Why the Republican Party will Deserve what it Gets

Make no mistake:  The Republican Party has a chance to win the 2012 election.  It has this chance for one reason, and one reason only:  the Tea Party movement.  That terrifies liberals.  Not just liberal Democrats, it also terrifies liberal Republicans, and by that I mean the people who run the Republican Party at the national level, and in many states.  From Morton Blackwell:

Dear Fellow Delegate,

On Tuesday of this week, as Republican National Convention delegates, you and I will be voting on rules changes that could fundamentally change our Republican Party — and not for the better...

These rule changes are the most awful I’ve ever seen come before any National Convention.

I’m writing you today to urge you to join the growing effort to stop the worst-ever changes in this Rules Committee’s Report and to vote in favor of amendments to Rules 12 and 15. The Minority Reports will restore important rights and protections which state parties and grassroots Republicans would lose under the Rules Committee Report as written.

These amendments to Rules 12 and 15 are contained in Minority Reports supported by at least 25% of the members of this convention’s Committee on Rules and Order of Business...

I must tell you there is tremendous arm-twisting now to peel signers off of the Minority Reports.

Finally, whether on Minority Reports or on voting down the Rules, it will require at least six states’ delegations to insist upon a roll call vote.

I will not pretend that the deck is not stacked against us.

But many state leaders, liberty-minded activists, and grass-roots conservatives are up-in-arms as word of this power grab spreads.

Our convention will make this important decision Tuesday as some of our first work. Many folks skip these procedural sessions thinking nothing of importance occurs.
This year, that is far from the truth.

If the Rules Committee Report were to pass without adoption of the Minority Reports, it would amount to a power grab by Washington, D.C. party insiders and consultants designed to silence the voice of state party activists and Republican grassroots by:

Political power grabs: not pretty.

*** Handing national party officials the power to change national party rules adopted by state and grassroots leaders at the Republican National Convention. For generations, the prohibition of manipulated changes in the national Rules of the Republican Party between national conventions has served as one of the crown jewels of our party. It’s a power grab which opens the door to many future power grabs.

*** Stripping state parties in all states with binding primaries of the power of choosing who will represent their states as national delegates and alternate delegates.
This outrageous change would empower presidential campaigns to disapprove and remove delegates and alternate delegates selected by rules adopted by state Republican parties. Rather than grassroots activists who won delegate and alternate delegate slots by following state party rules, a large majority of positions would be handed to top donors of the winning campaign.

*** Gutting the great and successful reform adopted in the current election cycle to stop the dangerous trend to front-load the selection of national convention delegates. Our party would move again toward a national primary which would deny grassroots Republicans the opportunity to vet presidential candidates in a nomination contest of reasonable length. This reform must not be abandoned.

Michelle Malkin has more. 

What evidently happened has been spun as a victory for the grassroots, but it isn't.  A "compromise" was approved, whereby the National Committee has been given the authority to make changes independent of the Convention.  It's expected that the RNC will make the changes that they couldn't get through the Convention.

This is a slap in the face to conservative activists of every stripe who have worked so hard to bring the GOP the success it had in 2010, and that it has within reach in 2012.  This will certainly have -- is already having -- the effect of discouraging activists from working for the national ticket this year.  They'll still vote for Romney, but like one local Tea Party leader I know, they won't lift a finger to work for Romney.  Their efforts will be directed towards local races.

I am not surprised by this.  No one who has been paying attention the past five or more years should be surprised.  Much more than losing, the national GOP leadership hates most of all the idea that they should owe their electoral successes to the great unwashed of Tea Party and pro-life rallies, to the neanderthals of the defense of marriage and immigration-enforcement crowds, and to the unenlightened supporters of the gun rights lobby.  The question only remains how these groups will react to their snub by the official party apparatus.  It won't be a good thing.

The rules have changed.  It's fools who are still playing by the old rules.  What are you going to do about it?

(Pretty girl H/T: Stormbringer)

UPDATE:  Former Illinois Repubican Party general counsel Doug Ibendahl has more:

Yesterday, the Republican National Committee in Tampa adopted some rules changes that shift power from the state parties and the grassroots to the RNC and the GOP presidential nominee. Former Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire touted the new rules as providing “a strong governing framework” for the party over the next four years. But in fact the the new rules should be very troubling and disappointing to conservative grassroots activists, because they move the national Republican Party away from being a decentralized, bottom-up party toward becoming a centralized, top-down party.

The Romney rules effectively disenfranchise grassroots delegates, and will thus tend to weaken and splinter the party over time. They specifically represent a blow to the Tea Party and the Ron Paul movement, and force grassroots conservatives of all stripes to contemplate their future within the GOP...

