We Want to Fight the Left, But the Republican Establishment is Distracting Us

-cross posted from my Townhall blog The shining City on a Hill

Okay, here’s the rule: if you are a Republican and want to badmouth Sarah Palin, please step aside and let those of us who have guts lead the charge to take back the Shining City On a Hill. I’m not one for silencing dissenters, but this is war. And the war is against the Left, the Obama agenda and the progressive movement. If you are a Republican, then this is where you need to be fighting. Tearing down Sarah Palin or feeding people false memes about gravitas and polarization only helps the Left and hurts the Republican cause.

Don’t let the liberals define our candidates. Have you not learned the lesson of 2008? In 2008, the Left chose our presidential nominee. They also convinced moderate and independent voters that we needed to move to the center to accommodate a (falsely pushed theme by the media) leftward swing in the electorate. Liberals voted in open primaries and when they couldn’t vote in a GOP primary, they cheered from the sidelines.

Had Huckabee or Romney become our nominee, the Left would have had to deal more directly with the reality that our country still is a center-right country. When McCain was chosen, the Left breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing that the road to the White House would go right past a man speaking to crickets and a few stragglers in a field or a gymnasium somewhere while the “messiah” was packing the house with fainting sheep and gullible lemmings. The GOP Establishment strategy basically was handing it to liberal socialism since it would easily have more credibility if it beat a moderate instead of a conservative.

Then John McCain named Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the Left went nuts. While they would go on to win the election anyway, it took a mobilization of the mainstream media, an orchestrated smear campaign that involved heavy AstroTurfing, the parading of whining cry baby malcontents from Alaska, the full might of Hollywood and a well timed (even if coincidental?) financial crisis to stop the ensuing slide in the polls. Ultimately Obama won by 7 points because those were the people he duped into believing Sarah Palin was not qualified.

This writer put forth early on in 2009 that the strategy for beating Obama in 2012 would not be one that required us to turn 67 million Obama voters around. McCain got 46% of the vote and 58,343,671 people voted for him. Obama got 53% and 66,882,230 votes. That's a spread of 8.5 million. It was and still is this writer’s heartfelt assertion that if you convince enough people that the media lied about John McCain, Sarah Palin and the conservative movement that at worst these people (the 8.5 million) could be won back.

And we were doing such a good job, too.

A couple of weeks ago, those people voted with us. These people are not the hardcore conservatives who were electrified by Sarah Palin, Rick Santelli or Glenn Beck. These are regular folk who hear what both sides have to say and then they go to the polls. They don’t read blogs. They will probably never read this article even if Sean Hannity read it on Fox. They watch the Nightly News. They read newspapers. They work. They have lives. Some of them still think Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house even if they think Obama drove us into the ditch.

So what do we want these people to hear?

We certainly don’t want them to hear that there is friction in the Republican Party because of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. Yet, every time one of these “Karl Rovian” coordinated attacks are deliberately delivered on Fox News, at the Weekly Standard or (for some odd reason – where Karl Rove works) the Wall Street Journal, somehow those of the ones we want to win back who listen to the mainstream media hear it. I don’t know (shrugging my shoulders like Glenn Beck). Maybe all of a sudden the mainstream media has taken an interest in the Republican Party?

You see, there is friction in the GOP over Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. But it’s the Establishment that’s causing the friction, not Palin and the Tea Party. When you see “conservative” pundits and political consultants go on TV or take to the keyboard to deliberately bash or underplay Sarah Palin, this is coordinated. This is being orchestrated from within. It’s like Journolist for the right. Read Whitney Pitcher’s article and you tell me if this doesn’t seem coincidental that it is happening in unison and right before we head into 2012 primary season.

I’m not going to name names here. I want bloggers like Whitney, Republican activists and Tea Party activists to do that. But, I will jump into the fray, too, after this. We should plan on slamming anyone who hurts the cause, even if they’re on our side. We should want a lean mean fighting machine going into 2012. I don’t want a bunch of mealy mouthed wussies fighting this battle. We saw how that worked out in 2008, didn’t we?

