MORE, FOR FIGHTING

You know the story of the five blind men who each describe their part of the elephant correctly, yet miss the big picture? Well, here are five Americans who see the Big Picture well, describing our Beloved Behemoth with clarity. Excerpts:

Doug Hoffman:

We see that the danger to our nation posed by unrestrained government has become fiercely urgent, and we have stopped accepting excuses from those who won’t stand strong to stop it. We have declared independence from party politics because too many people in both parties either have been complicit in creating the danger, or have shrunk from challenging it.

Republicans and Democrats alike seem content to keep playing this game, but people who work hard to build a living — as we must in upstate New York — are appalled to see our politicians playing games while our debt mushrooms, unemployment looms, and our nation’s security is neglected. We want our children to inherit a better country, not a flood of debt; we want them to be confident in their nation, not afraid of its shadow.

Our goal should not be a Republican majority. It should be a conservative majority. If the Republican party will not be conservative, then we are going to run against them …and we’re going to win.

I admire this Normal-American for stepping up.

Gene Healy:

Federal law has become incomprehensible because Congress has inserted itself into every area of American life. As James Madison explained, though, Congress’s constitutional powers are “few and defined…. [to be] exercised principally on external objects,” like foreign policy and international trade.

Read the bills? It’s more important for congressmen to read the Constitution. They’ll be pleased to learn that it’s short and written in plain English.

These laws are a perfect metaphor for the Behemoth they serve;

They are dense. Heavy. Oppressive. Impenetrable. Lawyered up. Written in a foreign tongue. Expensive–astronomically so. Unfathomable–purposefully so. When their purpose is ascertained, they’re horrifying. And they have special interests inserted deep within their bowels.

Thomas Sowell:

Does any of this sound like America?

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to “change the United States of America,” the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles, and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: “G** damn America!” Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community-activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans to a captive audience of children.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama’s own contempt for American values and traditions as trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.

Rush: Why NY-23 Isn’t a Third-Party Race

I really do not know what Newt Gingrich was thinking. Maybe he hasn’t gotten over the budget battle of 1995. I don’t know, but this is stunning. I ruined two hours of my day when I saw that the Republican Party was running ads against Hoffman. They have a death wish. The Republican Party has a death wish. Gallup: 40% of Americans now say they are conservative, 20% say they’re liberal, 36% say they’re moderates. And of those three groups, which one is being ignored — not just ignored — which one is being attacked by the Republican Party? The conservatives!

It’s worse than I thought. I thought this was just based on elitism and Northeast moderate liberalism, and embarrassment of the people that the social issues attract to the party. But now it’s just plain stupidity. The Republican Party, as constituted is as dangerous to this country as the Democrat Party is. “But, Rush, party loyalty is party loyalty, and the local Republican committee up there has endorsed Scozzafava.” So? I’m saying the two parties are the same. I guess I need to amend it a little bit, but, man, when I saw that they were running ads, as I say, ruined two hours of my day.

…You have to understand that the Conservative Party does not look at themselves as a third party. Only do they get in gear when the Republicans nominate some liberal.

Ronald Reagan opposed third-party races because he believed that conservatives needed to take back the Republican Party and not surrender it to liberals [as does Hoffman-ed.]. He told the liberals, “Go your own way.” He didn’t go his own way and form a Republican Party. It took a while. He narrowly lost to Gerald Ford in ‘76. He was the most popular Republican emerging from that convention, but Ford, the establishment Republican, the fix was in. Reagan didn’t slink away and start a third party. He began to take over the Republican Party.

Third parties lose. Speaking personally, I am not interested in creating another Reform Party like Perot did, like Buchanan did. It’s a losing proposition. I want to defeat what’s going on.

The Republican Party did not want Ronald Reagan in 1980. People have forgotten this. I have not. They didn’t want him in 1976. They didn’t want him in 1980. … And had there been no primary system, George Bush 41 would have been the nominee.

And we would have had the “Bush 41 Revolution”? I doubt it.

The Republican Party is big enough for a Jerry Ford. But not in leadership. Ford gave us Justice Stevens, who is still assaulting the Constitution. And he lost re-election. George H.W. Bush was better, but he raised taxes, gave us Justice Souter and lost re-election. Bush 43 barely squeaked by both times. By contrast, Reagan soundly won elections twice, first knocking off an incumbent, and then winning even stronger the second time.

Yet Americans never gave him a 60/40 Congress. We hadn’t yet learned every last one of their Stupid Liberal Tricks. We have now. I hope.

Anyway, when a Rush Limbaugh says, even with huge caveats, “The Republican Party, as constituted is as dangerous to this country as the Democrat Party is,” you know something big is roiling.

Doc Zero:

The task ahead for American voters is nothing less than reversing the momentum of history. This will not be an easy task… and it will not be simple.

No one on the Left even bothers pretending their agenda consists of selfless dedication to the poor any longer. It’s all about desperate grabs for gigantic amounts of power over an increasingly impoverished and dominated middle class.

The madness of launching new trillion-dollar programs on top of a madly inflating deficit has become accepted as reasonable discourse. When Nancy Pelosi made her infamous comment that the constitutionality of individual health insurance mandates was not a “serious” question, she was committing a horrible offense against her office, but also providing an accurate description of the current atmosphere in Washington. We’re twenty years past the point where such an outrageous statement could even shift the tracks beneath the Crazy Train of her political career.

Many factors combined to bring us to this moment. One of the most important is the blend of pragmatism and romanticism which characterizes the moderate American voter. They are easily excited by heady talk of “change” and “new ideas,” but they don’t want to be swept up into ideological crusades, or suffer any of that “change” within their own lives. They don’t want to take risks with their jobs, or the financial future of their families, but they want to be told they’re part of a bold new initiative that’s changing the world.

A truly transformational moment is upon us. The old game is over. The mad spending spree of 2009 has left America mortgaged to the hilt. The money is all gone. There are no more ways to pinch a few billion more out of the upper class, without destroying the middle class lifestyle. The Right has always been correct in its belief that tax-and-spend liberalism would not work. Every available dollar has been taxed and spent, and not one single problem the Left demanded the sacrifice of our wealth and freedom to address has been resolved. Not one of their programs has worked, and none of their cost estimates have been accurate, to within an order of magnitude. Tax-and-spend is over. The new coin of the realm will be control. A swarm of czars is already hard at work, minting these coins… and behind them, the momentum of history pushes a pendulum that has become a wrecking ball.

I don’t think the answer lies in confronting Republican candidates with non-negotiable lists of positions they must vow to uphold. The problem with this approach is that it focuses too much energy on compelling politicians, instead of persuading voters.

And for good luck, our sixth Sith, Canadian Mark Steyn:

Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.

Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It’s pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (i.e, the center and the right) and barely 20 percent are “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.

If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”

That is the death of the American idea – which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation” is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it’s unsustainable, and you’ve got to give some of it back?

At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty – for economic dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business.

While we were defeating the Soviets overseas, the Left was winning here at home. We need our own Long March through the Institutions. We need to win the war here at home; not the Culture Wars, per se, but the War against Culture, the Suicide Cult of Culture. Where we’re told to stop having children, kill our dogs, trust Mohamed ElBaradei to protect American families from Iran’s nukes and applaud as Federal judges release Gitmo killers into America. That Suicide Cult.

The Constitution is treated as little more than a speed bump now, but the real roadblock to tyranny is supposed to be the attitudes of People themselves. We’re in a race against memory, so that Americans will always remember what liberty means.