Yesterday’s fight offers a sobering glimpse of what life will be like for conservatives in a Romney Administration. It proves once again that sometimes we have to beat the Republicans before we can beat the Democrats.

Still More on Why The Catholic Church will Deserve what it Gets

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which forced Real Catholic TV to drop the "Catholic" from its name, still tolerates the use of "Catholic" by the pro-aborts at Catholic Relief Services:

Yvonne Craig as Batgirl

One CRS employee lists the pro-abortion Pro-Choice Resources and Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies as former employers on her LinkedIn resume, while another was hired by the Catholic aid organization directly from the pro-abortion Population Services International.

Another former employee was convicted of assault last fall after ramming her car into a crowd at the DC March for Life in January 2011 as the pro-lifers traversed a crosswalk.

The latter employee, Charisse Espy Glassman, was a Democrat candidate for the DC school board as well as a legislative assistant with CRS-Haiti. Despite assault charges, she remained at CRS until August 4th, 2011. In a statement on Facebook responding to queries, CRS said they had “operated on the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty.” A victim of the assault, who suffered two herniated disks, reported that Glassman had seemed to laugh as she drove into the crowd.

These people still get to raise money in Catholic Churches.  The U.S. Catholic hierarchy has made a deal with the devil, and until they get their own house in order, they will have no credibility to teach, exhort, or sue anyone else.  There are no heroes on the horizon who seem likely to accomplish this feat.

You Can't Deny Science

And the science says, liberals dominate the social sciences...

In news that could only surprise a liberal, the social sciences are not hotbeds of intellectual diversity, and don't want to be (H/T:  Cold Fury):

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”

This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

This is nothing other than typical liberal contempt for dissenting views.  It's a clear illustration of the fact that liberals will suppress dissent by any means at their disposal whenever they have the power to do so.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

"Statistically impossible" -- that means it couldn't have happened by accident.

Helen Slater as Supergirl

Beyond their findings on discrimination, the pair determined that while conservatives are minorities in their field, they are not statistically negligible: About 40 percent of respondents identified themselves as moderate or conservative on economic issues, while 30 percent did so on foreign policy issues. The widest divide occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only 4 percent as conservative.

“As offensive as it may seem to many social psychologists,” Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers write, “believing that abortion is murder does not mean that one cannot do excellent research.” To think otherwise, they argue, damages the scientific credibility of psychology — a field that has been criticized in the press for being a pseudo-science.

Remember this when you hear about what psychologists say about any, and I mean any, subject.  You'd heard of media bias.  Now you know know about academic bias.

How Hatred Became a Liberal Value

Paul Rahe explains (H/T:  Dyspepsia Generation):

Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl in "Batman & Robin"

I remember when liberals sported on their automobiles bumper stickers reading, “Hatred is not a Family Value.” Then, back in 2003, in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote an essay explaining why it was legitimate to hate George W. Bush, and the dam burst. Civility is no longer a liberal ideal. And now – as yesterday’s armed attack on the Family Research Council in Washington, the five-hour delay in President Obama’s condemnation of the act as he calculated whether it was in his interest to comment or not, and the mainstream media’s initial reluctance to report on the event, much less highlight the activist LGBT connections of the shooter suggest – left liberals are willing to wink at violence. It may be regrettable, they think, but, like stealing elections, it is all in a good cause – and before figuring out how to respond to an outbreak of violence on the part of their allies, they pause to calculate the political consequences. You will not hear liberals arguing for a crackdown on the use of force by animal-rights activists, environmental activists, union thugs, and the Occupy movement.  [Emphasis added.]

Read it all.   Liberals have been about hating what is good for a very, very long time.  They hate babies and children, they hate authentic religious faith, they hate traditional marriage, they hate economic prosperity.  And they hate, they hate, they hate the people who stand in their way as they try to destroy these things.

Why We Can't Communicate

Found on Facebook, re-posted with permission:

A number of my friends have been posting of late to decry the poor quality of political discourse in the 2012 election season.

It's understandable.  The slanders are going back and forth pretty heavily, and though it seems to me that the problem is far more on one side than the other, others will have different perceptions.

But what they may not be aware of is that little, very little, of political speech is actually intended as "discourse":  the two sides are doing such a poor job of talking to each other because they aren't trying to talk to each other.  Mostly, they're talking to their own supporters, trying to keep them in camp, trying keep their spirits up, their enthusiasm at pitch, and keep them excited.  But also, they're talking to the dwindling number of undecided voters.  A little of this is of the "see how good I am?" sort of message, but much more of it is of the color of "how can you vote for that devil!?"  Finally, a bit of political speech is actually aimed at the opponent's supporters.  Now, you might think that there would be an effort to persuade here, but there isn't.  Instead, almost all of this speech is intended to suppress the turnout of the opponent's supporters; thus the message is entirely negative, intended specifically to turn people away from the political process altogether, to create a "they're all bums anyway" sort of despair.

