Is Mitt Becoming More Conservative?

The American Thinker ^ | August 31, 2012 | Rosslyn Smith

[Cincinatus' Wife]

...Protecting the middle class might be the theme of Obama's campaign ads, but the defining movement of this campaign came when Obama belittled the efforts of Main Street America when he stated that "you didn't build that." Those sneering words about smart, hardworking people revealed the ugly side of Obama's redistributionalist ideology. As in 2008, most of the media accept all the carefully scripted images of Obama as Gospel truth while they busy themselves trying to either hide or spin away all those extemporaneous words and deeds that display Obama's true beliefs and character as being either out of context or aberrational....

This campaign is coming down to two competing views of America. As it plays out, I think something very profound may be happening to Mitt Romney. Romney reminds me of a good many smart businessmen I have known. They live their own lives by a set of solid small-c conservative rules, but they are too busy solving smaller daily problems to think much about political conservatism as a coherent system. Such people often pay lip service to the left-of-center conventional media wisdom about big government and public morality even as they rigorously practice all the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work, neighborliness, sobriety, and sexual continence in their personal affairs.

....this very smart, very competitive man is facing an opponent who is perhaps the most rigidly ideological man ever to become president. Romney doesn't like what he sees happening to the nation, nor does he much like the person he is running against. Confronted with the problem of beating not just the person, but also the ideology, and then fixing what is broken, Romney may be discovering for the very first time that he is actually far more ideological than he ever thought he was.

[BlackElk]

55 million sliced, diced and hamburgerized (by SURGICAL abortion alone in our country alone since 1973) is far more than enough. Romney does not think so. That's why he is Mittler. If not one other human being agrees, I am still right. By shamelessly taking up his pom poms for babykilling, Mittler has bought off on the whole da*n holocaust of the babies.

I am relentless. Always have been. Always will be. Convince me that I am wrong and I will change my mind. Not until then, however.

[Gene Eric]

>> I am relentless. Always have been. Always will be.

And my remark about it was a compliment.

I’m not one to shy away from the fact that Romney has betrayed Life.

Sadly the holocaust of the babies is not being fought like a real war, and it never has since the supreme decision that makes it legal to brutally kill nascent human life.

[BlackElk]

I imagine that since I oppose Mittler for essentially the same reasons I oppose Obozo, I must be part of the "Romney-hating lynch mob" but also the Obozo hating lynch mob. So tell me what lies I have told in the process. Also, feel free to tell me what "attacks" upon Romney supporting Freepers (offensive attacks or otherwise) I have launched here.

An observation that "conservatives" supporting Romney are not very conservative may disagree with your view of the moment but hardly constitutes a lie or an offensive attack. Ryan does not matter enough to change the equation unless there is a plane crash otherwise changing the ticket. Dick Cheney was the only VP of consequence in my lifetime (other than Lyndon Johnson) and while he was a force for good (mostly) as VP, he also favore pervert marriage and was Gerald Windtunnel Ford's White House Chief of Staff (which can hurt a man's reputation as a Republican).

OTOH, his wife Lynne Cheney is the author (1995) of Telling the Truth which brilliantly explains the systematic dishonesty of the left and its rationalizations and sources including a work heavily studied on the left: "I, Pierre Rivard" which seeks to convince its readers (including Slick Willy and Hillary) that there is no single truth (objective truth) only the self-serving truths that varying conflicting individuals perceive (the murderer, the murdered, the prosecutor, the police, the defense lawyer, the judge, etc.).

When conservatism is rebuilt, even though she is something of an apologist for her younger daughter's lesbianism, if Lynne Cheney is still alive (she is now 71) I am confident that she will still play a leading role in that rebuilding.

If we take the easy way out rather than insist on principle, as conservatives, we and this republic are lost and we will have deserved to lose it. I won't be part of that. Nor will many others here.

