Talk About Having No Idea What A Conservative Is... (Updated Again & Bumped) - Granite Grok

Talk About Having No Idea What A Conservative Is… (Updated Again & Bumped)

John B. Heroux is reported to be a resident of Bedford, New Hampshire, and a chronic contributor to the Union Leader Editorial page (if Google can be trusted), but he has absolutely no idea what a conservative is.  In his recent “Your Turn” contribution to the public discourse (Union Leader) he starts with this:

The first order of business should be to take the party back from the conservatives. Republicans are the minority party, and the party’s success depends on appealing to independent voters and conservative Democrats. The radical Tea Party and the Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter faction do not appeal to these voters.

That’s all well and good as opinion–to which he is of course entitled–except that as he proceeds to storm his way down the laundry list of “consevatives” he blames for all that seems to ail him, he fails to name anyone who has actually behaved like a Conservative.

George Bush and Dick Cheney? The age of compassionate conservatism was a progressive expansion of government.  There was nothing Conservative about it.  The only reason Democrats objected was because it wasn’t them and it wasn’t more.

Mitch McConnell: He’s better than Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, but that does not make him a Conservative.

Mitt Romney never governed as a conservative, which is why when he tried to play at one more than a few people looked at him sideways.

John also mentions Frank Guinta, who ran as a conservative but in the end never really  managed to vote like one.

No one that John stands before us, as evidence of a failed conservative agenda, is a conservative.   So John clearly is not, nor has the slightest clue what one looks like, so how could he possibly blame them for anything?

He’s obviously in denial about how what was actually rejected was moderate progressive Republicanism, the very thing he claims will cure our political disease.

There are a few more points worth mentioning that solidify my point.  John does not take any shots at Charlie Bass, who also lost.  Charlie Bass is a Main Street Republican, a progressive moderate.  He couldn’t be a conservative if he tried.  Must be John’s favorite kind.

And John sounds like Charlie Bass too, says we need to make deals, find middle ground, and suggests that since Republicans are a minority they cannot expect to get elected if they hew to conservative principle.  Yo John!  Democrats are a minority too if you look the other way but if all you see are more Democrats with “R” next to their name, how is the view any different?

The only people who could be taken as Conservatives in his entire piece are Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but no one else he mentions ever followed their advice.  So John is clearly a Network TV Republican–he knows who Coulter and Limbaugh are but only because the media mentions them as the kind of Republicans you should never be.   John is happy to regurgitate it for us.

And when John asks how the (National Republican) party could allow eight uninspired candidates to run for the nomination, a better question is this; did you notice that none of them were all that inspiring to actual Conservatives?  Want to know why?  Most weren’t, and Michele Bachmann, who at least has some Conservative credibility, just wasn’t ready for that stage.

And by the way, what kind of party picks and chooses its candidates as John Suggested?

Why did the party allow eight uninspired and uninspiring candidates to run in the primary elections?

What Party clears the decks for the right kind of candidate?  The Communist party comes to mind.  The Democrat party does too, and while we’re on that subject, if it’s State party Chairman, the progressive establishment NH-GOP is all about finding that one suitable candidate to toe their line, and she stopped being a conservative years ago when she discovered how much further she could get if she became one of them.

This editorial is a huge waste of newsprint.  The only thing he actually gets right in this letter to the editor, is that Carol Shea-Porter is unqualified.

No kidding, really?  So are you, if we’re talking about who is a Conservative.

What John suggests as an alternative to a conservatism he cannot even understand is the same death as electing Carol Shea-Porters, just with a slower poison.   So he appears to have completely bought into the lefty-media narrative of what Conservatives are, and what real Republicans should do (compromise, develop a bi-partisan agenda, work with the the other side to get things done), all in a piece that Kathy Sullivan could just as easily have written about her opponents (with the exception of the Shea-Porter bit of course.)

What are we to do?

Sam Adams reminds us that “It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

Forget brush-fires of freedom, John wants them thumbing a ride for a back seat on the Obama appeasement bus.  This is not igniting minds it is herding sheep.  And we did not lose because our ideas are bad we lost because no idea (or just left-wing sophistry) herded more mindless sheep to the polls than moderated progressive republican platitudes bereft of any conservative principles whatsoever. (update- added this great quote and the above link)

Consider voting. “You can count voters and votes,” Mr. Mansfield says. “And political science does that a lot, and that’s very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They’re just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That’s probably because they’re not wise.”

By that measure, the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved “a sneaky victory,” Mr. Mansfield says. “The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama’s campaign consisted entirely of saying ‘I’m on your side’ to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous.”

John is welcome to his blinders on what-we-need-is-appeasement mentality if it makes him feel better about losing but it is an addiction that ends in soft tyranny–with a hefty down payment on the real thing.  John has not yet realized this but Democrats will never give back once they’ve gained progressive ground.  They’ll agree with moderates for incremental progressivism if they must, if it is the only way to move the needle closer to their side of the issue, but there is no such thing in their world as incremental conservatism.  There is no tweak to Dodd-Frank. that favors Republicans.  There is no Partial back-track on Obama-Care.  When they say Forward, them mean to the left.  All you get is more government more often, giving in just makes it easier.

It is the kind of tack that gets you carbon taxes on emissions that do not make the earth warmer or whose reduction will not make it cooler, and enough Republican State Senators in your state legislature to keep it alive.

It marks as endangered a species that is thriving and bans light-bulbs, both for the same political purpose, under the cover of bi-partisan do-goodery.

It results in billions in tax dollars spent on failed energy while cheap abundant energy is not only shunned, the free market is prevented from investing its own money to obtain it.

It gets you lawless leaders who shun the process meant to protect us from their tyranny just “to get stuff done.”

It spends trillions a year we don’t have on things government should not be doing, leaves us to 16 trillion in debt, and puts the same government that can’t even get water they already have, to a staging area that is already prepared, even when they know where the Hurricane is going to hit, in charge of the entire health care and insurance apparatus.

Just agreeing with Democrats and progressivism on both sides so we can say we are “getting things done” is why we are  in the mess we are in.

And John obviously has no clue what a conservative is, so might I suggest he read Edmund Burk, Russel Kirk, even Tocqueville and others.  Grasp the idea that conservatism does not shun government in total, it manages it–in tiny necessary bits, kept as close to the people as possible.  That its goal is not “to just get things done,” it is to only let government do what is absolutely necessary, always as near to home as can be managed, and only because it could never be achieved by individuals acting alone.

Now maybe he has not realized this yet (about Republicans v. Conservatives) so I am happy to help you out;  if these are the people he defines as “Conservative” (the ones in his letter) for the purpose of identifying “Republicans,” then the kind of Republicans he is looking for are something we real Conservatives refer to as a “Democrats.”

And the reason they lose elections is not because they are Conservative–they are not–it is because when they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, why grow government with the fake progressive when you can get the genuine article?

If we’d run real conservatives, we’d have won.  We didn’t.  End of story.

 

Another Update: Courtesy of PJ Media “Republicans need to stop nominating right-wing extremists like John McCain and Mitt Romney.”

This is satire, of course but it sounds a lot like our friend john.

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