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This past week brought us the sad news that John Boehner has, once again, been re-elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Having a Republican Speaker of the House ought to be a good thing for liberty, justice, and all else that is American. Alas, it's not. In fact, according to none other than a former Republican presidential candidate:
“I think a majority [of Republicans] recognize that we have to govern responsibly,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who will become chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “We have to show that we can be a productive party, and that, I think, will have a direct effect on whether we’re able to elect a Republican as president in 2016.”
When John McCain says "productivity," he means passing laws. If the laws he wants to pass were to repeal existing laws, that really would be productive. But he means nothing of the sort, and everybody knows it: the Republican leadership may want to grow government in slightly different directions than the Democrats, but grow the government they will.
In contrast, let's hear from a former Republican president who actually got elected, and who regularly polls as the greatest president of the modern era:
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
That was Ronald Reagan, of course, who John McCain, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and the rest of the Republican leadership personally knew. Why won't they learn from his success and at least attempt to duplicate it?
Instead, we get garbage like this:
With the new Congress convening, incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been trying to set a strikingly new GOP tone, indicating that he wants to pass legislation in cooperation with Democrats instead of merely running against them.
“I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority,” McConnell said. “There would be nothing frightening about adding a Republican president to that governing majority.”
Now to be fair, this is the Washington Post, which would support Chairman Mao if he ran on the Democratic ticket. We don't suppose they created this quote out of thin air, however, we suspect that Sen. McConnell actually said that.
What sort of political leader even suggests that their party might be frightening? A total loser, that's what! A sane political leader would be out talking about the good things they intend to do, not this weepy "We won't bite! We're not that scary!"
Furthermore, what sort of winner decides to let the losers set the agenda? The American people just gave the Democratic party the worst hammering of this millennium, and there are more Republican Congressmen than there have been since before the Great Depression. Why on God's green earth should we give two hoots about what the Democrats want, or attempt to "cooperate" with them?
Yet the Washington Post's headline following the overwhelming Republican victory is "The GOP’s long road to deserving voter trust"! The GOP already has voters' trust, at least to a sufficient degree to get their votes which is what matters.
As we see now, that trust is sadly misplaced: no sooner did the newly elected Republicans take their seats than they started abandoning everything they ran on.
The reason the American people so hate and despise politicians is because we have two parties. One party is somewhat honest about the horrible, awful, destructive things they want to do to you, basically "steal from Someone Else and give you stuff." The other party claims to oppose this, but, once elected, goes along with them anyway. Honestly, which is worse?
The disgusted and despondent American people figure that the Republicans are slightly better because they at least claim to be different, and who knows, maybe they'll have an off day here or there where they keep their promises by accident. The Democrats... well, as even the most dedicated Obama voters are starting to realize:
Joel Gilbert found Peggy Joseph, the Florida voter who became infamous during the 2008 presidential campaign for saying Barack Obama would “pay for my gas and my mortgage.”
Surprisingly, some six years into the Obama presidency, Joseph has turned against the president, disappointed that he did not deliver on his “hope and change” campaign promises.
“Truth and honesty are important,” Joseph explained to Gilbert in the film. “He lied about everything.”
Joseph explained that after doing some research and listening more carefully to Obama, she realized he was a fraud, and “just like the Wizard of Oz, Obama has turned out to be nothing more than a man behind a curtain.”
Which brings us back around to the Republicans: why, why, why do they persist in governing as Democrat-lite when running on red-meat Republicanism is what actually wins elections and governing on red-meat republicanism wins re-election?
We all have heard about "inside the Beltway syndrome" where people forget their roots and are sucked into the big-government trough. The Washington Post inadvertently shows us why: it, along with the New York Times, are the papers of record for our governing class, and both are hard-left, borderline Communist. Yet they're treated with respect as real news organizations, despite their having thrown out every tenet of journalistic ethics or honesty generations ago.
Jonah Goldberg explains why this is:
If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.
Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture — journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce — liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he’s some kind of underdog.
If your enemy is Hitler, then it's OK if you have the occasional moral lapse in opposing him. Firebombing Dresden wasn't very nice, but hey, we had to stop the Nazis. That's perfectly true, rational, and fair - if your enemy is Adolf Hitler.
We need to face up to the fact that that's what the Left truly, fundamentally believes conservatives to be. Conservatives aren't a legitimate, historical American perspective, they are the enemies of all that is Good and Right and must be opposed tooth and claw, every minute of every day, using whatever techniques work, by every right-thinking person. It's OK to lie, it's OK to register illegal voters, it's OK to pad teh ballot boxes so long as you're opposing those evil conservatives.
Nobody would expect the British government in 1942 to give a "fair and balanced" appraisal of Hitler's pros and cons. No more should we expect anyone in the leftist media, the leftist academy, or the leftist governmental structure all up and down the bureaucracy, to be fair to conservatives.
No, the only question left is, how can we fight and defeat them in the free market of public opinion? That's a legitimate debate, if only John Boehner and his peers were willing to even have it.