In any event, let's hear the specifics as to the lies you would attribute to me as a proud member of the Romney-hating lynch mob and Obozo hating lynch mob. And does your post suggest that those who oppose Romney are not "thinking conservatives???" Sounds suspiciously like an attack to me. If not, explain the distinction.

[BlackElk]

Would bert’s #109 constitute an “offensive attack” or is he immune as a Romney supporter?

[BlackElk]

Make that bert’s #110.

[BlackElk]

Let's see. Lenore ran as a pro-abort in 1970 against Senator Philip Hart and was described by her son Myth in 1994 as "personally pro-life" but "favoring a woman's right to choose." Ho hum! GOP-E in spades just like Mittler. Two years later, the GOP was rightly deriding McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion."

I can find no reference to Hart's position on abortion but he and his wife Jane Briggs Hart were connected heavily on the Catholic left. That suggests that he was pro-life as many Catholics of all stripes tend to be but I cannot say with certainty what his position was. So Lenore MAY have been appealing to pro-aborts by being "ambivalent" in her public commentary until 1972 when she had learned her bitter lesson about how unqualified she was as a GOP candidate.

On antiwar issues, Hart took an extreme position and was arrested in an antiwar demonstration with his wife. Lenore took a slightly less extreme position (calling for the US to cut and run by 1971 when she imagined she might be a Senator and did not get arrested. Hart was a war hero and was badly wounded in the D-Day invasion suffering permanent injury to his right arm by shrapnel, and reached the rank of Lt. Colonel by the end of his service. I thoroughly disagree with antiwar types and particularly with opponents of the Viet Nam War. Nonetheless, Philip Hart earned respect.

All that having been said, what is your point and what SHOULD we conclude about the votes Lenore Romney was seeking? Her performance in that 1970 election made Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angle in 2010 look like electoral Babe Ruths.

[Timber Rattler]

Palin was out there fighting tooth and nail within days after the election, making her first powerful endorsement victory in December of 2008, after a few months of her fighting a one woman battle against the Obama machine, the media, the world, THEN other conservatives and the tea party emerged.

That's exactly right! Saxby Chambliss was in deep trouble during his run-off in December 2008 and begged her to fly down and save his hide, and she did.

“I can't overstate the impact she had down here,” Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.

[JediJones]

Good analysis, ansell2. Any conservative saying anything else is engaging purely in wishful thinking. The idea that Mitt has any kind of "long-term Conservative goals" is totally laughable. He has a clear record from the numerous years he's spent in politics. Anyone who knows the Republican party knows it has always had 2 wings, Rockefeller and Goldwater. And anyone living in the real world knows which wing Romney falls in.

That doesn't mean he can't be twisted and pressured by conservatives to do what they want sometimes. But the Orwellian world so many so-called conservatives want us to live in, where we ignore what Mitt is and pretend he's something else, is frightening because it would make forming an effective front to engage in such arm-twisting impossible. Every time we say Romney needs to be more conservative, we can't have people telling us, "Oh, shut up, he's already conservative." Everyone's first responsiblity must be to the truth. And in Romney's case, the truth is that you'll be hard-pressed to name any Republican who has a more liberal record than he does.

[BlackElk]

Sorry that the sad truth bothers you. I used to be a Libertarian State Party officer and then I grew up. Forty years later, I still enjoy cordial relations with much later Libertarian leaders in that state.

I have also been a state chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, College Republicans, Young Republicans, the state affiliate of the American Conservative Union and, in 1976, I was state chairman of Ronaldus Maximus's challenge to Gerald Ford, the last GOP candidate to be competitive with the evil that is Mittler (i.e. easily worse than Bush the Elder, Bush the Younger, Dole, or McCain). What was that about belonging at DU???

While you are at it, post your credentials as a conservative while you serve as an apologist for Mittler.

Did Mittler include abortion-on-demand in Romneycare at a cost of no more than $50 (Deval Patrick has eliminated the $50)???