In America today, we are divided.  We are divided about basic questions like what is a person or what is a family?  We don't agree on what constitutes a marriage, whether there's a God, what God expects of us, what constitutes Good and Evil or how to achieve them.  We disagree on whether a man is entitled to the fruits of his labors, or whether he owes them to the state.  We disagree on what is our duty to each other, and on who should define that duty.  We disagree about the proper size and role of government, and on how best to educate our children.  We disagree about whether there should be one set of laws for all, or freedom to do things differently.  We disagree about what are rights, and about what rights are.

Increasingly, we don't even speak the same language, using the same words to mean very different things.  And, increasingly, we abandon media that facilitate consequential communication, and turn to media that trivialize communication (yes, like Facebook).  We've abandoned our brief, failed experiment in "objective journalism" (which at least had as its ideal the notion of serving the entire public) in favor of agenda-driven reporting and commentary serving a diverse market of information consumers.  Information consumers, who, by the by, are consuming (mostly) for free a very expensive to produce product -- but it's paid for by someone who wants you to consume it.  Who?  and why?

We disagree about history, about divinity, about humanity, about sexuality, about liberty.  We lack respect for those who hold differing values and opinions.  Only this last is understandable to me; few of us ever experience being respected by those who hold differing values and opinions.

I don't know the solution.  I'm highly skeptical there is one.  I'm completely certain that there is no short-term solution.  My best hope is that we won't tear ourselves to pieces before a solution can be found.

But it's hardly surprising that the people who are vying for our votes present such a poor image.  It's our own reflection.

Dina Meyers as Batgirl in "Birds of Prey"

 Not only are we divided, but one side is determined to wipe out the other, and in order to achieve that has taken over academia, the news and entertainment media, most of the judiciary and most of the government.  They use our virtues, institutions and traditions as weapons against us, and they are on the verge of rendering our values not only obsolete, but illegal.  The process will be completed during the next presidential term, if Barack Obama is re-elected.  In such a situation, there can only be victory or defeat.  You may wish to compromise, but true compromise is not possible with an opponent who uses compromise itself as a weapon against you.

There will be no heroes to save us.  Which will it be?  Victory or defeat?

Name-Calling

It's very much as though, following halftime in a basketball game, the opposing team has come out wearing football pads and helmets, 11 men instead of 5, formed a line of scrimmage, and is now busily tackling our center, guards and forwards, and carrying the ball instead of dribbling.  And our team is haughtily declaring our superiority in following the correct rules, while the score is run up against us, and our best players are sidelined and crippled.

The rules have changed.  Only fools are still playing by the old rules.  We will have to win according to the new rules even to have a chance of reinstating the old rules.

It's time for us to play by the rules our opponents are playing by.  Name-calling is a good example.  Even the mainstream press, even the president himself, has called Tea Party activists by the degoratory name of "tea-baggers".  "Tea-bagging", as what we used to call decent people have been forced to come to understand, is the playful name given by homosexuals to the practice of taking one's partner's testicles into one's mouth.  When they call you a "tea-bagger", they don't mean something nice.  Nor even neutral.

Much less do they mean anything nice when they react with name-calling to the slightest hint of opposition.  You can barely chat five minutes with most liberals before they'll ask if your opposition to President Obama isn't really because he's black.  That's the nicest way they have of calling you a racist, but they'll often just come out and say it.

Few homosexuals, or their supporters, can last as long as two minutes without calling you a bigot for opposing gay "marriage".

None of this is new.  Communists used to call capitalists, "running dogs."  Slave-owners had some pretty bad names for abolitionists, too, of which "religious extremist" was the mildest.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

When he calls you a tea-bagger, call him a cocksucker.  Not just once.  Keep doing it and don't stop.

When he calls you a racist for opposing President Obama, call him a fascist.  Over and over again.

When they call you a bigot for opposing the gay agenda, call them fagots, or fudge-packers,  or limp-wristed.

Use your imagination.  Unleash the anger that their name-calling inspires in you.  Don't hold back.  Keep calling them names over and over, like cruel children in a schoolyard.  That's the level of discourse that they have chosen, that's the game that they asked for.  It's laughably simple to beat them at it.  Because most liberals in today's political discourse have the mentality of schoolyard bullies.  And schoolyard bullies, famously, cannot themselves stand being served a helping of what they dish out.

