Boy, am I ever disappointed today. My cherished dream of watching Newt Gingrich wipe the floor with Barack Obama in a Presidential Debate just went down in flames with the resignation of just about all of Newt’s campaign staff.
I’ve been beating the drum for Newt since Christ was in short pants and knee socks, thinking that he was something that America needed – a right wing intellectual who understood the nuts and bolts of government and who also possessed the historical frame of reference I believe all good leaders should have, but I have finally come to the painful conclusion that a Gingrich Presidency would probably be nearly as bad as the Obama one has been. Primarily because Newt is a procrastinator.
We already have a President who looks like he doesn't want to do the job.
I should have first recognized this when Gingrich took so long to finally announce his candidacy (like maybe six years?). I then should have realized that not only does Newt live and die by the maxim “don’t do tomorrow what you can leave until next month”, but that he’s also somewhat tone deaf: a Mediterranean vacation, a cruise no less, when you have the opportunity to start making your case to the public while The President is down? Romney can’t pay crowds to show up at his events, and Pawlenty is making the case that Brand X Dishwashing Liquid is every bit as good as your brand…so long as you don’t mind warts and chemical burns.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: it’s still early. And besides, Sarah Palin’s “I’m Not Running” tour is, to quote the flapping rectums on television “sucking all the oxygen out of the Republican race”, so sitting on the sidelines for now may be a good strategy and all that bullshit, but let’s face it: Newt shot himself in the foot the day he called Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms “right wing socialism”, and despite the fact that he’s right, the majority of the GOP voters (if not it’s elected officials) just doesn’t give a shit; they’re just in love with the idea that someone is ‘taking on’ an entitlement, and who gives a crap if it actually fixes anything? It sounds good.
You have to be a complete douche to screw something like this up, and under these circumstances. Barring some sort of miracle, Obama ain’t getting re-elected and the current crop of GOP ‘front-runners’ leaves much to be desired, in my estimation. Romney changes positions more often than I change my shorts, and being a Mormon could never garner the brain-dead Evangelical vote. Pawlenty is about as interesting as sawdust, and leaves one with the impression that he might be the result of some genetic experiment intended to discover the origin of the Boring and Numbnuts Genes. Herman Cain, bless him, is a nice man with some good ideas, but I’ve now seen him flounder about 30 times when asked a non-financial question that doesn’t seem to require a great deal of depth of thinking.
Michelle Bachmann simply weirds me out; it’s that staring thing she does, and it detracts from the fact that she is a smart-as-a-whip and attractive woman. Rick Santorum would be a fine candidate…if it were still 1948, or if women still wore hoopskirts. Sarah Palin’s I-don’t-know-if-I’m-in-or-if-I’m-out-you-betcha routine is starting to wear my patience thin, and I seriously tired of her months ago just from sheer overexposure. Right now, I wouldn’t follow Sarah Palin through my own front door. She appears to be doing what she does for the money, which is all well-and-fine, so far as that goes, but she’s not a viable candidate.
Right now, if you ran the numbers, Prostate Cancer is probably more popular than Barack Obama. A retarded German Sheepdog with a speech impediment and ties to several Neo-Nazi and Organized Crime groups could clean Obama’s clock. Even better, he’s going to be challenged from within his own party (you think Hillary Clinton is giving up that easily?) for the 2012 nomination. It’s almost gotten to the point where all anyone has to do to win the presidential election is to simply point to Obama and say “Really? Haven’t we had enough of this shit?” and practically coast to victory.
And all Newt had to do was to appear engaged, put Mitt Romney in his place, and shout ‘ObamaCare!” at the proper moments, but this wasn’t on his agenda, I guess.
It’s too bad.
So, now I will have to find another vessel in which to place my enthusiasm. This is going to be difficult because despite what the pundits say, the current crop of ‘professional’ GOP’ers on the slate may all be capable of beating Obama, but I find them most of them to be…what’s the word I’m looking for?...oh, right: assholes.
