conservatism

Jim McElhatton at The Washington Times:

Since April, Mr. Biden has collected more than $13,000 from the agency charged with protecting him and his family for use of a rental cottage adjacent to the waterfront home he owns in a Wilmington, Del., suburb.

I don’t know if there’s any sort of precedent for this. Maybe he’s not the first Vice President to charge the Secret Service rent. Either way, this has the appearance of blatant hubris. I know $13,000 is a drop in the bucket for Biden, and makes no difference to our national budget, but it just plain looks bad. $13,000 is a lot of money to most Americans. I’d like to know: Why, Biden? What’s the point?

By Joseph Curl at The Washington Times:

Back in 1900, there were six candidates for president — from six different political parties. But since the 1950s, it’s been two main parties, with a Green Party here and a Reform Party there (Ralph Nader seized 0.7 percent of the vote as a Greenie in 1996, and 2.7 percent in 2000; Pat Buchanan pulled down a whopping 0.4 percent as a Reformer in 2000).

The times they are a-changin’. There’s a new power force in Washington, and it’s running the show right now, deciding the very fate of the nation (if you believe the White House on the calamity that would befall America if the debt ceiling is not raised to pay for things we can’t afford).

It’s an interesting take. Beyond that, it’s an attractive proposition to me. That is, the Tea Party acting as its own party. However I don’t agree with Curl’s conclusion. The Tea Party isn’t a third party. The Tea Party is simply restoring the GOP to its former glory. At the risk of sounding cliché: we didn’t leave the GOP, the GOP left us.

Many of the former Republican powerhouse names are hailed by the Tea Party as shining examples of leadership. From Ronald Reagan to Calvin Coolidge, Tea Partiers laud the conservative policies of former Republican leaders (that is, the conservative ones). What’s happened recently is that we’ve got a sack of RINOs¹ that have run on a conservative platform to get elected and then abandoned those principals once in office. They’ve caved to the temptation of going along with the Washington way of doing things. They toe their new party line instead of their own principals. Quite simply, they’ve lost their way, and they’ve taken the GOP with them.

This is not lost on the American people. Many RINOs thought it would be. They felt safe because they told themselves “We live in a two party system, if we can motivate our base with a conservative message, we’ll get (re)elected.” Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for America, the 2010 midterm elections proved that Americans are completely in tune with their representation. Tea Party candidates were elected in droves, and they’re sticking to their principals. This, to the outrage of establishment Democrats and to the frustration of establishment Republicans:

The tea party members of today…abandoned their leader and left him twisting in the wind, caring not a whit about his threats. What they care about is spending, basing their intransigent stance on this simple fact: You cannot take in $2.5 trillion and spend $3.7 trillion. Perhaps they do know how to govern after all.

Let’s hope they can restore the GOP before the ways of Washington gets hold of their wallets, morals, and sense of decency.

Charlie Spiering at The Washington Examiner:

“He’s getting absolutely no sleep. He’s working tirelessly, meeting with his economic team, doing a lot of outreach, exploring all kinds of possibilities for compromise,” Jarrett said.

Chief of Staff William Daley told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night that Obama has issued a secret plan for solving the debt crisis.

I don’t want a compromise. This is not an issue of compromise. Why can’t Obama look at the situation and evaluate what he thinks is the right thing to do? Put a stake in the ground and say “This is the plan. This is the right thing to do.” Then everyone else can either rally around it or against it. The administration has yet to put forth an actual plan that can be scored. Just a couple of loose ideas.

From the transcript:

BLITZER: So what you’re saying is the president did present a plan to the speaker, John Boehner.

DALEY: Yes.

BLITZER: But – but he didn’t…

DALEY: Right.

BLITZER: – make it public.

DALEY: No, because there’s… both the speaker and – and the president had agreed and – that these sort of negotiations do not happen in public.

Translation: Obama can’t make it public because it will get ripped to shreds.

He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.

Brilliant piece from Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal. A must-read.