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.<\/p>\n
Well, they were yokels. What changed, for those of us fortunate enough to outlive the phase, was that we came to wonder why we\u2019d 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 \u201cvehicle\u201d with a hard \u201ch,\u201d was known to announce she was going to \u201cwarsh the deeshes,\u201d 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\u2019t much to eat but what you\u2019d put up in Mason jars and what the dog managed to tree.<\/p>\n
We saved silver dollars. The \u201csophisticates\u201d bought dot-com stocks and flipped real estate. Our silver dollars are still there.<\/p>\n
Yet now we\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow naive to lead off their campaigns by taking these wacky positions with hostile reporters!\u201d the elites shout in mock dismay.<\/p>\n
No, they were just politely trying to answer your questions. Then, if they stop answering \u201cgotcha\u201d questions, they\u2019re ridiculed for \u201chiding from the press.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so we\u2019re told we should be ashamed, ashamed of that clumsy rural rube Sarah Palin or Rand Paul or Sharron Angle. Or, now, Christine O\u2019Donnell of Delaware.<\/p>\n
(It\u2019s \u201cextreme\u201d 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\u2019re told. Yet when Ronald Reagan ran on that platform in 1980, he took 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter\u2019s 49. Oh, we are so ashamed.)<\/p>\n
After all, when the most important thing is to elect as many people with \u201cR\u201ds 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 ?<\/p>\n
Oh … wait.<\/p>\n
Mind you, I\u2019d probably get thrown out of most any \u201cChristian conservative\u201d conclave, given that I\u2019m for re-legalizing all drugs and leaving the queers in peace.<\/p>\n
Yes, I\u2019d rather Libertarians. But open Christianity doesn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n
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 \u201cR\u201ds after their names.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what created the Dole-Bush-McCain-Mike Castle \u201cgo-along\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
(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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmoderate,\u201d to earn themselves places at the lobbyists\u2019 feeding trough by \u201creaching across the aisle\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Purge them. Who the hell needs a \u201cDemocrat Lite\u201d party? One gang of tax-the-rich collectivists isn\u2019t enough?<\/p>\n
If the Constitution is a \u201cfailed idea of the past,\u201d why did Barack Obama perjure himself by vowing to protect and defend it?<\/p>\n
Downsizing government is not a \u201cchoice.\u201d The only choice now is whether we will reorganize — and vastly slim down — in Chapter 7, Chapter 11, or Chapter 13 — whether we\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
Will the nomination of \u201cprincipled\u201d conservative yokels like Christine O\u2019Donnell lose the Republicans a few seats that might otherwise have gone \u201cR\u201d on Nov. 2. Maybe.<\/p>\n
But with any luck, the newly invigorated smaller-government party that\u2019s thus built will actually offer Americans \u201ca choice, not an echo.\u201d<\/p>\n
So when those slick big-government sleazebags, so proud of all the machinery they\u2019ve constructed to seize your wealth and empower themselves and their friends, urge you to be ashamed, ashamed of the Tea Party nominees because they\u2019re so crude, such yokels: hold your head high and say, \u201cYes, we\u2019re yokels. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne didn\u2019t 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 \u2018Constitution.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when Old Ironsides was done with the Guerriere, her English decks were awash in blood, brains and molasses, and there wasn\u2019t enough of her left to tow to port.<\/p>\n
Send us more yokels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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