Of course it's distasteful.  It's a virtue in you that you would find name-calling distasteful.  Do not let your virtues be their weapons.  Your hospitality doesn't force you to open your home to robbers.  Your distaste at such childish tactics shouldn't require you to accept their insults without hitting back.  Don't disdain to tackle their quarterback.

Fight fire with fire.  When they call you names, call them names.  And just watch how fast they back down!

a few words about this blog

It's not important who I am.  Suffice to say, I'm somebody who thinks that the re-election of the president would be a disaster to America of historic proportions.

What I say here probably isn't important either.  But the main point, not original to me, is that the re-election of President Obama will render impossible the rolling back of the big government juggernaut that threatens to consume our entire society.  The fundamental relationship of the government to the people has been changed -- they are no longer accountable to us, we are accountable to them.  If Obama is reelected, we will have lost our last opportunity to change it back.

If you agree with what I say, don't bother to comment, just post a link to the blog you like to Facebook or Twitter and share it.  Help get the word out.

If you don't agree, feel free to fisk me on your blog.  That'll get the word out, too.

I expect to have a few things to say here over the course of the next few months.  If I am right, and Obama is re-elected, I'll have advice and opinions about how we should conduct ourselves according to the new rules of society.

If Gov. Romney wins, we will still need to stay engaged and involved, and so I'll something to say about that as well.

Thanks for stopping by.  Feel free to come back.

The Main Reason Obama will be Reelected

The obvious bias of the news and entertainment media is so pervasive that for the vast majority of voters, it's simply the air they breathe.  Obama is smart, his critics are dumb (or racist), and his opponent is a wimp because he won't stand up to the great evil that threatens America: conservatives.

In spite of the hard work by many in talk radio, the Tea Party, and the new on-line media, most people simply won't get the opposing viewpoint, and most people will still be outraged that there even is an opposing viewpoint.

Rule 5 Action

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and all text, all politics, all the time makes for a dull blog.

So, in slavish obedience to the Great McCain's Rule 5, I offer these lovelies from Lost Pinup:

First, the wonderful Betty Page.

The immortal Marilyn Monroe.

A rare comparison, showing that photography isn't always better.

Thanks for dropping by!  Be sure to check out the rest of the blog!  We're new here, and you might like what we have to say.

Cardinal George on How the Culture is Changed

But will he figure out how to do it himself?

Chicago Archbishop Francis Cardinal George revisits the Chick-fil-A issue, and observes how the left has moved the culture by excluding entire vistas of context (H/T:  BackyardConservative):

An argument is always made in a context that determines what can be considered sensible, and it seems to me that some of us are arguing out of different contexts. 

There are three contexts for discussing “gay marriage”: 1) the arena of individual rights and their protection in civil law, 2) the field of activities defined by nature and its laws, and 3) the realm of faith as a response to God’s self-revelation in history.  Unfortunately, when the only permissible context for discussing public values is that of individual rights protected by civil law, then it is the government alone that determines how it is acceptable to act.  Every public actor (including faith communities) then becomes the government’s agent.  This is a formula for tyranny.

We can see how appeals to pluralism and toleration gradually become tyrannical in the development of how we are now expected to regard the killing of unborn children.  When the individual civil right to abort a living child was discovered in the Constitution, its justification began as a “necessary evil” for the sake of a woman’s health; it was then applauded in nobler terms as a positive symbol of a woman’s freedom; it is now part of the value system of our society and everyone must be involved in paying for it, either through taxes or insurance.  It is mainstream medicine and settled social policy.  Its opponents are relegated to a quirky fringe, outside of the American consensus not only on what it is legal to do but also on what it is good to support.  When the government, the media and the entertainment industries agree to agree on how to use words and shape the argument, society itself is deliberately transformed in ways that bring academics, judges, legislators, lawyers, law enforcement officers, newspaper editors, actors, psychiatrists, doctors and every other public professional into public agreement, all portraying themselves as original thinkers.  Anyone opposed to the new consensus, no matter the reason, is dismissed as a throwback to an earlier age, to be tolerated, perhaps, but removed from public life and, eventually, punished.  It’s a very old story.

The Cardinal is exactly right.  But he's been standing on the sidelines watching it happen his entire life.  Now what's he going to do about it?  People on the wrong side of these issues go to communion every Sunday, every day, some of them, in the Chicago Archdiocese.  Evidently, it's OK with Cardinal George for someone to stand up in his territory and say "I'm Catholic and gay is OK!  Abortion is OK!"  There are no consequences for this, even for the most famous and power Catholics.  Until the Church starts flexing its muscle, and getting into the game, it's going to be relegated to a seat on the 50-yard line to watch as western culture completes its slide into the gutter, taking the economy with it.