There's been quite a lot of attention on the ruinous failures of Obamunist "foreign policy," insofar as The Won can be said to have a foreign policy that goes beyond "whatever will support my sagging poll numbers." It's hard to fault the majority of commentators for that focus, for beyond our shores blood is being spilled in great quantities, usually because Islam, the totalitarian ideology that masquerades as a religion, is on the march in the face of Western (especially American) lack of resolve. But the barbarians of other lands should not completely absorb our attentions; there are barbarians in this land as well, and they, too, are on the march.
Hearken to Kevin Williamson about one such front:
Consider that the same Texas prosecutor that has indicted Governor Rick Perry on two felony counts for the so-called crime of exercising his constitutional authority to veto a bill — a bill providing funds to that prosecutor’s office — is now preparing to indict University of Texas regent and whistleblower Wallace Hall, on charges of . . . hmm.The charges against Mr. Hall are odd even by the standards of Rosemary Lehmberg, the vodka-pickled Texas prosecutor whose videotaped tirade after a DUI arrest — she threatened to have sheriff’s deputies jailed if she was not given special treatment — led to Governor Perry’s veto of funds for her office, on the theory that he could not in good conscience sign off on funding for an agency under such non-credible leadership. Mr. Hall is accused of leaking private information regarding academic records; short of that, prosecutors want to charge Mr. Hall with the crime of leading people to “speculate” about certain information protected by privacy rules. For the record, I should note that, though I never have spoken to the man, the party to whom Mr. Hall is accused of leaking information and whose speculation he is accused of encouraging . . . is me.
The point of such a legal initiative is not to obtain a conviction. Such cases are never won in court. As Williamson points out, the objective is to silence the target -- and in that effort, the prosecution usually succeeds.
Wallace Hall's "crime" is that he resisted the efforts of Jim Pitts (R), the chairman of the Appropriations committee of the Texas House of Representatives, to force his underqualified son into the University of Texas law school. Pitts succeeded in gaining admission to the law school for his son, but apparently his resentment of Hall's resistance was not slaked by victory. So he leaned on a convenient prosecutor -- Travis County's Rosemary Lehmberg, the "vodka-pickled Democrat" whose fury over having Rick Perry demand her resignation for her execrable public behavior incited her to have him indicted -- to put the screws to Regent Hall, who was already reviled by the power elite of Texas academia as a "whistleblower."
This is the exact reverse of justice -- and no system, however constituted, that tolerates such infamy has any right to call itself a "justice system."
On swallow doth not a summer make, nor does one abusive prosecution completely condemn a justice system...but the indictments of Rick Perry, Tom Delay and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the latter two of which were thrown out of court as without merit, emerged from that same system and were aimed at the same outcome. Travis County, the district that contains Texas's capital city of Austin, apparently elevates such unscrupulous prosecutors as Ronnie Earle and Rosemary Lehmberg without a qualm.
It matters little that Jim Pitts, apparently the moving force behind the attempt to prosecute Wallace Hall, is a Republican. Venality, peculation, and partisan abuse of office are rife in both parties. But Pitts could not secure an indictment of Hall on his own; he had to have the cooperation of a prosecutor: Democrat Rosemary Lehmberg. So here at last, in this unusually acrimonious time in American public discourse, we have a visible case of members of two "opposed" parties "reaching across the aisle" and "working together."
I consider this substantiation for my contention that we don't have a real "two-party system." The parties have a common aim -- maintaining and extending their respective grips on power -- that overrides any differences on public policy. Indeed, each finds the other more useful than not:
- As an obstruction: "We tried, but the other side thwarted us."
- As a whipping boy: "America's problems are their fault!"
- As a bogeyman: "Vote for us or you'll get them!"
After all, a political party must have opponents to be meaningful. The Soviets didn't make voting compulsory because it was too popular.
No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected -- from a lapel button
Elections have come to matter less and less as time has passed. Policy changes have become feather-light; hardly any have had the sort of dramatic "main effect" the proponents thereof have promised. Even the ascension of the hard-left Obama contingent has resulted only in a moderate acceleration of our drive toward the Total State.
One of the reasons the establishments of both parties give lip service to the memory and legacy of Ronald Reagan is to conceal their resentment of this unabashedly American, patriotic, and public-spirited president. Reagan aimed to upset quite a number of applecarts on both sides of the political divide. During his tenure in the White House, the Republican power brokers strove to surround him with "advisors" and "counselors" who would mitigate his natural conservatism, especially about federal spending and fiscal matters. The Democrats, of course, never ceased to paint him as the enemy of all that's right and good. Together, they blunted all but the most popular Reaganite initiatives, such that his legacy is far less than it might have been were the GOP truly based on conservative American principles.
In this connection, it's worth revisiting the dictionary definition of conservative:
conservative a: Tending or disposed to maintain existing institutions; opposed to change or innovation.
Alternately:
conservative n: One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs
Perhaps we should be a bit more vocal about what we'd like the word conservative to mean, rather than what it seems to mean at present. Or perhaps we should settle on another word. In either case, given the current operational definition, we've got as "conservative" a ruling elite as we can endure -- with anti-Americans, at least in orientation and guiding sentiment, holding the reins.
Welcome aboard old friend.
ReplyDeleteI've said it many times -- and probably to you directly -- that the obvious working slogans for well situated conservatives is "I've got mine; you can't eat principles; shut up and get out of the way or be run over."
Whenever a man of principle turns up the leadership wants them out lest their boat be rocked. Without question, that is a conservative point of view. Hardly one that protects any but a small number and then only for a short time. This sort of conservative has not your principles and hopes to have died before the S they built up HTF. They are not the conservative that cares a whit for posterity, not even their own.
Thus the last two dictionary definitions do indeed apply to these obvious (overlooked) working slogans.
The Progs are in control. They are far more reactionary than any opposition they first met in the late 1800s or, for that matter, from any American cultural defenders since then.
As such reactionaries, you sir are now representative of the revolutionary, the one who wishes to upset THEIR personal definition of conservative. Which I think is the reason you brought the definition up after all that preceded it.
And here is the corollary: They have begun to be ruthless in your suppression.
While God is undoubtedly on your side (via natural law even without supernatural intercession that often may seem to be needed), I pray that your current camp survives to witness its inevitable victory.
I was mystified at the time of the beginning of the first Reagan administration by his choice of worthless apparatchiks as his closest advisers. They had no "conservative" credentials. Reagan seemed hamstrung from the git.
ReplyDeleteHeck. His choice of the decent but formless, shapeless, clueless, idea-free G.H.W. Bush as VP was a sure sign of incipient and fatal compromise. Bush's four years as president were nothing less than a full resurgence of RINOism.