Worse, they’re the kind of assholes that snake-handling-Baptist rednecks like, which makes just about all of them persona non grata in my book. You should never, ever overestimate the taste or intelligence of someone who finds NASCAR entertaining, and who comes from a place where Crystal Meth and Keystone Light are the recreational substances of choice. Unfortunately the GOP has been wedded to a Southern Strategy since Nixon, and old habits are hard to break. So long as this is the case, we’ll continue to get GOP candidates who can quote Corinthians, but who don’t see a ‘reform’ of Medicare or Social Security as nothing more than keeping socialism on life support.
You could have done it, Newt. It didn’t look all that hard from here. But I guess work is not your thing, huh?
Showing posts with label Newt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newt. Show all posts
Friday, June 10, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Friday, March 04, 2011
A Note To Newt...
Just saw Newt Gingrich on Hannity, and I have a bone to pick with him.
First, I'd like to say that I have been beating the drum for a Gingrich Presidential run since at least 2006, and to date, the man has disappointed. At some point, I don't know exactly when, I came to the conclusion that Speaker Gingrich must have been biding his time, perhaps playing rope-a-dope until the time was just right for him to throw his hat in the ring, all the while creating that 'Ground Game' thingy and going through the process of setting up the rationale (I believe they call it 'Creating a Message') for eventually running that all successful candidates must complete before the first vote is even taken.
Yesterday, I picked Gingrich as perhaps the best hope of unseating the Obamatard for the GOP in 2012. Although I have already admitted a favorable bias towards Gingrich, I'm pretty certain that I did my best to not let that cloud my opinion. I'm still convinced that Gingrich would stand as a stark contrast in terms of policy against Obama, and I'm bet-a-lung-on-it sure that Gingrich is the more intellectually deft, the more experienced and temperamentally-prepared of the two.
Then Newt showed up on Hannity tonight -- and pissed me right the fuck off.
If Newt Gingrich were my girlfriend, I'd dump him in the same way that I would dump a chick who let me pick up every check, demanded at least five dates before I got a peck on the cheek, expected gifts and doors held open for her, and then wouldn't put out.
If Newt Gingrich were my gardener, I'd have the most beautifully-tended flower beds in the neighborhood, but my front lawn would be choked by 5' tall grass, and probably have leopards hunting from within it's cover.
If Newt Gingrich were God, the first Chapter of Genesis would have taken seven months -- not days -- and he would probably have rested every weekend.
Watching Newt Gingrich's decision-making process is like watching old people fuck; there's a lot of very slow and deliberate movement, not much action, and it's questionable as to which comes first -- the broken hip or cardiac-arrest-upon-orgasm.
Glaciers move faster than Newt Gingrich. So to the Post Office, Union Workers, Galapagos Tortoises, Three-toed Sloths, and Sheila Jackson-Lee's thought process. My bowels move faster than Newt Gingrich.
You know, one of the very real criticisms of Barack Obama is his seeming inability to make a decision about anything. This should come as no surprise; in his abbreviated stay in the Senate, Obama never decided anything, preferring to vote 'Present' on the order of 200 times. On those rare occasions when Obama does make a decision, the process is almost guaranteed to be protracted and that stalling process is pretty much the result of Obama getting too much input, hearing too many opinions, weighing too many options, considering far too many variables.
For democrats, delay, procrastination, indecision, clutter, obfuscation, is all part of the illusion of The Great Man of History tragically 'wrestling' with the 'problems of the day', and the 'Burdens of the Oval Office', which when juxtaposed against black-and-white photos and tinny music is supposed to represent the idealized vision and drama of 'Leadership', but it's really a mental handicap.
People who behave this way usually have a serious problem with confidence. Not making decisions is the first indication. Going through a laborious and overwrought process in which all of your attention is focused the on details -- no matter how small -- is the second indication. People who can never have enough input, can never stop considering putting more and more variables into the decision-making process are not being decisive; they're simply collecting or creating more excuses to not make any decision whatsoever.
