The media wants Huckabee, and the reason the media wants Huckabee is because they know they’re going to, down the road, be able to portray him as a nutcase, Bible-thumping evangelical who’s going to take his religion and God into the Oval Office — and they’ll use that to incite fear among liberals and progressives and so forth… They built McCain up. McCain loved it when they built him up. They tripped him up over the war, and now they’re trying to revive his campaign again.
If somebody told you that a conservative was someone who supported amnesty for illegal aliens, who supported limiting free political speech (McCain-Feingold) who embraced the ACLU’s brief for terrorist detainees getting US constitutional rights. If someone told you that a conservative is someone who opposed tax cuts during the Bush administration, and has recently confirmed he would do it again, what would you say?
Most likely you would say, “Hell no! That’s not a conservative.” Yet I just described to several of Senator McCain’s positions over the years. Now, the idea that he’s a great conservative in this race is an affront to conservatives.
They’re pushing McCain hard now. They were waiting to see what happened. Now they’re pushing. They are willing, the Media, are willing to tolerate his position on Iraq in exchange for all of his other views: opposition to tax cuts, limiting free speech, siding up with the ACLU. These are things they’re willing to tolerate in McCain as they overlook his position on Iraq — and, really, they don’t have to overlook much because his position on Iraq isn’t all that different from Rudy or Thompson.
In terms of electing a president, there are a couple things the president can do about abortion, one of them substantive, the other is somewhat ephemeral. The substantive thing that a president can do about abortion is to nominate judges, primarily Supreme Court justices.
That’s it.
Now, a president can lead, a president can try to inspire and motivate, change hearts and so forth, but, in a substantive way, there’s not much a president can do about abortion. There are some people who will overlook every aspect of Governor Huckabee that is really something in total opposition to most of their beliefs, because all they will see is the Christian characteristic, particularly if it fits right with the abortion issue.
Now, my friends, I advocate conservative principles here, which I will not throw away to embrace any candidate. I don’t support open borders and amnesty, as does Governor Huckabee. I don’t support the release of hundreds of criminals. I don’t support repeated increases in taxes. I don’t support national health care.
I don’t care what you call it, whether it’s in the name of the children or not. I don’t support anti-war rhetoric that sounds as if it was written by Nancy Pelosi.
Too much is at stake here!
Now, I don’t want somebody in the White House who has no problem with abortion. I don’t want anybody in the White House who thinks that it’s okay and that we ought not do anything about it.
Don’t misunderstand.
But I also don’t want anybody to misunderstand what a president can actually do about it and how far a president can actually take the issue.
It’s about judges, if your concern is overturning Roe vs. Wade. If it’s not, if you realize that’s going to be a ways down the line and yet we want to do something about abortion prior to that then it’s about changing minds and hearts.
There are several ways of going about doing that, and one of the ways is not wagging your finger in people’s faces and telling them they’re sinning or telling them they’re wrong, you’re just going to seal their resolve against you. I think we’re in the process of changing minds and hearts. I think abortion figures are falling. I think as generations grow and change, there’s a greater repugnance attached to the whole practice. It is not an 80% majority issue, pro-choice isn’t. It’s not even 50% now. Progress is being made on this.
But I’m not going to sit here and put aside all of these things that I believe in.
One of the most frustrating things to me, about this entire Republican primary, is sitting out there right in front of us for all of us to see. I don’t care how far you want to go back, if you want to go back to Buckley and Russell Kirk, if you want to go back to Edmund Burke, if you want to go back to Goldwater, you can do that and you can find how conservatism has positively influenced change in this country.
But all you have to do, if you don’t want to go that far back, all you gotta do is go back to 1980. Now, I realize a lot of people get sick and tired of hearing about Ronald Reagan because there isn’t another Reagan out there. Reagan was a unique individual and so forth. I’m not pining away for somebody to be Ronald Reagan. What I am asking some Republican to see is that Ronald Reagan won two landslides coming off of a Jimmy Carter four years of malaise. Following Ronald Reagan, in 1994 we took back the House of Representatives: the first time in 40 years, and we did this with conservative principles.
What frustrates me is why the latest current crop of Republicans wants to ignore that and think that there’s a better way, when the evidence that shows progress, both economic, social, you name it, national security, defeating the Soviets in the Cold War, it’s all there. And why it is eschewed, why it is ignored in different ways, starting in the early days of this primary campaign…
Why?
My largest concern is how conservatism is going to be redefined so as to fit whatever the current crop of candidates said it is. There’s a bunch of these guys running around saying they’re Reagan.
None of them are.
There’s not one Reagan conservative — well, I can’t say there’s not one, there may be one. The point is, that the lessons are clear on whatever issue you want to raise: national security, taxes, economics, individual prosperity, domestic security. It’s all there: How to beat liberals; how to beat Democrats; how to take power from them.
It’s all there.
Ask me to compromise my principles…
Leave a Reply