first few years of the new administration establish a new tyranny, a soft tyranny as radio talk show host Mark Levin would go on to explain in his book Liberty and Tyranny.
The progressive movement, the Shadow Party and communists all worked cleverly behind the scenes to infiltrate academia and the pop culture. The children of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s were playing outside unsupervised, drinking from garden hoses and riding their bicycles to the store without helmits while their parents worked hard jobs with long hours. They weren’t concerned with politics or current events beyond the surface level. The news was something to be absorbed, not questioned.
These children became the young people who would go on to colleges and universities where they were taught Marx and Lenin under the pretense that they were getting “all points of view.” Professors would glamorize collectivism, socialism and nihilism by contrasting it to a system which they delicately but meticulously painted as flawed and unfair. They capitalized on the government’s failure to execute the Vietnam War properly to cause students to lose faith in their institutions and to rebel against them. To bring a new order to fruition, it would first be necessary to destroy the old one.
Students began to believe they could change the world. Idealism was nurtured on college campuses. The disillusioned were now ready to be reinvigorated by a new American liberalism that saw the machinery of government as the solution to social injustice, unjust wars and a capitalistic system that made the lazy envious of the successful. The infiltration of the system had begun.
These students would graduate into the world with a sense that they were entitled to change it into their naïve image. Many went into the media and into law where the words spoken both over a television screen and written into newspapers and legal documents would slowly become theirs. As they moved up the chain and gained experience they found that by slanting news stories, collaborating on opinion pieces and uniting behind a common liberal cause that they could mold the information in such a way as to drive their opposition out of power.
The Constitution was no longer understand by its letter, but interpreted by those who would manufacture or embellish intent. The Founders created the basis for a self-reliant society where the states and local communities would be places with their own identities where problems unique to those places would be resolved through a partnership of the people and local government. Instead, the United States became a cookie cutter operation where all the states in one way or another apply the same solutions to social problems and economics.
Some, like Andrew Breitbart, are pointing out how these idealistic people become part of "what I call the Democrat media complex, the natural alliance of the Democratic Party, liberal politics in the mainstream media." These people have used the media, academia and the legal field to cast a net so large and powerful over the nation that those who wanted no part of this are now being adversely affected by the political outcomes of today.
It used to be traditionalists could stay home and tend to their families, have their Sunday dinners and live productive lives while waving off the TV where anti-war protestors and cultural philosophers were worlds away and had no effect on the family, the dinner or the job. Now, everyone is affected by it whether they like it or not. The creeping vines of liberalism that once grew unnoticed under our political house have grown all around the sides and up to the roof.
How do you boil a frog without it noticing and jumping out of the pot? You cook it slowly, very slowly.
In the 1960’s, college kids sitting cross legged on the floor would complain about “the man” and the oppressive institutions. They asked authority to leave them alone and let them live and let live. Some dropped out. But many decided to follow progressivism. They believed they could change the system; and boy have they.
They infiltrated the system and became the system. It wasn’t good enough for these hippie freaks of the 1960’s and 1970’s to want everyone to be left alone. They had to use the legislative and judicial process to drag the regular folk out of our world with the hard work ethic and Sunday dinners and into their world totally against our will.
Today they codify special rights and privileges for those who have out of wedlock births, abortions or alternative sexual lifestyles at the expense of those who believe in traditional values. They have legalized their lifestyles at the expense of traditional lifestyles. They have become that which they complained about. The inmates have taken over the asylum; and we have come to find out that they run it worse than the ones they once complained about.
Today, the world is reversed. Traditionalists are the ones oppressed by “the man” and the institutions which once served them well. We are where they perceived themselves as being 50 years ago. The tables have turned.
We can learn a lot from them. Conservatives are not used to getting their hands dirty. We are small government people who never really got involved in the politics of social manipulation. We’d rather work in the private sector and turn to our churches, communities and local governments to work on solving problems from the ground up, not the top down.
There is a way out of this. It requires courage and a non-traditional approach. It requires us to understand their tactics, counter those tactics and turn those tactics against them. They want to marginalize? Then let’s marginalize. They want to curse and swear at us yet hold us to higher standard of civil discourse because they think they can shut us up by shaming us into thinking we’re racists and inciters of violence when it is really they who are projecting this false image onto us. Then lets not be afraid to speak our mind. If they don’t like our dialogue or discourse, too friggin bad.
It’s time for us conservatives to sit cross legged on the floor and demand that the man get off our back. It’s time for us to take on the establishment and clean up the institutions that have been corrupted by a Godless, immoral and intellectually bankrupt ideology. It’s time to infiltrate the system and the media. It’s time to take it back unapologetically and with no regard for what the media thinks of us. The traditional media must be destroyed. They are the first line of defense between us and the progressive Democrat establishment.
If we do it right, we can get the message out that it doesn’t matter if you're "young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled," you’ve been had. When George W. Bush was president, 9.4% of blacks were unemployed. Today the figure is 15.1%. How’s that hope and change working out for ya?
