Thomas Sowell on Election ‘06
Written by Mike on October 25th, 2006The brilliant Thomas Sowell writing at NRO explains to the RNC why no one is interested in helping them send more RINOs to DC:
How did the Republicans manage to bring themselves to this dire condition, just two years after winning both Houses of Congress, the White House, and most of the state governorships?
It wasn’t easy — and it wasn’t new. It was the same thing that caused the first President Bush to lose his bid for reelection in 1992, after having had sky-high approval ratings in 1991. It was betraying the trust of supporters.
Back then it was the betrayal of the “No new taxes” pledge. More recently, it was the even worse betrayal of trying to legislate amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, combined with insulting our intelligence by saying that it was not amnesty.
Add to this the Republicans’ runaway spending and the fact that the war in Iraq has been going badly, and you have all the ingredients of a political debacle.
He does conclude with this advice however:
If this election were about the fate of one political party rather than another, it would hardly be worth thinking about.
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It would be worse than obscene for some voters to cut off their nose to spite their face by either staying home on election day or actually voting a blank check from America for a party with a decades-long history of irresponsibility on national defense.
Even though I disagree with him this is good food for thought. The last time defense wasn’t a vital issue on election day was in the 1920s. I don’t see an election in the next 50 years that doesn’t include national defense as the number one issue. So does that basically mean that we will never, ever return to following the Constitution? That is not acceptable, I would rather bring the nation to its collective knees with a strong dose of Democratic mayhem than tolerate being misled and lied to for another minute.
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AM
I’m of the belief that a two year shock treatment of Democratic mayhem is far preferable to a prolonged and interminable dose of Big Government Republican idiocy, to follow your analogy. I’ve noticed that the Bush/BGR playbook is to make everything about national security and just use that to try and scare everyone away from real reform. They used it on the Democrats first, and now they’ve turned it on their own. It worked, and actually made sense for a while, but now the Administration has shown they don’t necessarily have much of a clue on national defense either (or else they would at least do something about the border), so I don’t know that it will keep on playing.