Quotes of the day

It’s going to be an unpleasant week, but we should keep things in perspective. The vast majority of American voters (who are, in turn, only a portion of the American public) didn’t think they were voting for a liberal messiah, or voting to outlaw the Republican Party, or throwing in the towel on the American experiment. They voted for the guy the media told them was cool, and they want to enjoy the historic moment of blissful non-racism the media promised them they could have. They know virtually nothing about the issues, and would have been hard-pressed to name a single substantive policy they think Obama will enact. The swing voters who went Obama, and the sizable chunk of the Republican electorate that stayed home, collapsed under the pressure of years of cultural hatred and slanted news reporting, since McCain provided them with no stirring reasons to keep resisting.

Only a few leftist zealots think this was some kind of “transformative” election. The truth is, the meaning of any election is not decided in November, or on Inauguration Day. It is an ongoing struggle. Candidates who forget that suffer for it. Bush after his 2004 re-election is a textbook example – he scurried into the White House after he was sworn in for the second term and disappeared, apparently assuming his defeat of Kerry had settled all the political and cultural questions of the day, and he could shut his office door and get back to work. If Obama listens to his more obsequious media sycophants and does the same thing, he’s in for a painful 2010 and a devastating 2012… provided we who disagree with his policies and beliefs don’t listen to the same sycophants and limp off the playing field.

We have specific lessons to learn from 2008: the importance of controlling our own primary process, the necessity of charismatic leadership, the importance of forming solid policy proposals and expressing them to the electorate in moral terms. We must get started on that last mission immediately, because the next two years are a time of great danger for the American way of life – not just because of Obama, but because of the conditions he will be reacting to, and the reactions he is likely to have. Above all, the public must be taught the great peril of socialist policy, which is the permanence of its mistakes. They must understand that Obama’s vast spending binges, Supreme Court nominations, and collectivist policies are not experiments they can easily undo in two or four years, but rather permanent deformations of the American character they will never be allowed to vote on again, any more than they can vote to get rid of Jimmy Carter’s bloated and child-destroying Department of Education, or FDR’s economy-destroying Social Security sinkhole. They must be reacquainted with the virtue of liberty, and reminded that its risks are more than worth its rewards.

Conservatives have an opportunity to retake control of a Republican Party that has not served them well in recent years. The attempt is under way to assert that “conservatism” has been discredited or defeated, because of the political suffering of two men – George Bush and John McCain – who had very little to do with conservatism, and articulated virtually none of its principles. Let the Republicans understand that their task is far larger than rolling around in the dust with Obama’s degenerate, intellectually bankrupt party over the exact size of a capital-gains tax hike. They must find the energy and courage to do what McCain never could: show the American people the true and ugly face of the Democrats, naming names and refusing to assume the supine position the media expects from them. Tell the country who Barney Frank is, what ACORN does, and exactly what the Democrats were doing while Bush was leading the military in the war against the terror masters – the one thing he unquestionably did right, if not perfectly. Illuminate every rotten sinkhole the Democrats are pouring those trillions of “stimulus” dollars into. Begin addressing the electorate like adults again, and remember you can choose your words and deeds in such a way that the media is forced to cover you…

… And don’t be afraid to begin reminding the public of the exact meaning of a certain word, a word buried under layers of emotional hysteria, a dangerous word that it is critical for them to understand properly. That word is fascism. It’s not easy to discuss it calmly and rationally, but someone had better get that discussion started, very soon.

Doctor Zero on January 18, 2009 at 11:03 PM