Elections

I Think I See What Glenn Beck is Doing (Updated)

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The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

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[UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD]

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Obama + Reid + Pelosi = A Scared, United Right

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“I happen to be opposed to gay marriage, but our peril is so great
that goes on the back burner,” Debbie Johnson of Georgia told me on
Saturday. Bruce Majors, a gay real-estate agent from Washington D.C.,
had a different take. He told me earlier this year that he felt
perfectly comfortable working with the Tea Party on bringing the size
of government under control. “We’re both about freedom and we have a
common short-term goal,” he said. Indeed, in Washington this past
weekend the more libertarian and the more socially conservative
elements of the Tea Party seemed to get along just fine.

From this, via Instapundit.

The Cold War was the glue that held the American Right together up to 1989.

Obama and the Democrats have become a domestic Soviet Union, politically.

They and all their evil works and their trillion-dollars-at-a-time cash bonfires are a menace so great that everything else has to be put off to the side.

These fools have scared the herd of cats on the Right into a tactical alliance that may (fingers crossed …) turn into a longer lasting realignment.

That is a perverse achievement.

Lauding Paul Ryan

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There is a great piece in the American Spectator about Paul Ryan and his “Road Map.” Ryan lacks Gingrich’s Machiavellian talents, and therefore isn’t in the running for taking over the party. Of course, Ryan doesn’t seem to have any of Newt’s devastating character flaws either.

The fact is that Ryan is a talent that is being wasted in the slow-witted and slow moving Republican Party. He’s a policy guy trying to save the nation while the party is run by idiots running the stupid “Pelosi Fright Wig” strategy. We all understand the trade off in winning elections. The GOP is once again choosing the wrong path, using the supposedly easier path of winning power by vacuity over running on ideas and then actually having a mandate to govern.

In this cycle, we could actually win an honest mandate for change by following Ryan. Instead, we are wasting the opportunity to put in a gaggle of intellectually flaccid graymeat who will do what Boehner tells them to do. This is a strategy for disaster.

Paul Ryan’s Friends

The amount of flack being directed at Ryan and his “Roadmap” has been rapidly increasing. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag, who should know better, trashed the Ryan plan in his farewell lecture at Brookings. This from the man who, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, “presided over record deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009-or 9.9% of GDP-and an expected $1.5 trillion in 2010.” Cheeky fellow.

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller observed that this high-profile critique of Ryan “shows the seriousness with which Obama and his top advisers take Ryan’s alternative vision for the country’s future, as well as the vehemence with which they disagree.” Ward mentioned that the Orszag attack was the same day the Democratic National Committee attacked the “Roadmap.”

Note that the left takes Ryan more seriously than the leaders in his own party.

You can live with enemies in politics, but you can’t survive without friends. Ryan needs more than intellectual or moral support from conservative intellectuals, commentators, and even honest liberals, as important as they are. He and his “Roadmap” need the heartfelt support of his party, its leaders and its candidates across the country who must take the argument to the people in this watershed election year.

The stakes are too high for the Republicans to simply stand by, quietly, hoping the Democrats will self-immolate. The GOP needs to embrace a big, visionary idea, something like Ryan’s “Roadmap,” which addresses the most important political challenge of the age: the runaway costs of entitlements which were irresponsibly put on autopilot under both Democratic and Republican governments.

As many readers here might know, I put forth a much bigger, better, and more visionary idea here a few days ago. While I laud Ryan as true thinker, leader, and one of the few hopes for a brain dead party, my idea is a better roadmap.

Thug-Tolerating and Corruption-Enabling at Obama’s DOJ

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I posted a couple of weeks ago about the DOJ’s decision to drop a voter-intimidation case–a case that had already been won–against the New Black Panther Party. Today, Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) is sending a letter to the DOJ Inspector General demanding a formal investigation of this matter. The letter is here.

Given that the independence of the Inspectors General seems to have been grievously compromised under the Obama administration, I’m afraid we can’t expect too much from this request for IG involvement.

J Christian Adams, the career DOJ attorney who resigned in protest over the handling of the New Black Panther matter, also asserts that DOJ is failing to enforce provisions of the “Motor-Voter” law which require states to periodically purge invalid voters from the rolls. WSJ:

Last year, Justice abandoned a case it had pursued for three years against Missouri for failing to clean up its rolls. When filed in 2005, one-third of Missouri counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. What’s more, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who this year is her party’s candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, contended that her office had no obligation to ensure individual counties were complying with the federal law mandating a cleanup of their voter rolls.

The case made slow but steady progress through the courts for more than three years, amid little or no evidence of progress in cleaning up Missouri’s voter rolls. Despite this, Obama Justice saw fit to dismiss the case in March 2009.

There is growing evidence that the behavior of the Obama administration, together with that of its congressional enablers, represents a serious threat to the integrity of the democratic process and to the liberties of all Americans.

The Political Bazaar and the Political Cathedral

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Last night I got an excellent education in politics from a local old master at how they play the game in Lake County, Indiana. Halfway through it, I had an epiphany, that the whole internal system, top to bottom was largely based on “Cathedral” style thinking straight out of Eric S Raymond’s influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar and I had long ago decided that the bazaar had the winning argument, at least for this generation.

That moment cleared up a lot for me and clarified my thinking. I was having this discussion because the Indiana Republican Liberty Caucus had just organized a Lake county chapter and I was elected chairman. I was calling around and letting the town chairmen know that there was a new player in town on the GOP’s side and oh, could I stop by to introduce myself and the LC-INRLC at their next meeting.

The old master went on and I paid attention but my entire perspective shifted because I had realized that the fight I was in was a different fight than the one he was describing. Imagine building a cathedral in a bazaar. It’s a bit annoying to the rest of the bazaar but if you’ve got the scratch to reserve that much space, the bazaar will accommodate. Now imagine building a bazaar in a cathedral. The cathedral people will hate you because, inherently, your activities often won’t respect the day to day pieties of the cathedral you’re working in. Nobody has found a perfect solution to this, though the best of the cathedral builders in the software world have learned to make their peace and to change their structure to accommodate the bazaar builders that they rely on and compete with.

The ideological struggle with the left just got company as my top priority. Party building a GOP bazaar just snapped into focus as a major challenge.