While we certainly do not want a Chief Executive who makes hasty, and poorly thought through decisions, neither do want one who dithers over the process, or who burdens himself with too many options. We want, we need, someone to lead. The process of leading requires that the Leader make decisions, surely with the best available information and facts at his command, but not burdened by the fear that the pettiest detail and remotest possibility will always be that one thing you forgot that finally bites you on the ass.
I can understand why President Obama is burdened with this particular handicap; he came into office, I think, never having expected to have won in the first place. His experiences in life never prepared him for the reality of having to make the sort of decisions a President in his predicament has to make (to be fair, I don't what sort of experience, short of the battlefield, can prepare you for that sort of thing). I don't think he ever put his name on a piece of legislation while in the Senate, never voiced an opinion until he was certain he knew how it would be received, and he never held a private-sector job in his life. I'd even go as far as to say that Barack Obama is probably the poster child for the mollycoddled-advanced-beyond-his-abilities-all-shortcomings-get-papered-over-socially-promoted-Affirmative-Action-Achiever.
The First Lady probably lays out his clothes for him in the morning.
Newt shouldn't have these problems. He's been in the political brawls, he knows how the system works, he's won elections before; he should know what he has to do.
Why he doesn't just get off his ass and do it is the question I would like to see answered. This hemming and hawing is beginning to make Obama (and even some of Gingrich's potential GOP competition) look like Pericles or Augustus, by comparison.
Leaders lead. They display, and then instill in their followers, a feeling of Confidence. They don't tinker with 'exploratory websites', they don't dance around questions that require direct answers. They certainly don't dither until the very last second, and then not pull the trigger...without at least being obligated to explain why they didn't act. They lead. They do.
Shit or get off the pot, Newt. You've got a deer-in-the-headlights opponent who's so far in over his head that he probably cries himself to sleep. He's a man who doesn't have the moral courage to call anyone a terrorist, or the balls to step up and support the enemies of totalitarianism around the world. His second-in-command would lose a game of 'Jeopardy' to most inanimate objects, let alone Watson. Someone has to take the bull by the horns here, and if we have to depend on a candidate selected (by mere process of elimination) by the retards over at FreeRepublic -- because the alternative is seen as indecisive and slow to act when it's called for (you can never be 'conservative' enough for that lot unless you frog-march the gays to the ovens, and kill the abortionists with a gilded Bible) -- we're going to get another 4 years of the Postracial Hammer-and-Sickle Treatment.
Don't make me look like a douchebag, Newt. That's a reason for a fistfight in these parts.
First, I'd like to say that I have been beating the drum for a Gingrich Presidential run since at least 2006, and to date, the man has disappointed. At some point, I don't know exactly when, I came to the conclusion that Speaker Gingrich must have been biding his time, perhaps playing rope-a-dope until the time was just right for him to throw his hat in the ring, all the while creating that 'Ground Game' thingy and going through the process of setting up the rationale (I believe they call it 'Creating a Message') for eventually running that all successful candidates must complete before the first vote is even taken.
Yesterday, I picked Gingrich as perhaps the best hope of unseating the Obamatard for the GOP in 2012. Although I have already admitted a favorable bias towards Gingrich, I'm pretty certain that I did my best to not let that cloud my opinion. I'm still convinced that Gingrich would stand as a stark contrast in terms of policy against Obama, and I'm bet-a-lung-on-it sure that Gingrich is the more intellectually deft, the more experienced and temperamentally-prepared of the two.
Then Newt showed up on Hannity tonight -- and pissed me right the fuck off.
If Newt Gingrich were my girlfriend, I'd dump him in the same way that I would dump a chick who let me pick up every check, demanded at least five dates before I got a peck on the cheek, expected gifts and doors held open for her, and then wouldn't put out.
If Newt Gingrich were my gardener, I'd have the most beautifully-tended flower beds in the neighborhood, but my front lawn would be choked by 5' tall grass, and probably have leopards hunting from within it's cover.
If Newt Gingrich were God, the first Chapter of Genesis would have taken seven months -- not days -- and he would probably have rested every weekend.
