The Republican Party matters to me in the sense that it is the vessel — it is the host, if you will — for conservatism.

Now, too many Republicans look at themselves as the host, and conservatives as an infection — as a virus that has been spreading throughout the Republican Party and slowly eating it away.

Wrong.

That’s what will happen if we succeed in having a candidate — I don’t care who it is — who is so enamored with getting independents and moderates and certain liberals, by going out and trying to be like them and telling them that our party is in fact their home. It’s the Invasion of the Body Snatchers all over again in a political sense.

I think a lot of people’s devotion to McCain is. I think a lot of people’s devotion to Governor Huckabee is a cult of personality.

Reagan didn’t invent conservatism. He just showed how to apply it, and he showed how it attracts voters. How can you do better than a 49-state landslide? A fifty-state landslide, but it’s pretty damn close.

Anybody want to tell me that Reagan was campaigning as a moderate, independent?

Anybody want to tell me that Reagan was running around campaigning and telling people how to become dependent on the government?

Come on, folks! It’s time to wake up here.

I understand going out and “expanding the base” and having a chance at electoral victory and so forth, but if it means destroying the Republican Party — and certainly losing, by the way.

Does anybody think that the way to be elected president is to out-liberal liberals, to out-moderate moderates?

Some of this just escapes me, especially when the history is not that long ago. It’s fairly recent; it’s the eighties. Even the Contract with America and the Republicans winning the House of Representatives in 1994, you think we did that with liberalism? You think we did that by attracting moderates? We had a little help there because there’s so much corruption on the House of Representatives on the Democrat side, but how did anybody know about that? Remember the Dead Media – ABC,CBS,NBC.

There’s no magic and there’s nothing valorous about going out and attracting people to our party by being like them, and having them think that our party is a new home for them, because of whatever deficiencies there are with Hillary or Obama or what have you.

That expediency to win is going to set us back.

For those of us that are conservatives first and Republicans second, this is something that matters deeply.

As I said, global warming and campaign finance reform are not just little throwaway issues that McCain made mistakes on and maybe apologized for (which he hasn’t). They’re substantive. They’re crucial. I think this notion that we’ve gotta go out and broaden the base of the party by forsaking our own roots, by forsaking our own base, I’m going to tell you: You talk about this notion, “When you get down to nominations, and you get down to the presidential race, if it’s McCain or Huckabee or any of our guys against Hillary or Obama, you really think that our guys are going to stay home and not vote for our side?”

It depends…

If our nominee spends a whole campaign acting like he’s embarrassed at his own base; like he’s angry at them, wants to diminish them and deemphasize them; and wants to instead build his party and his victory on members of the Democrat Party and liberals and moderates.

Yeah, it’s going to make ’em mad!

There’s already an undertow of real anger at Senator McCain over immigration alone and McCain-Feingold, among the Republican base. It’s just these moderates out there, those that are also in the media. They’re out of touch with the Republican base as well. The Republican base embarrasses them. So these are the people that consider themselves to be the party’s “modernizers.”

Well, hell, I’m all for “modernization,” but not destruction.

McCain says, “I think I’ll match my conservative record up against anybody that’s running.”

Okay, now, see, that’s pretty clever. It’s pretty clever, because one of the laments among a lot of conservatives is that we don’t have a thoroughbred out there, that every one of these guys has some sort of a question mark about them that you can go to in their past. The only guy that doesn’t have to defend a prior liberal governing stance or moderate governing stance, well, and it’s not even totally, is Thompson. But even Thompson went along with McCain on the campaign finance reform thing.

So, nobody is a thoroughbred out there.

We’re not looking for purity. We’re looking for people that want to beat liberals, not join them, and not have them join us. That’s not the future. Do you ever hear liberals say — do you hear Obama and these guys running around saying — “We need to go out and attract conservatives to our party. We need to find out how to broaden or base?”

Do you think if any one of those candidates — be it Obama, be it Mrs. Clinton, be it Edwards — started talking in ways that would attract somebody like me, that their party would put up with it in order to win?

Well, they promised a middle class tax cut, but they don’t deliver the thing. You know, it works when the conservative Democrats run in local, state, House of Representatives elections. That’s how they won the House last time.

That’s another thing that bugs me. When the Democrats do want to win, especially in local House race, they run conservative Democrats, and they win. Our own side wants to bad mouth conservatism; sweep it aside as something that’s an antique, that needs to be modernized and so forth.

It’s patently absurd.

Obama cites Reagan…

This embarrasses me. He’s citing Reagan in great ways. He’s not citing Reagan on policy. He wouldn’t dare do that, and he’s taking a risk doing it anyway. That group over there despises Reagan even more than some of the country club, blue-blood Republicans on our side despised Reagan — make no mistake, they did.

Nevertheless he’s out there citing Reagan, but he’s doing it in the context of attitudes and uplifting sentiments, optimism and hope and inspiration. The kind of things our people ought to be doing, Obama is out there-doing.

Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (Mika Brzezinski is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to Jimmy Carter), and they’re talking about conservatives in the presidential race, and Mika Brzezinski says, “I don’t have any problem with morality in politics.”

You don’t have any problem with morality in politics? And that was somehow big news!

The secularists are all over it. “No, I don’t have any problem with morality.”

It’s like: I can stomach morality.

Pete writes in his piece on Obama and Reagan, the one thing — one of the most fundamental aspects of Ronald Reagan’s success was the morality of everything that he brought into play. He knew the Soviet Union would implode on the basis of its own immorality, if we just gave it the right nudge.

He thought the same thing of liberalism. It’s its own immorality, if you give it the right nudge, it will implode on itself.

Reagan’s morality was a fundamental aspect of who he was and how he took the concepts, the precepts, the contexts and principles of conservatism and applied them to the issues of his day.