Did Mittler cram sexual perversion posing as "marriage"down the throats (so to speak) or whatever body part of Massachusetts??? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered no such thing and could not because only the Massachusetts legislature (known confusingly as the "Massachusetts General Court") is constitutionally authorized and the Supreme Judicial Court did not pretend otherwise. Mittler, as governor and without power to do so, threatened "legal actions" against any Town Clerks who failed to provide marriage licenses to perverts.

As to the name Mittler, how many innocent unborn babies will be sliced, diced and hamburgerized in Massachusetts or, God forbid, the United States because of Mittler's blatant refusal to defend their lives (while lying nowadays through his teeth to gull the suckers)??? 55 million have been slaughtered since 1973 because we are governed by moral midgets and by those who are outright evil. Is there a limit on your and Mittler's yearning for more dead babies??? See why I stopped being a "libertarian" when I grew up? You have Doris Gordon a pro-life atheist libertarian from Maryland (if she still lives) and the late John Walker who was also an atheist pro-lifer and friend of mine as known libertarian pro-lifers??? Got any others of whom anyone has ever heard??? It is not a common phenomenon. La Rand was a galloping pro-abort and endorsed Ford over Reagan in 1976 in her Ayn Rand Letter. She was alarmed that Reagan was pro-life.

If you don't like the name Mittler, I trust that you would at least have the integrity not compare Mittler to, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a pro-life champion.

[BlackElk]

Therefore: yes, Mittler, REALLY!

[BlackElk]

What was that again about insults???

Your problem seems to be that you have sold out and that, as ever, misery loves company. Do I owe Mittler my vote just because he blatantly purchased my party's nomination??? Or does he deserve to be punished?

[BlackElk]

sf4dubya:

I voted for Dole in 1996, for Dubya both times, and for McCain in 2008. So cool it with the assumptions as to "you guys" (who won't vote for Mittler).

To get that "trifecta," you need more than GOP majorities in each house of Congress especially with corrupt sell-out artists like Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy running the House and the likes of McConnell running the Senate. If it is toting a portable mattress, a portable red light and a sack of quarters, it is NOT Mother Teresa.

And again, this has NOTHING to do with Mittler's religion. I have risen to your defense on keeping his religion out of it. It has EVERYTHING to do with his sick and pathetic track record in public life and his decades of self-serving lies and "etch-a-sketch" behavior. Did Napoleon or Hitler EVER conquer Russia? The Russians scorched their own earth rather than be conquered. Obozo like Mittler, is worthless and extreme but each lacks the intestinal fortitude to scorch the earth.

Stalin was utterly despicable but even he had the sense to break out icons of the Blessed Virgin to stir believers to defend "Mother Russia." So, Mittler has the sense to lie to conservatives. Stalin was still Stalin. Mittler is still Mittler.

I am applying the "purity tests" not to "my conservative friends on FR" but to Mittler who presumes via the expenditure of renewable mountains of corrupt Wall Street money to have some sort of right to my vote and to run the GOP according to the tastes of the Junior League and the Polo Club.

Whatever "voice" I have after this tragic election (regardless of the identity of the "winner") will be no fault of Mittler or Obozo. I don't doubt that you are conservative as some others have. I read your story of how you became a conservative and I find it quite credible.

This year's election will likely have one of two outcomes. If Obozo is sworn to a second term, just about everyone here will be united against him, although those most insistently principled will be blamed for a while by those who voted for Mittler. If Mittler is sworn in, I will still be as opposed to him as ever and those FReepers who ARE conservative, if they have integrity and intelligence as I do not doubt that they do, will be joining against Mittler one by one until they, joined with his opponents, become an irresistible force in the GOP and in the nation. We need to unite behind ONE genuinely conservative GOP candidate next time (2016) whether we are taking the nomination from Mittler or choosing on a blank slate afforded by Mittler's 2012 defeat. Living as I do just south of Ryan's Congressional District, I would suggest that he will have to make an awfully good argument to overcome willingly accepting the VPOTUS nomination under Mittler.

