Monday, May 30, 2011

The Royalist GOP

The Royalist GOP


By Mr. Curmudgeon
Something strange is going on within the GOP. First, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich calls Rep. Paul Ryan’s pittance of a budget cut “right-wing social engineering.” Then Karl Rove appears on Fox and Friends, dismissing conservative presidential candidate Herman Cain as simply a “talk radio guy in Atlanta,” a “former head of a national pizza chain.” Rove then warns fellow Republicans that it’s “not just your narrative on Obama. It’s not just your own personal narrative” that wins the presidency.
Last March, the Associated Press reported that Rove established two political action committees to raise $120 million “ahead of the 2012 elections to help make President Barrack Obama a one-term leader and elect Republicans.”
The obvious question – one the mainstream media refuses to ask – is: “Exactly what kind of Republicans does Karl Rove expect to elect?”
I don’t think the GOP’s establishmentarians are nearly as worried about President Obama’s re-election as the media would have us believe. As Gingrich and Rove have clearly indicated, their enemy is Tea Party activists and the candidates they hope will end the careers of me-too, big-government Republican incumbents.
Back in October, Rove told POLITICO.com that Tea Party supporters aren’t “sophisticated” and “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.”
Rove and his fellow establishment hacks believe “We the People” aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the Hayek readers among the GOP’s establishment smart set. You know, the guys who passed “no child left behind,” saddled us with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, lost the GOP majorities in Congress and started the bailout snowball rolling down the hill.
But it is far more likely Hayek’s free market ideas will be implemented under a Tea Party-controlled House and Senate than under the GOP establishment’s well-read harem eunuchs.
According to Rove, a politician needs “to convince people that, ‘I’ve got something in by background that gives you confidence I can actually do these things I’m talking about.”
Really?
Will somebody tell me what was in Barrack Obama’s background that qualified him to radically transform America, saddling it with an authoritarian health care law?
Say what you will about the man, he had a vision for America and the will to push it through no matter the political costs to him or his party.
It’s not that establishment Republicans aren’t well read or educated. It’s that they are empty suits devoid of even the slightest hint of imagination. And this gets to the heart of the matter.
Tea Party America is growing increasingly frustrated and angry by the inaction of the GOP establishment’s small thinkers. Tea Partiers actually believe America can return to a system of laws and not men. That makes them radicals – as radical as the Tea Party Founders who established this great country.
What Karl Rove is telling Herman Cain – and by extension the nation – is that pedigree and not ideas determine legitimacy. King George III would agree.
In 1782, Lewis Nicola, a colonel in the Continental Army, wrote Gen. George Washington a letter expressing his hope that should the Revolutionary War conclude in America’s favor, Washington might become its king.
“I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country,” wrote Washington to Nicola. “Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your Country, concern for yourself and posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your Mind, and never communicate, as from yourself, or anyone else, a sentiment of the like Nature.”
That’s quite a statement from a rebel without a country. Washington was offended by the royalist notion Americans could not govern themselves. That the cause he and his army were fighting and bleeding for, founding a nation where liberty flourished under a restrained government, was far too radical to be taken seriously.
Rove and Gingrich hope to preserve today’s soulless Republican Party. And that’s quite understandable. You see, nonentities like Rove and Gingrich can only flourish in an environment where bold ideas never leave the bookshelf. Where a man’s family lineage or business résumé are all that sets him apart from his fellow men.
In the minds of Rove and his fellow GOP stiffs, George Washington would never make it on their short list for king. After all, the man was nothing more than a tobacco planter and a failed commander in the Virginia militia – hardly the breeding or record that screams, “I’ve got something in my background that gives you confidence I can actually do these things I’m talking about.”

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