Watching Newt Gingrich's decision-making process is like watching old people fuck; there's a lot of very slow and deliberate movement, not much action, and it's questionable as to which comes first -- the broken hip or cardiac-arrest-upon-orgasm.
Glaciers move faster than Newt Gingrich. So to the Post Office, Union Workers, Galapagos Tortoises, Three-toed Sloths, and Sheila Jackson-Lee's thought process. My bowels move faster than Newt Gingrich.
You know, one of the very real criticisms of Barack Obama is his seeming inability to make a decision about anything. This should come as no surprise; in his abbreviated stay in the Senate, Obama never decided anything, preferring to vote 'Present' on the order of 200 times. On those rare occasions when Obama does make a decision, the process is almost guaranteed to be protracted and that stalling process is pretty much the result of Obama getting too much input, hearing too many opinions, weighing too many options, considering far too many variables.
For democrats, delay, procrastination, indecision, clutter, obfuscation, is all part of the illusion of The Great Man of History tragically 'wrestling' with the 'problems of the day', and the 'Burdens of the Oval Office', which when juxtaposed against black-and-white photos and tinny music is supposed to represent the idealized vision and drama of 'Leadership', but it's really a mental handicap.
People who behave this way usually have a serious problem with confidence. Not making decisions is the first indication. Going through a laborious and overwrought process in which all of your attention is focused the on details -- no matter how small -- is the second indication. People who can never have enough input, can never stop considering putting more and more variables into the decision-making process are not being decisive; they're simply collecting or creating more excuses to not make any decision whatsoever.
While we certainly do not want a Chief Executive who makes hasty, and poorly thought through decisions, neither do want one who dithers over the process, or who burdens himself with too many options. We want, we need, someone to lead. The process of leading requires that the Leader make decisions, surely with the best available information and facts at his command, but not burdened by the fear that the pettiest detail and remotest possibility will always be that one thing you forgot that finally bites you on the ass.
I can understand why President Obama is burdened with this particular handicap; he came into office, I think, never having expected to have won in the first place. His experiences in life never prepared him for the reality of having to make the sort of decisions a President in his predicament has to make (to be fair, I don't what sort of experience, short of the battlefield, can prepare you for that sort of thing). I don't think he ever put his name on a piece of legislation while in the Senate, never voiced an opinion until he was certain he knew how it would be received, and he never held a private-sector job in his life. I'd even go as far as to say that Barack Obama is probably the poster child for the mollycoddled-advanced-beyond-his-abilities-all-shortcomings-get-papered-over-socially-promoted-Affirmative-Action-Achiever.
The First Lady probably lays out his clothes for him in the morning.
Newt shouldn't have these problems. He's been in the political brawls, he knows how the system works, he's won elections before; he should know what he has to do.
Why he doesn't just get off his ass and do it is the question I would like to see answered. This hemming and hawing is beginning to make Obama (and even some of Gingrich's potential GOP competition) look like Pericles or Augustus, by comparison.
Leaders lead. They display, and then instill in their followers, a feeling of Confidence. They don't tinker with 'exploratory websites', they don't dance around questions that require direct answers. They certainly don't dither until the very last second, and then not pull the trigger...without at least being obligated to explain why they didn't act. They lead. They do.
Shit or get off the pot, Newt. You've got a deer-in-the-headlights opponent who's so far in over his head that he probably cries himself to sleep. He's a man who doesn't have the moral courage to call anyone a terrorist, or the balls to step up and support the enemies of totalitarianism around the world. His second-in-command would lose a game of 'Jeopardy' to most inanimate objects, let alone Watson. Someone has to take the bull by the horns here, and if we have to depend on a candidate selected (by mere process of elimination) by the retards over at FreeRepublic -- because the alternative is seen as indecisive and slow to act when it's called for (you can never be 'conservative' enough for that lot unless you frog-march the gays to the ovens, and kill the abortionists with a gilded Bible) -- we're going to get another 4 years of the Postracial Hammer-and-Sickle Treatment.
Don't make me look like a douchebag, Newt. That's a reason for a fistfight in these parts.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
If Tim Pawlenty Falls in the Woods, Does Anyone Give a Shit?