One day single mothers, minorities, gays and the poor will wake up and realize that their leaders - the people who won their vote by selling them the progressive agenda - have been in power now for years and their lives have only gotten worse. All the groups that make up the rainbow coalition and the progressive movement were asked to invest all their political capital into people like Barack Obama. They have been rooked.
They will find that even if we disagree with them on social issues and lifestyle choices, we believe all rights including theirs are God given, not government given. They will find that even when we disagree, we are tolerant. We don’t name call. We don’t violate the basic human rights of another in the name of social justice or because we want to punish people who aren’t like us. And, if we are protecting life in the womb, we are simply affording that unborn child the same protection we believe the Constitution provides for those very liberals who disagree with us. All Americans have the right to life and liberty.
We are now a European style socialist democracy. Less than half of Americans have jobs according to Mark Schumacher. U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression, Elizabeth MacDonald points out at FoxBusiness. 47% of Households Owe No Taxes, writes David Leonhardt at the New York Times.
Is this incompetence or is this being done on purpose? There are those who say that progressives are trying to collapse our system. They are not drilling for oil here at home the way we should be. They are devaluing our dollar. They are choking off our traditional lifestyles, yet they tiptoe around Muslims for some reason. It's okay for liberals if Muslims build a Mosque near Ground Zero while the government removes prayer, crosses and nativity scenes from our public square.
Do I need a rug and a knowledge of which way east is before our politically correct government will be sensitive enough to allow me to pray?
Losing is not an option in 2012. This is our last stand. There may be some debate on the Republican side as to who should lead that fight, but remember what was happening to the conservative movement the day before Sarah Palin was selected as the VP nominee and think about what happened the day after. That should tell you everything you need to know about how damn close the progressives thought they were.
They thought they had it made; that Obama would slide in on a wave of popular support and govern with the authority of a dictator against a demoralized and defeated opposition. Everything that has been done to Sarah Palin has been done because she represented a road block, a threat, a reviving force for the conservative movement at a time when the liberals least needed it. We were not demoralized and our defeat was simply an electoral one.
Sarah Palin was the unexpected traffic the Left hit after a century of driving to Utopia. They were right around the corner and they could smell it. But she got in the way. She was the speed bump that stopped the Left from getting even further than they are now.
The progressives would have continued boiling the frog slowly, but they got excited about Barack Obama and turned the heat up just a little to fast. That quick burst of heat and that impatient jubilation on their part also gave us the Tea Party.
So here we are. We have an army in the Tea Party and a leader in Sarah Palin. Some may think we are leaderless, but that’s because some just haven’t accepted her yet. In all fairness, though, she hasn’t yet asked us to be our leader.
We know that if we don’t take it back, revive, restore and renew it now, we will probably never get another chance. We know that if we botch this one, there is no next time. We know that this is a must win. It’s do or die. "We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness."
It’s a big burden. Asking Sarah Palin to take on the weight of the world after all she has been through is asking a lot of her. Asking the Tea Party to have confidence in Sarah Palin is asking a lot of them. But the game is not won by worrying, thinking or fearing. It’s won by acting.
If she accepts that role and the movement takes what it may think is a risk and accepts her as our leader, mark my words right here and right now. We will win.
No risk. No reward.
This is not the time to nominate a safe choice. Nor is it the time to destroy the Republican Party during the nomination process. We must respect each other and our differences. Criticism must be focused like a laser beam on Obama, not each other. During the GOP nomination process, may the best man or woman win. The media, the punditry and the pollsters should never decide who our nominee is. We should!
Some may not think they can accept the outcome of a nomination process that gives us Sarah Palin, but think of the alternative. Who out there is the one? If you have someone that you support and trust as much as I support and trust Sarah Palin, stick with them. But if you don’t, join us. It will be a nerve-racking ride, but it will be fun. Following Sarah Palin is a thrill of a lifetime. It is the same thrill we had when Ronald Reagan was on his way in the late 1970’s.
Believe it. Believe that we can once again be that shining city on a hill. It will take a unity of purpose and a unity of vision. Picture it. Picture Sarah Palin with a running mate that unites our movement and revives the Republican Party by rallying us like she did in Madison Wisconsin. If you can take the leap of faith, you are ready to take back our country. If you are courageous enough to stand behind Sarah Palin and take on the arrows that will fly from the media, we will win.
If we have her back the whole way, she can succeed.
If you imagine Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee and it bothers you, it means you either a) have another candidate you believe strongly in, b) are afraid, c) are tainted by the negativity the media has been pushing about her, d) are an establishment Republican or e) are an out and out liberal. This does not make you a bad person. It makes you someone we can help (okay, we can’t help the liberal – but the rest of you yes). Borrow our confidence and we will revive and restore America.
The army is growing. We must continue growing it. Sarah Palin may have great leadership skills, but she cannot do it without legions of us. We are going to have to take on the press, an incumbent president and a Democrat Party machine that is merciless. They are fighting a force that wants to destroy us. We can only beat them with sheer numbers, brute rhetorical force, focus and unity of purpose.
Liberty's Lamp