Peter, Paul and Mary were no conservatives but many of their songs, while meant to be leftist anthems, may be viewed from our point of view even if they never intended that. I think they were being cunning in expanding their fan base by being ambiguous in their lyrics. "Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don't stand in the doorway. Don't block up the hall..." had its original meaning in the 1950s-1960s civil rights era and quite another as Ronaldus Maximus was inaugurated. My favorite is an obscure little song of theirs, not easy to find, called "Sweet Survivor." It is a song nostalgically celebrating lives of radical political commitment (when issues MATTERED) without specifying the movements being celebrated and prodding the aging radicals (ours or theirs?) to recruit and inspire a new and fresh generation of young people to do what they have done. The punchline of the song is, as almost always, by Mary Travers singing: "For all the things that matter, carry on!"

Your adopted goals are worthy though your chosen vehicle is badly flawed. If Obozo is re-elected, you will be tempted to blame those too principled to vote for him. It will take longer for Romney voters to REALLY come around. We will see better times than this year's tragedy. I trust that we will find ourselves allied. May you be blessed! For all the things that matter, carry on!

[BlackElk]

As a lawyer (now recovering), I represented 1100 pro-lifers who were arrested for various "crimes" when invading abortion mills, desterilizing their instruments, pouring raw eggs into the suction machines (requiring them to be rebuilt by engineers) and sometimes putting the mill out of business for weeks.

Many were brutalized by police for refusal to cooperate with their arrests. The overwhelming majority were arrested for: either felony burglary or misdemeanor criminal trespass, felony assaulting a police officer (trumped up baloney that never occurred even once) or misdemeanor interfering with police officers or misdemeanor resisting arrest, misdemeanor breach of the peace or misdemeanor disorderly conduct, and/or felony or misdemeanor criminal mischief (essentially destruction or desterilizing of property, i.e. the killing instruments.

No more than 30 were convicted of anything (because of their fortitude and resistance more than anything I did) mostly non-criminal infractions and never more than misdemeanors on which they refused to pay fines. A handful (fewer than 10) were incarcerated post trial having been convicted after a marathon trial and none did more than ten days post-trial.

One of my clients on several occasions was Fr. Norman Weslin who died of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's on May 16, 2012, and a man who would make Patton look like the most peaceful of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Google him. He was the priest arrested at Notre Dame for carrying a cross onto the campus to protest Obozo's presence at graduation. He flew in from Colorado to do it. He also had led a sit in at Nancy Pelosi's office during the pendency of the Obozocare bill.

My point is that SOME pro-lifers did, in fact, fight the holocaust as a war. Fr. Weslin had been a colonel in the US Army and was originally a Lutheran who married an Irish Catholic woman. He taught at the War College as I understand it and was charged with the nuclear defense of Chicago and New York. He always said that his military experience was small potatoes and that pro-life was the REAL war. He had converted to Catholicism by the time he retired from the military. He brought his wife to Chicago to visit her relatives. On an exit from an interstate, his car was stuck in traffic. He got out to check a noise under the car. A drunk driver rammed his car from behind and his wife was beheaded in his presence. He entered a seminary for late vocations and was ordained and spent the rest of his life either working for Mother Teresa in New York or later being a general in that pro-life war.

I was not complaining about your remark. I was just giving you my honest response.

Faced with this electoral tragedy offering us major party candidates like Mittler and Obozo, may Fr. Weslin besiege God with prayer for the Church, for the pro-life movement and for the nation that he loved and served.

[BobL]

“A vote for Mittens is a vote for NOTHING.”

“Neither elitist snob can define their candidacy beyond the negatives of their opponent.”

I’m with you man. Obama - FOUR MORE YEARS!!!!!