Tim Pawlenty, lilly-white-panty-buncher-nonentity from Minnesota, is in New Hampshire, announcing his intention to garner the republican nomination for President in 2012. The announcement is greeted here in Lunaticland with a great, big yawn.
Just when the republican party needs a figure capable of formulating a sane response to the Hopenchange message of it's political rivals, just when it requires someone capable of exciting The Base while still appealing to the great mass of 'independents' (i.e. those too stupid to choose a side, or simply waiting for a bribe in return for their votes) the republican establishment throws up this dude.
And 'throws up' is the proper term.
At a time when the great mass of the public is concerned with a political class that 'just doesn't get it', the political class goes out and proves it in spades.
Now, I'm not telling you I'm an expert on Tim Pawlenty, but if you asked me to give you an opinion on who I believe to be the top five republican prospects, Pawlenty rates somewhere near the 160th on the list. Right after Cholera, and just before Bubonic Plague. Someone must be pissing in this guy's ear with the usual claptrap about how he 'represents a sizable segment of public opinion', or how he speaks to 'conservative values' (having once been a Conservative before that actually lost any meaning whatsoever, I can tell you that it's my considered opinion that 'Conservative' now simply means 'Bible-thumping-gay-hating-redneck-with-a-fifth-grade-education-and-a-Norman-Rockwell-delusional-view-of-America'). Conservative no longer means a believer in the sovereign right of the people and advocacy of individual liberties; it's a tribal affiliation. Sorta like gang colors.
Tim Pawlenty couldn't be elected dog catcher outside of Minnesota, but that doesn't matter; he's ideologically pure.
It's time to get some real conservatives into the fight, and I don't mean the God-fearin' sort that would make the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University; I mean the ones who actually espouse conservative positions that don't find their genesis in Scripture (pardon the pun).
Start with Sarah Palin (who is at least wildly popular, if relatively unprepared), and then include Rudy Guiliani, Condoleeza Rice, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
The last four, despite their obvious talents and proven records, will never get a chance because that Calvinist wing of the republican party will do their level-best to chase them off the stage -- because their social views don't pass Godbot muster, their position on abortion is unknown, one's a Mormon (next to devil worship!), and the other cheated on his wife, despite the fact that he engineered a republican takeover of the Congress and advanced a plethora of true conservative issues. True to form, the republican party seems determined to go down in flames with the likes of a Pawlenty than to do the right thing and establish conservatism before Calvinism, and so they will never get a fair hearing.
The RNC continues to listen to the wrong people who put their religion and their hang-ups before their reason. At this point in history, social issues need to take a back seat to the more crucial requirements of rebuilding the political system and structure, reestablishing the rights of the governed, and fixing the economy.
Discuss.
Just when the republican party needs a figure capable of formulating a sane response to the Hopenchange message of it's political rivals, just when it requires someone capable of exciting The Base while still appealing to the great mass of 'independents' (i.e. those too stupid to choose a side, or simply waiting for a bribe in return for their votes) the republican establishment throws up this dude.
And 'throws up' is the proper term.
At a time when the great mass of the public is concerned with a political class that 'just doesn't get it', the political class goes out and proves it in spades.
Now, I'm not telling you I'm an expert on Tim Pawlenty, but if you asked me to give you an opinion on who I believe to be the top five republican prospects, Pawlenty rates somewhere near the 160th on the list. Right after Cholera, and just before Bubonic Plague. Someone must be pissing in this guy's ear with the usual claptrap about how he 'represents a sizable segment of public opinion', or how he speaks to 'conservative values' (having once been a Conservative before that actually lost any meaning whatsoever, I can tell you that it's my considered opinion that 'Conservative' now simply means 'Bible-thumping-gay-hating-redneck-with-a-fifth-grade-education-and-a-Norman-Rockwell-delusional-view-of-America'). Conservative no longer means a believer in the sovereign right of the people and advocacy of individual liberties; it's a tribal affiliation. Sorta like gang colors.
