The United States is falling to a saturation offense decades in the making. Like the scene in the movie Aliens where the motion tracker says the aliens are so close that they are in the same room with our heroes, we can’t quite figure out where the enemy is, but we know they’re all over us. In the movie, our heroes needed to expand their thinking from two to three dimensions; the aliens were in the overhead. For our own purposes we need to look not at individuals and elections, but at the large picture. Our house is being eaten by termites, and no matter how many individual bugs we squash, it does nothing to help remove the infestation.
Those Americans who most keenly feel and honor their commitment and duty to the Constitution are at a critical point. Speaking for myself, I have found it difficult to express my opinions on the course this country is on since the election of November 2012. It is not that I have nothing to say, but that I have everything to say, and it is hardly possible to begin one thought without being alarmed anew a multitude of other connected thoughts. This makes it difficult to think anything through and nearly impossible to get a point across. It is hard to isolate and discuss any one thing when everything is connected.
A case in point is the sequester. Who remembers where it came from? It is not so much, as people like to describe it now, “the result of Congress not passing a budget”, but the result of GOP betrayal. Recall that the whole Supercommittee (remember them?) and sequester mechanism was designed to fool the Tea Party into allowing another continuing resolution to go forward, while kicking the can down the road on the debt ceiling. Interestingly, now when CRs and the debt ceiling are discussed, they are no longer attached to the Supercommittee and the sequester. Neat trick.
There is a fury building in the wake of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ stunning collapse, the disastrous re-election of President Obama, and the unceasing attacks by the Congressional Republican leadership of both houses against conservatives of any stripe. After the 2010 crushing victories won by the Tea Party, Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell gave pithy, humble speeches promising that things would change, and that they had been shown what the American people really wanted. They promised fidelity to the American people, and described the new day dawning in Washington, D.C. etc. It was all horseshit, and when Speaker Boehner installed sixteen-term Representative Hal “Prince of Pork” Rogers as House Appropriations Committee Chair, the Tea Party began to see what was up. And what was up was the usual shenanigans. We realized too late that the old guard GOP would not tolerate being granted victory by a bunch of mere Americans if it meant that they would have to change their big-spender ways. A few victories notwithstanding, the GOP has shown its contempt for conservatives, Americans, limited government, and the Constitution itself by position itself between the Tea Party and the White House as some sort of intermediary. Instead of working with the Tea Party to defeat the Marxist menace in our government, the GOP has made war upon the Tea Party, and since 2011 has predictable joined ranks with the White House to oppose the Tea Party. The GOP has effectively disarmed the Tea Party in a fight with the White House, and the Tea Party now has only one target left–John Boehner.
Facts no longer matter, as they can not only be discovered and proven (or refuted and ignored) regardless of their validity, more rapidly than those facts can be checked out in any meaningful sense. And at any rate, when conservatives are suckered into debating progressives, they have already lost. Why? Because when they make points, we either refute or accept them, whereas when we make points, they ignore the points and hurry on to something else, typically a straw man for us to knock down. And most important, to argue facts implies a willingness to be convinced, and this is a key difference between conservatives and progressives. Progressives already have their answers fixed firmly in their minds, and are speaking not to convince, but to defeat. This is crucial to understand: they are not arguing with you to convince you that they are right. They are arguing so that you will shut up. You must be made to question your own conclusions, no matter how ludicrous the objections they raise may seem. The mere raising of progressive objections to conservative arguments is an exercise of power in itself, and because they are willing to “debate” on those terms, they win.
Another important point is that victory is attractive, and defeat is repulsive. If President Obama and Speaker Boehner differ on a point, and Speaker Boehner decides to “give this one, in order to bring pressure for the next one”, then the Speaker is losing this battle twice. First, he will not be given credit by the President for having compromised, made a deal, crossed the aisle, acted reasonable, or any of the rest of it. When he surrenders a thing, then that thing is taken as forcibly as if he had defended it, and he is credited with no flexibility by the President’s side. Why? Because it is not in the President’s interest to deal with Boehner as if he matters. The President has nothing to fear from John Boehner, and knows it. The problem is that Boehner does not know it,. or worse, has made his own calculations which call for him to make a separate peace with the executive branch. Whatever the reason, the second loss in this is that, as Vince Lombardi said, “Winning is a habit.” The complement to this is that losing is a habit, and uit is a habiut which Congressional Republicans have developed into an addiction. They feel that there is some external judge, some cosmic keeper of the Great Score, and that if they give on sufficient points, then they will be granted a boon some time when they really need it. But the truth is that they lose time after time, and nobody likes a loser. If you lose all of your battles, even your friends will drift away. As Patton said, “American love a winner. They love a winner and will not tolerate a loser!”
And this is the key. Even if we were to accept the flawed GOP premises that the Tea Party is too far outside the mainstream, and that there is some large body of independents or otherwise swing voters who can be convinced, or who are keeping score so that the GOP can be granted victories because “fair is fair”; even if we accept those nonsensical assumptions, the fact is that a loser gathers no support. This is not only because people in general want to be on a winning team; this is certainly true and not dishonorable, but it is not the important aspect of this loser problem. The more pressing political issue here is that if your team does not win, you do not get your way. So even those who retain the importance of their own positions firmly in mind as they strategize and execute most realize that a GOP which gives in too readily is not going to be able to generate victories. Ever.
But even this reticence to be connected with a bunch of sorry losers is not the thing I sense as paramount in the conservative silence these days. It is rage. Blinding, dangerous, grim fatalistic do-or-die rage. Constitutional conservatives don’t build bonfires in parks, host drugged-out nude parades, and crap on police cars. To be completely honest, we don;t know what we’ll do. We know we don;t want a war, but we also know that we will not accept the Marxist destruction of our Republic, our culture, our way of life, our Constitution. Time will tell.
Mark Levin’s show from March 8th, 2013, is an outstanding example of the pressure building up within the conservative movement. The callers are polite but furious, the host is agitated and spot-on correct. Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster defending the Constitution (it was never about Brennan) may be a key crack in the dam, or it may be just another amazing spectacle on a post-apocalyptic roadside. Either way, there is trouble ahead, and it is coming whether we fight it or not. This is the dawning horror that America is grappling with. As Churchill remarked on the occasion of Britain allowing Hitler to gobble up another chunk or Europe, which Britain was supposed to object to, “We have been given a choice between war and dishonor. We have chosen dishonor and will get war.”
The coming troubles are already baked into the cake, so to speak, oh and you may rest assured that conservatives will receive the blame. This is just the way things go these days, because the GOP is too weak and fickle to defend conservatism, but instead tries to parlay favor with our domestic enemies by selling out conservatives, and conservatism itself.
It is so difficult to express the problems we see mostly because no matter what difficulties to Marxists may bring, we cannot win a single thing until we fight out the Republican civil war. Boehner’s, McCain’s, McConnell’s, and Graham’s conduct suddenly becomes perfectly clear when you understand that they are applying Alinsky to the Tea Party. Just as America is run through with internal enemies, so is the GOP. They are everywhere. That horrifying sensation of being surrounded by an enemy we cannot see is not an illusion. We are being choked off not by the Marxists in the democrat party, but by their footservants in the Republican party. The old guard of the GOP has decided to make peace with Obama and his people in return for favorable treatment. We have been left to die on this muddy cold field, and the Cavalry is not coming. I understand that the President’s dinner with twelve leading Congressional Republicans, while Rand Paul filibustered to defend the Constitution, was exquisite. Really, you should have been there.
