Vin Suprynowicz

Many of us went through a stage when we were embarrassed even to be seen with our parents or grandparents. They were just so … uncool. Their clothes were all wrong, the cars they drove were all wrong. Compared to the parents of our much more sophisticated and stylish friends, our families seemed such insufferable clods, yahoos and yokels.

Well, they were yokels. What changed, for those of us fortunate enough to outlive the phase, was that we came to wonder why we’d been embarrassed about the earthy folk and the values and down-home communities that sustained our families and gave us birth. My grandma pronounced the word “vehicle” with a hard “h,” was known to announce she was going to “warsh the deeshes,” and committed many another assault on the English language as spoken by our urban elites, thus betraying the fact that the Bishops and Clarks had come to the hill country of Southeast Ohio a very, very long time ago, and survived even when there wasn’t much to eat but what you’d put up in Mason jars and what the dog managed to tree.

We saved silver dollars. The “sophisticates” bought dot-com stocks and flipped real estate. Our silver dollars are still there.

Yet now we’re expected to do it again. After years of complaining about slick urban politicians who trick us with focus-group-tested sound bites designed to imply they agree with us, but which turn out after the election to have meant something else entirely, we have brought forward a group of sincere smaller-government conservatives, not professional politicians at all, but yokels in plaid and polyester with a sound and simple faith in the founding principles of this republic. They open their mouths and you never know what’s going to come out. Sometimes they refer to their religious faith in a way bound to make urban sophisticates cringe and roll their eyes. Sometimes they believe reporters’ questions are sincere, and — instead of deftly dancing around the traps laid for them — wade right in as though the gal or fellow really wants an honest discussion of which federal agencies could be shut down to cut the budget, which parts of the Constitution are violated by one or another of the sacred-cow enactments of state-socialism.

“How naive to lead off their campaigns by taking these wacky positions with hostile reporters!” the elites shout in mock dismay.

No, they were just politely trying to answer your questions. Then, if they stop answering “gotcha” questions, they’re ridiculed for “hiding from the press.”

And so we’re told we should be ashamed, ashamed of that clumsy rural rube Sarah Palin or Rand Paul or Sharron Angle. Or, now, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.

(It’s “extreme” to call for elimination of the federal Department of Education, founded by Jimmy Carter in 1977 as a sop to the teacher unions, on whose watch test scores have fallen through the basement, we’re told. Yet when Ronald Reagan ran on that platform in 1980, he took 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter’s 49. Oh, we are so ashamed.)

After all, when the most important thing is to elect as many people with “R”s after their names, it can only be suicidal to nominate people who actually believe in the kind of low-tax, small-government conservatism preached by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan … How many of THEM ever made it into high public office in this country ?

Oh … wait.

Mind you, I’d probably get thrown out of most any “Christian conservative” conclave, given that I’m for re-legalizing all drugs and leaving the queers in peace.

Yes, I’d rather Libertarians. But open Christianity doesn’t offend me, so long as no one proposes subsidizing it with tax dollars (unlike the current administration, which has spent $100 million of our tax dollars rebuilding mosques in Egypt and Tanzania.)

What would really be suicidal — for America as well as the soul of the Republican Party — is to believe that anything substantive can be changed merely by nominating the candidates best able to get into office this year with “R”s after their names.

That’s what created the Dole-Bush-McCain-Mike Castle “go-along” GOP that helped sink us in this swamp, and which has now been so thoroughly discredited and renounced, leading left-wing cartoonists into their current panic, portraying Tea Parties feeding poisoned Kool-Ade to the GOP elephant.

(Yes, McCain won his primary — by running as the anti-McCain, appearing at the southern border fence with tough-ass Arizona sheriffs, vowing to send the illegal aliens scampering home with buckshot in their backsides … a policy to which I believe he will remain faithful for oh, about another 45 days.)

Both the Democrat and Republican parties are minority parties, Democrats the more so. As the recession they caused eventually starves their main cash cow in the form of public employee union dues, they are doomed.

How on earth, then, could they have achieved all their state-socialist mischief of the past 45 years? Only with the support of go-along Republican allies, anxious to sell out conservative principles for the cherished Washington Post sobriquet of “moderate,” to earn themselves places at the lobbyists’ feeding trough by “reaching across the aisle” to enable the bankrupting of America and the erection of a massive nanny-police state that now strip-searches us at will, beats down our doors, taxes and regulates our employers out of business.

Purge them. Who the hell needs a “Democrat Lite” party? One gang of tax-the-rich collectivists isn’t enough?

If the Constitution is a “failed idea of the past,” why did Barack Obama perjure himself by vowing to protect and defend it?

Downsizing government is not a “choice.” The only choice now is whether we will reorganize — and vastly slim down — in Chapter 7, Chapter 11, or Chapter 13 — whether we’ll actively supervise the creative destruction of this destructive police-nanny state, or just get washed out by the floodwaters of red ink, clinging to whatever stray piece of flotsam we can lay hands on.

Will the nomination of “principled” conservative yokels like Christine O’Donnell lose the Republicans a few seats that might otherwise have gone “R” on Nov. 2. Maybe.

But with any luck, the newly invigorated smaller-government party that’s thus built will actually offer Americans “a choice, not an echo.”

So when those slick big-government sleazebags, so proud of all the machinery they’ve constructed to seize your wealth and empower themselves and their friends, urge you to be ashamed, ashamed of the Tea Party nominees because they’re so crude, such yokels: hold your head high and say, “Yes, we’re yokels. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne didn’t expect to have any trouble with these yokels at Saratoga. The British frigate Guerriere sailed up and down our coast with a barrel of molasses hanging from her mainyard to make fun of those yokels and their frigate ‘Constitution.’

“But when Old Ironsides was done with the Guerriere, her English decks were awash in blood, brains and molasses, and there wasn’t enough of her left to tow to port.

Send us more yokels.