Posted on 03/07/2014 2:33:01 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
From the corners of the conservative movement to the main stage, signs of hope. Or at least that the GOP is grasping at reality again.
The Conservative Political Action Conference has gotten more conservative. It hasn’t moved to the right, exactly – there’s not a lot of room remaining on the visible spectrum – but it’s definitely gotten more sedate. A little more self-contained, a lot more self-conscious, and maybe even a bit serious.
Don’t get me wrong: CPAC is still very much a circus. You can’t book sideshow acts like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter and then just expect people not to notice all the chewed-up red meat and low-hanging fruit on the floor. But a slimmer schedule overall and a pared-down roster of speakers – heavy on actual elected officials, lighter on stunt candidates – suggests that someone in the movement is trying to put the clown car in reverse.
CPAC has been a scene of ideological excess since its founding. A 1975 New York Times article could have been written at any point in the last eight years. It describes a conference dominated by talk of a third party, and quoted a Georgetown University attendee thusly:
"The people at this conference no longer reflexively see the Republican party as home."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Funny how these pundits always use phrases like “red meat” when a Conservative or a Republican is speaking to supporters, but somehow you never see phrases like this when any Democrat speaks to their supporters.
You see, Conservatives throw out red meat to the angry lions, but Democrats talk to their base. See how that goes.
Unless the writer care to provide us her description of what makes a “right winger” right wing, we can just assume she’s a extreme left-winger who considers everything to the right of her “radical”.
Really? More conservative?! Don’t make me laugh!
I have. Sometimes [rarely] The Guardian can get something right. But mainly it is an engine of Left-Progressive muck-raking when it comes to serious public policy discussion. It caters to what Troy Senik describes, in the current edition of NR, as a legion of "gentry liberals" — the sort of folks who are enablers and codependents of "a left-wing governing caste whose public-policy predilections owe more to considerations of taste than of economic necessity.... The unhappy reality of life under the gentry is that the sorts of measures needed to foster economic growth — not to mention affordable middle-class lifestyles — are regarded as gauche...."
Against this background, consider Mark Steyn's luminous insights in the same issue [March 10, 2014]:
You can't have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that's the position the Republican party is in. After the last election, I said that the billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign on robocalls and TV ads and whatnot had been entirely wasted, and the Electoral College breakdown would have been pretty much the same as if they'd just tossed the dough into the Potomac and let it float out to sea. But imagine the use of all that money and time could have been put to out there in the wider world. Liberals spend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November — and then are surprised that it doesn't make much difference. Culture trumps politics — which is why, once the question's been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain ... why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why 30 million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out-of-wedlock are "natural allies" of the Republican party....And Stein calls himself a "Happy Warrior!!!"
In 1986, in a concurrence to a majority opinion, the Chief Justice of the United States declared that "there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy." A blink of an eye, and his successors are discovering fundamental rights to commit gay marriage. What happened in between? Jurisprudentially nothing: Everything Chief Justice Berger said back in the Eighties — about common law, about Blackstone's "crime against nature," "the legislative authority of the State" — still applies. Except it doesn't. Because the culture — from school guidance counselors to sitcom characters to Oscar hosts — moved on, and so even America's Regency of Jurists was obliged to get with the beat. Because to say today what the Chief Justice of the United States said 28 years ago would be to render oneself unfit for public office....
...[I]n the [next] 28 years' time we we may be fairly well advanced toward the de facto abolition of man, at least in the manly sense. That seems to me at least as interesting a question as whether the Republicans can take the Senate with a pick-up of this or that swing state. Culture is the long view; politics is the here and now. Yet in America vast cultural changes occur in nothing flat, while, under our sclerotic political institutions, men elected to two-year terms of office announce ambitious plans to balance the budget a decade after their terms end. Here, again, liberals show a greater understanding of where the action is....
So, no, I'm not particularly focused on a Tuesday in November 2016. Liberals understand that it's in the 729 days between elections that you win all the prizes that matter, on all the ground conservatives have largely abandoned. [bolds added]
Meanwhile, middle-class American families are truly suffering. The Progressive Left has been undermining them for years, and Obama's real policy — for all he says to the contrary — is to systematically loot them under color of law in order to enrich his friends — which consist of (1) the already rich "gentry liberals"; (2) and the feckless, and seemingly terminally stupid poor who really do believe that there is such a thing as a "free lunch." The latter have been led to believe that its "the rich" that will be paying the tab for their dependency. But it's really going to come out of the hide of the middle-class....
GOP needs to develop practical policies to relieve the inexorably increasing financial insecurity of the middle class, and especially of FAMILIES.
Perhaps something like doubling the child tax credit might be useful, for openers.
A lot — but not all — of what I'm hearing from CPAC is pretty much "pie-in-the-sky," abstractideology, when what we conservatives need are real, practical policies that help the middle class to recover and turn around, so that the historical potential for American prosperity, and the achievement of the American Dream, can be resumed — for the benefit of ourselves and our Posterity.
Get that going, and the stagnant economy will follow.
That's because Democrats throw out Pasty Tofu
Cox, like other liberal fools, shows her ignorance by writing such garbage.
Shove it you elitist b*tch. Have you ever listened to the BS rhetoric from the left?
Indeed. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
That's because most of the Dem supporters have no idea of what arugula is, or that it will never replace red meat.
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