R's Winning Elections Does Not Necessarily Advance Conservatism, Go Winteregg! - Granite Grok

R’s Winning Elections Does Not Necessarily Advance Conservatism, Go Winteregg!

Source: FreakOutNation
Source: FreakOutNation

The Republican Party right now acts like a union. You go in as a youngster, you spend enough time there you eventually become a leader. If you say anything bad about the party you’re a scab. That’s a union. For the rest of us Republicans, that’s the culture we despise.

Right on!   That quote is from J.D. Winteregg, via TheDC,(emphasis mine) a schoolteacher running for congress in Ohio’s 8th district.  Why should we care about some guy running in Ohio’s 8th District?  For those that do not know, his primary opponent.  His opponent is the Orange One. Yes, John “heads down bottoms up, no such thing as too craven” Boehner.  I can’t stand the Orange One. He epitomizes the putrid pusillanimity in D.C.: Big Government Republicans.

I’ve written about the establishment’s thuggishness against the conservatives and also that the idea that Republicans  simply winning elections is the be all end all is a loser for conservatives, here, here, and here. Mike touched on this as well. It’s not an opinion, it’s an empirical fact. And many others are reaching the same conclusion and that’s a good thing. 

If you’re a conservative and you believe in limited, small government. That is small not just in size, but in scope (what it does), and in breadth (who it does). Electing a person with an R behind his/her name is more often than not, at least in my lifetime, not a good way to advance small government conservatism. Many share the same sentiment, including Winteregg:

People are fed up with the establishment. The one thing consistent with bad policy coming out of D.C. is the people creating the bad policy. The most common thing I hear going door to door is throw the bums out. That’s the national sentiment. Hold them accountable directly to us…

He’s right, it’s true. Most of those R’s at the Federal level and some at the state level (ahem, Bradley, Morse, O’Dell), have no problem growing the state and shrinking the individual.

For a Federal example, recall that when the R’s controlled all the levers of the Leviathan, it still grew. They’ll say “not as much”, big deal, it still grew. Remember the Homeland Security behemoth was established under Bush and a coven of R’s.

Many people bought into the idea that to thwart terrorism we need a new department! And the inane in DC “had to do something” after 9/11, which to them meant “make bureaucracy”. ( By the way, I mean the 2001 9/11, not the 2012 9/11, the one the Democrats in charge couldn’t care less about.  Just a pesky embassy conflagration and that inconvenient ambassador assassination… it’s all phony anyway, who cares).

So the “something” the R’s in power came up with was a new bureaucracy. Brilliant. I don’t know, if it was me, I think before flushing more resources down another bureaucratic hell, removing Democrat Jamie Gorelick’s Wall might have been a good start. Reforming the already too bloated bureaucracies to be more manageable, doesn’t just sound like a better idea, it is.

Expanding the state is a Democrat/progressive “remedy”. It’s lazy, inevitably ineffectual, and provides a false sense that the problem was actually addressed. Republican leaders following the same formula is not conservatism.

This is why Mike and I and many other people agree, that we need new leaders in the Republican party.  Winteregg underscores part of the problem, again on the OrangeOne:

I was eight years old when he was first elected to office in the House. [For a while] he sounded like me. The more power he got, the less conservative he got – to the point where now he’s just conceding every point to the president and it’s embarrassing,

Exactly, he forgot who is and went along to get along and jettisoned his principles in the process.  Boehner’s:

… slogan is, ‘One of Us.’ We get these little booklets now talking about how he’s one of us. If you have to try that hard to convince people, maybe you’re not one of us

He’s not.

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