Tim Pawlenty couldn't be elected dog catcher outside of Minnesota, but that doesn't matter; he's ideologically pure.
It's time to get some real conservatives into the fight, and I don't mean the God-fearin' sort that would make the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University; I mean the ones who actually espouse conservative positions that don't find their genesis in Scripture (pardon the pun).
Start with Sarah Palin (who is at least wildly popular, if relatively unprepared), and then include Rudy Guiliani, Condoleeza Rice, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
The last four, despite their obvious talents and proven records, will never get a chance because that Calvinist wing of the republican party will do their level-best to chase them off the stage -- because their social views don't pass Godbot muster, their position on abortion is unknown, one's a Mormon (next to devil worship!), and the other cheated on his wife, despite the fact that he engineered a republican takeover of the Congress and advanced a plethora of true conservative issues. True to form, the republican party seems determined to go down in flames with the likes of a Pawlenty than to do the right thing and establish conservatism before Calvinism, and so they will never get a fair hearing.
The RNC continues to listen to the wrong people who put their religion and their hang-ups before their reason. At this point in history, social issues need to take a back seat to the more crucial requirements of rebuilding the political system and structure, reestablishing the rights of the governed, and fixing the economy.
Discuss.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
And Another Thing...
Re: Election Day in New York.
This whole Scozzafava mess opened my eyes to something. In this very space, I have implored Newt Gingrich to run for the office of President of the United States, praising him to the heavens all the way.
But you know what? Newt's insistence that Scozzafava was a 'reliable vote for Boehner' overrode her ideology (which is a Bloomberg-like, iron-fisted, yet supposedly-enlightened-nannyist liberalism) made it impossible to see just where the republican in her was. Okay, so she's pro-life, but the rest of it was pure crap: supporting gay marriage, in favor of Card Check legislation, and so forth. It appears that when Newt made his endorsement, he was either misled as to who Scozzafava is (hardly possible, given his intelligence), or was simply rubber-stamping someone the New York Republican Party (itself an organization akin to a circular firing squad)
considered 'republican enough where it counts'. It would appear the overriding qualification for that endorsement was who Socozzafava might have caucused (and voted) with, had she been elected. On what, exactly, her vote was reliably Boehner's, is still unexplained.
If Newt was THAT cynical that he would simply endorse someone who was flying under false colors for the sake of a vote or two, or in the name of 'Bigger-picture-Republicanism' at the expense of real principles, then he just lost a lot of my respect.
Someone has got some 'splainin' to do, methinks.
This whole Scozzafava mess opened my eyes to something. In this very space, I have implored Newt Gingrich to run for the office of President of the United States, praising him to the heavens all the way.
But you know what? Newt's insistence that Scozzafava was a 'reliable vote for Boehner' overrode her ideology (which is a Bloomberg-like, iron-fisted, yet supposedly-enlightened-nannyist liberalism) made it impossible to see just where the republican in her was. Okay, so she's pro-life, but the rest of it was pure crap: supporting gay marriage, in favor of Card Check legislation, and so forth. It appears that when Newt made his endorsement, he was either misled as to who Scozzafava is (hardly possible, given his intelligence), or was simply rubber-stamping someone the New York Republican Party (itself an organization akin to a circular firing squad)
considered 'republican enough where it counts'. It would appear the overriding qualification for that endorsement was who Socozzafava might have caucused (and voted) with, had she been elected. On what, exactly, her vote was reliably Boehner's, is still unexplained.
If Newt was THAT cynical that he would simply endorse someone who was flying under false colors for the sake of a vote or two, or in the name of 'Bigger-picture-Republicanism' at the expense of real principles, then he just lost a lot of my respect.
Someone has got some 'splainin' to do, methinks.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Newt Gingrich in 2012...
I've read this post at Knoxblog, via Instapundit about the prospects of one Bob Corker come 2012.
