Frum's Right on Limbaugh and GOP: Conservatives, Republicans Must Evolve

US World and News Report ^ | 3/13/09 | Mary Kate Cary

[mbarker12474]

The Republicans should run on a platform of free healthcare for all, a ten million dollar stimulus in cash for every household, and free porn on every TV channel.

They should promise a 10,000 square foot house for all families, a free chef in every household, and free meals three times a day at your choice of Red Lobster, Outback, and Olive Garden.

They should promise a new hot babe every night for every man, and three maids for every woman.

Double all this for blacks.

Triple all this for immigrants already here.

Quadruple all this for everybody else in the world.

The Republicans should offer the vote to anybody alive anywhere in the world.

They’d win every election. (We’ll, they’d win the first and only election.)

Winning elections is easy.

Proper governence takes a little more than Frum has to offer.

[Semper Mark]

“Conservatives, Republicans Must Evolve”

Conservatives are strict Constitutionalists, and until that
precious document itself evolves , I think we’ll stay right where we are.

[Unam Sanctam]

I don’t see how free market health care reform and tax cuts are antithetical. Why not both? And why shouldn’t there be a voice for fiscal restraint and for encouragement of private investment and economic growth? As for same sex marriage and abortion, the party should stand up for the preservation of marriage as traditionally defined and for human life, regardless of how “popular” those stands are among “young people”. There should be a voice in their defence because they are the right positions. Moreover, the pro-same sex marriage people have shown here in Massachusetts that they are willing to make public schools promote and normalize same sex marriage without any opt out for parents who disagree. There are fundamental religious freedom issues at stake that need to be spoken out against.

[freespirited]

Just another yuppie who has spent too much time schmoozing in Georgetown.

[biff]

I will rot in hades or just not vote before voting for her version of the New Republican Party. I swore an oath to myself that I will never again vote for another rino McCain.

[pissant]

I swore that same oath ages ago. That’s why I wrote in Duncan Hunter of POTUS. :o)

[ReneeLynn]

Seems these kind of Repubs are evolving into liberal Democrats. In which case, Mary Whoever, there is already a party for you.

We don’t need another.

[ex-snook]

The Republican party needs to reach out to family working class voters. The GOP need not quit on abortion or gay marriage. The GOP won with the Reagan Democrats but lost them because the GOP refused to hear the job sucking sound over the cash jingling on Wall Street. McCain could have won if the put on a hearing aid and listened to the middle class.

[freekitty]

Be careful about set up words. You can't have free health market without tax cuts. There is no incentive.

[Jubal Madison]

I don’t change my positions based on public consensus. While there may be some issues I would be willing to compromise on, my core principles and beliefs are non-negotiable. If that means never winning another election-then so be it.—JM

[driftless2]

This whole “Republicans must change/evolve” thing is a whole lot of hooey. We weren’t crushed last November, and if the economy hadn’t imploded in September, McCain might still have won. Obama certainly wouldn’t have won by seven million votes. These “experts” are looking at a fluke and thinking it’s decisive. It isn’t. In three years Obama won’t be looking so hot to panicky voters who bought the hoax that Republicans blew the economy and Obama was the man to save it. If anything Republicans must make sure that a candidate with a conservative message gets it out effectively to the public before 2012.

[pissant]

That’s why I stand 1000% with the Duncan Hunter wing of the party. A promoter of American industrial superiority and America first.

[nathanbedford]

Here is a portion of a post which I published before the election in response to a politico article calling for Republicans and conservatives to move left to fill the big tent:

As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.

The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.

We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.

As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.

If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.

Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.

As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.

[screaminsunshine]

Evolve to communism??? No thanks. Forget it. I want a new party. Of course it will lose at first. I do not care. The Democrats are now communists. Republicans are socialists. Iwant a capitalist party!!!

[yazoo]

“We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message.”

The free market and low taxes go hand in hand. Health care reform will only work if it is done via the free market, which is at the core of Republican philosophy. The conservative movement is about core ideas, not putting our wet finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. Republicans always win when they put their core ideas out there and measure them against the way things are. They always lose when they try to compromise with the left by supporting ideas that rely on government solutions, albeit smaller big government.

[Northern Yankee]

Why do people with a conservative philosophy have to abandon core principles, while the liberal point of view becomes more radical?

Where's the outcry from their side?

[screaminsunshine]

I want to join NOW!

[yazoo]

So, the idea is not to oppose abortion but just to demand less of it. Now there is a winning idea.

[FlipWilson]

Not this crap again. Hey Frum and the Frumettes, stop wasting words and energy and just adopt the following slogan:

“If you can’t beat em, join em, our plan for conservatism’s future.”

Afterall, it is what you and your ilk are saying without, of course, coming out and saying it.

[MyDogAteMyBallot]

Maybe if we all had 3 names....

did the olson twin with the drug problem get married?