Does the Union Leader consider Sen. Kelly Ayotte to be an ‘actual Republican’? I’d really like to know because the other day they published an editorial titled 11 Conservatives and Trump. In it they posit the notion that all the Republican presidential primary candidates are conservatives (except Trump I suppose) and that those who claim otherwise have moved the goalposts on them.
A group of perennially discontented New Hampshire activists is trying to hijack the Republican Party by kicking out all the actual Republicans.
That’s rich. This field is bottom-heavy with (and supported by) Republicans who will not even defend their own party platform. You know, “the goalposts.” So tell me again, who is it that hijacked what? I contend that it is the Establishment GOP that hijacked the Republican party and a perfect example of this is New Hampshire’s own NHGOPe beloved, Kelly Ayotte.
Ayotte ran for office during the TEA Party wave of 2010 and pandered to them all the way to the US Senate. Since then she has expressed support for a national carbon tax, embraced an expanded centrally planned regulatory state, helped Obama and the Democrats (and the Republicans) grow the size of government and double the national debt, funded the nation’s largest abortion provider with taxpayer dollars, supported radical left-wing nominations including Loretta Lynch and Janet Yellen, funded Obama’s illegal executive actions on Immigration, voted against expanded oil and gas exploration, and would not limit the authority of armed forces to detain Americans without due process. That’s the short list.
With a list like that does Kelly even have a platform plank to stand on? One or two, perhaps, as do many of these so-called actual Republicans, but is that the new standard? If you can prove you are not as bad as the Democrat, platform or Constitution be damned, that should be good enough to earn my support?
Sorry, it is not, and not because of anything I did.
A few short years ago, to many of these same ‘actual Republicans,’ none of those things were the sorts of things that ‘actual Republicans’ supported. So, can we put the goalpost-moving problem to rest? There are no goalposts with regard to the Republican party establishment unless moving as far left as necessary to pander to as many victim classes as the Democrats can name can be considered a goal worthy of …posts.
For the record, there is nothing Conservative about that
Speaking as an actual Conservative, and as an unauthorized representative of the “perennially discontented New Hampshire activist,” I can tell you that my goalposts for politicians are right where I left them. I didn’t move mine an inch. If you’d like to see them check out any of the 6500 or so blog posts on GraniteGrok. Look at the US and NH Constitutions or the NHGOP Party platform–before the era of Horn, Bergeron, and Duprey; who have taken to hiding the goalposts to avoid embarrassing challenges to their Republican political pedigrees.
You might as well hide it for all the good it does.
The GOP party platform has become a living document so that “actual Republicans” like Senator Kelly Ayotte can continue to fire her increasingly progressive opinions at an ever widening target under an increasingly bigger tent, where the “competing flavors of conservatism” jockey for a seat at a table set by the progressive Washington establishment at the expense of the states and the people.
So, is the Union Leader going to announce on its pages that Kelly’s words, votes, or actions are not those of an actual Republican? No. She’s as good a Republican as Graham, Kasich, Christie, Bush and company, all good conservatives, by their telling.
Here’s a question. Does anyone know much more of what used to be Republican principles an “actual Republican” has to abandon to lose the support of the boot-licking editorial apparatchiks at Manchester’s largest daily Newspaper? Is there a red line in the ideological GOP sand or do they just keep moving the goalposts? I think the latter.
The UL can then defend them from attacks by people who have the gall to stand up for last cycles traditional Republican ideas in opposition to the ones from this cycle. The only question remaining after that is how long before the Manchester paper can no longer be bothered to make excuses for anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat Maggie Hassan.
Hey, the Union Leader used to be the most conservative daily in America, or so I am told. Someone moved those goalposts pretty damn quick and it wasn’t the perennially discontented New Hampshire activists. It was editors and journalists did that, and they are still at it.