Now I personally believe it's a bit early to start throwing names out there for consideration, but others have already done so with regards to Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and whoever it is that Ann Coulter anoints this week (Ann has talked up both Duncan Hunter and Jeff Pence, in recent years, if memory serves). She's good at identifying back-benchers no one gives a shit about, but who nevertheless have 'solid, Conservative credentials'. They merely lack a realistic prospect of victory (they can't sway enough independents). Corker may be an attractive candidate to some in a primary sense, but he's a real loser in the greater marketplace of a general election. Not that it would be his fault; that's just the sort of electorate we have. Then again, Corker was another one of those 'conservatives' asleep at the switch during the GWB days.
That having been said, I might as well toss another name out there for consideration:
Newt Gingrich.
I personally believe Newt would have wiped the floor with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had he taken the initiative. He would have soundly thumped John McCain, sparing us the agony of that campaign. And even if some portions of 'The Base' (hey, doesn't Al'Queda translate as 'The Base'?) find him a bitter pill to swallow, given his martial history. Eschewing conventional wisdom, I am confident in saying that while conservative principles DO often resonate with the electorate (especially one dissatisfied with liberal excess), many of the conservative candidate that come from Central Casting do not.
What Conservatism needs at the moment, and what the country desperately requires, is someone who can stand for conservative principles, certainly. But these principles need to be championed by someone who also knows how the apparatus of government actually works, coupled with the ability to see and react to present conditions with the keen eye of a trained historian, and with the ability to properly prioritize and communicate issues. At present, we don't need someone who will promise to put prayer back in school, defend the Second Amendment to his dying breath...yet, or frogmarch the abortionists to the gas chambers. While these things are certainly important issues, they are secondary considerations taking a back seat to economic issues, matters of national defense and reestablishing a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. The primary mission of the next Republican president will be the undoing of the damage eight years of Bush-Cheney/Frist-Boehner inflicted on Republicans, Conservatives and the country, and then ensuring that the four years of disaster that will be inflicted by Barack Obama is effectively addressed and then repaired.
We also need someone who will know what to do, and then how to get it done within the existing framework of the Constitution.
Discuss...
Now I personally believe it's a bit early to start throwing names out there for consideration, but others have already done so with regards to Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and whoever it is that Ann Coulter anoints this week (Ann has talked up both Duncan Hunter and Jeff Pence, in recent years, if memory serves). She's good at identifying back-benchers no one gives a shit about, but who nevertheless have 'solid, Conservative credentials'. They merely lack a realistic prospect of victory (they can't sway enough independents). Corker may be an attractive candidate to some in a primary sense, but he's a real loser in the greater marketplace of a general election. Not that it would be his fault; that's just the sort of electorate we have. Then again, Corker was another one of those 'conservatives' asleep at the switch during the GWB days.
That having been said, I might as well toss another name out there for consideration:
Newt Gingrich.
I personally believe Newt would have wiped the floor with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had he taken the initiative. He would have soundly thumped John McCain, sparing us the agony of that campaign. And even if some portions of 'The Base' (hey, doesn't Al'Queda translate as 'The Base'?) find him a bitter pill to swallow, given his martial history. Eschewing conventional wisdom, I am confident in saying that while conservative principles DO often resonate with the electorate (especially one dissatisfied with liberal excess), many of the conservative candidate that come from Central Casting do not.
What Conservatism needs at the moment, and what the country desperately requires, is someone who can stand for conservative principles, certainly. But these principles need to be championed by someone who also knows how the apparatus of government actually works, coupled with the ability to see and react to present conditions with the keen eye of a trained historian, and with the ability to properly prioritize and communicate issues. At present, we don't need someone who will promise to put prayer back in school, defend the Second Amendment to his dying breath...yet, or frogmarch the abortionists to the gas chambers. While these things are certainly important issues, they are secondary considerations taking a back seat to economic issues, matters of national defense and reestablishing a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. The primary mission of the next Republican president will be the undoing of the damage eight years of Bush-Cheney/Frist-Boehner inflicted on Republicans, Conservatives and the country, and then ensuring that the four years of disaster that will be inflicted by Barack Obama is effectively addressed and then repaired.
We also need someone who will know what to do, and then how to get it done within the existing framework of the Constitution.
Discuss...
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