[Gene Eric]

Thank you for sharing that. You obviously have a unique perspective familiar with not only the brutality of abortion, but also the not uncommon brutality of enforcement that inevitably facilitates the death of Life.

I recall the arrest of Fr Weslin at Notre Dame — it was appalling. I will definitely learn more about the man.

Your post should be linked on your FReeper page. It’s a salient accounting of things related to Life.

[Captain Beyond]

I understand your post perfectly you want to blame conservatism for all these guys inability to get elected. You picked this fight and I am not going to let you get away with lying about conservatives and throwing us under the bus for lame nominees who lost the elections due to their own gross incompetence. Who in some cases were handed the blueprints for success and plenty of ammo from thier opponents and failed to use any of it and execute a winning game plan that was given to them. Your fable about a conspiracy of purists trying hold the RINO-Man down is just that a fable that is completely false and I am calling you out on it.

Geroge H Bush blew his election chances ever before the election got started with "Read My Lips" and then he raised taxes. Ronald Reagan handed him the model to win by and he was to stupid to use it and ended being boxed in by his own actions which got his ticket punched by a gigolo governor with serious bad policy issues. So how did this imaginary conspiracy of purists blow that one for Mr. George H Bush?

You need to look around everyone who was there for those elections knows exactly how it went down. Newt had everything set up for Bob Dole. All he had to do was take the hand off and run 10 yards into the endzone for the TD. But he could not even do that right. Dole was running against Slick Willy Clinton that was scandal ridden and his only accomplishment was he was forced to sign a Republican welfare reform bill yet what did Dole do he fumbled over and over again. There was no conspiracy of purists busting Dole balls about not being conservative enough. He could not close the deal with the American Public pure and simple. We as conservatives were doing everything we could and he went out everyday and dropped the ball and found himself getting beat by a lying do nothing president. It was Dole who could not manage to get the independent vote.

It was not the conservatives that lost the election of 2008 it was John McCain. It was McCain that could not close the deal with the Independents or the American Public. McCain did everything he could to sink his own ship from not going after Obama on his Socialist past, his socialist ideas, disappearing for weeks on the campaign trail for a TARP vote, to endorsing Obama as a good president if elected. Tell me what conspiracy of purists made McCain blow his own election? If it wasn't for the Conservatives coming out and voting because of Sarah Palin it would have been a landslide defeat. So which is it dude a conspiracy of purists who cut him lose or a conspiracy of purists who showed up and tried to save his RINO butt? And by the way why could he not get the Independent votes because you can't get anymore Middle Of The Road than John McCain.

Wow you are so out of touch you didn't even read what you have posted. You the one accusing others for your own failure to get a RINOs elected. You are the one going after conservatives. It is you using inflammatory accusations of your strawman of conservatives causing all your problems which is just that a lame attempt at a rewrite of the history of RINO political failures and to cover your ass for throwing away your principles and being pissed because others want join you this time around in selling out their core beliefs and principles. This conspiracy theory of purists of yours that forced you to lose elections is just imaginary lie. It is nothing more than a bogus attempt to smear conservatives for RINO loses and nothing else.

The question is “Is Mitt Becomimg More Conservative” and the answer is NO! Why try to pretend to make Mitt out to be something he is not. It only sows more distrust among the electorate. He records are out there and can not be disputed. Nothing said at that convention changes in any way who Mitt Romney is and the way he wants to run the country if elected. At least be honest about it.

Do you really think Mitt is sitting on the bus going “Wow those Tea Party people makes some good points we need to completely change my whole ideological core approach to this election.” Or Do you think he is going to stick to what he has been doing his whole career and took money for and made promises for to get that money. Yeah it was nice to see some Tea Party stuff and some lip service but it is still Mitt Romney's political campaign, his stance on issues, and his character that the American public will making up their minds on who to vote for on election day and not what somebody from a Tea Party point of view said during the GOP convention and not his VP choice. It will be all about Romney and who he is. And that is the whole point now in Mitt being elected or not.