If there’s going to be a fight then let’s do it now, not on the convention floor for the world to see. Let’s clean house now. The Tea Party has begun its infiltration. Sarah Palin has knocked back the lamestream media. And the Republicans are a majority again. Take notes Establishment types and members of what Ronald Reagan pejoratively called “the Republican Fraternity.” Do you remember 1980? It’s happening again; unless of course you want to turn it into 1976.

Those who ride the Reagan wave which has put silver spoons in their mouths at the expense of forgotten principles or who have earned their wealth on the rebuilding of a compassionate quasi-Rockefeller wing of the GOP while using Reagan as a prop are not understanding something about today’s new and emerging GOP: Homie don’t play that game. True Reaganites would not diss the similar nature of the anti-Establishment theme coming out of the Palin camp. Nor would they break Ronaldus Maximus’ 11^th commandment.

Guys, this is the same Republican establishment that nearly turned this country over to the progressives, the new world order people and the socialists two years ago. How the heck can we allow them to control the GOP narrative or handpick the 2012 nominee again after all their great failures?

There is a very good possibility that the GOP rank and file will choose Sarah Palin to be the nominee should she run. If I was wrong about this, we wouldn’t see the knee-capping and there would be no need to write this article. The establishment is scared she can’t win in 2012 and rightfully so. She can’t win if they undermine her the way they did Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. If the establishment can’t man up, suit up and strap on their gear without fear and stand behind her and help push us to the top, then we are going to have to work that much harder on our end - on the Tea Party end.

It will ultimately be the Establishment’s decision whether the Grand Old Party lives on or chokes on its own caviar.

You know those people who the President said were standing on the side of the road drinking slurpees while everyone else was trying to get the car out of the dish? That’s the Establishment. They’re standing there complaining “she’s not doing it right.” But they sure as hell aren’t lifting a finger to get in there and help.

The Establishment is sipping their fancy drinks with their pinkies stuck up talking in the Glenn Beck “intellectual elite” voice he uses to mock them. They’re saying “those Tea Partiers are useful because they vote for us, but God forbid any one of those rumpled suits or uncouth backwoods women with motor oil under their fingernails gets too much power.” Just look at how they are reacting to Michele Bachmann as she gets closer and closer to a committee chairmanship. They are cowering like sniveling babies in the backroom, but when they come on TV with their white boards and their polished analyses, it’s always about “the good of the party.”

This is not the time to leave the party or go off half cocked complaining about the Establishment by talking third party or getting cynical about politics again. This is about whooping their butts and taking it over. Get their hands off the GOP wheel and we’ll drive. So what if we’re not 100% polished yet and fully vested in Congress. We can’t wait. The last time we waited we went from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. Time is of the essence.

Sarah Palin is willing to lead this fight for us. She has said if she runs, she’ll “be in it to win it.” The woman is willing to go to the matt for us. Let’s do the same for her, our party and our country.

Why would the GOP Establishment make the same stupid mistakes that the liberals have been making for the last two years? The more they bash Palin, the more it drives her to work harder, to become better, to be more aware of her surroundings. She has told us this! It’s odd that those who are so afraid she might run would motivate her even more by egging her on like this.

Some will read this and say, aw shucks, it’s just Palin propaganda. No it’s not. Do you see anything in here that bashes Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum or any of the other candidates? No. That’s why we have primaries. That’s why we want the grown ups back in charge so that the whining, the sniveling and the foot kicking will stop – on both sides of the aisle.

Now I’ve figured out why the liberals got so strong. It’s because of the Establishment. The political games, the lip service to conservatism and the fancy suits and fundraisers all mask a crony insider game of musical chairs that gives it to the next in line and sells the electorate on how many points of light there can be or how compassionate they are. And every time the people smell this, they run to the other side.

That’s not my party. My party is represented by the ideals of a great man who once told us that our better days were ahead of us.

Put up or shut up. May the best man or woman win – fair and square.