Blogs For Victory

So, The One announces that if you’re a lobbyists you can’t work on the transition – this is supposed to give us all a tingle up our legs as we believe that, finally!, government will be cleaned up…

But, meanwhile, we still haven’t got a valid explanation from Obama about just why the security precautions were taken of his internet donation link and just where did all that money really come from? We know some came from non-existent people and some from foreigners…anyone want to take bets on some of it coming from lobbyists via third-party cut-outs?

Obama, if you want us to believe you’re really going to change how DC does business, then call for a special prosecutor to look into all campaign fundraising in 2008. We’ll be fair – we’ll have the GOP looked at, too.

After all, Democrats, there is nothing to fear from a full airing of just who donated to whom, right?

And we’d better listen:

Republicans once said that the opportunities this nation has to offer rest not in government but rather in the hands of individuals. Over the past decade or so, however, we Republicans lost our way. The disparity between our rhetoric and our action grew until our credibility snapped. It wasn’t the fault of our ideals. It was the failure of our leadership.

Over time, our principles morphed into baser motives. Continued political dominance grew more important to those who led us than the noble vision most of us originally signed on for. And to maintain power we turned to the controls of government — we became the party of big government. We behaved like Democrats.

True, the country has changed and our party must adapt. However, it is wrong to believe we must change our principles or become conservative-lite. After all, the voters did not suddenly become liberal; but they have lost any sense of confidence that the Republican Party holds the answers to their problems.

Most Americans today see a Republican Party that defines itself by what it is against rather than what it is for. We can tell you why public schools aren’t working, but not articulate a compelling vision for how we’ll better educate children. We’re well equipped to rail against tax increases; but can’t begin to explain how we’ll help the poor. We exclude far better than we welcome.

Lt. Governor Steele goes on to note that we shouldn’t set about beating Democrats, but instead work on winning voters. I am in whole-hearted agreement. First off, because it is the more Christian way to do things and I’m sick to death of the hatred of the past 8 years. Secondly because it is the way to win. And with rather big, if we do it right.

We have to apply the eternal verities to current conditions, not modify our verities to match whatever is fashionable at the moment. We have to explain why Truth is best and why coming along our path will help people to become freer, better educated, healthier and more prosperous. A well-ordered liberty built upon Judeo-Christian values is what we want; it is what is best; and it is what is most inclusive. There is room at our table for everyone save the incorrigible hater – and even he’ll be welcome if he ever changes his ways.

It is the left which hates and which lives on lies – we must not be like them. We must become the best of the best. Plenty of room here for repentant sinners, but no room at all for the coarse, the hypocrite, the greedy. Our Republican Party must shine with moral courage and stride forward fearlessly to proclaim the truth – and never worry about whether a particular election will be lost or won, but only be concerned with whether or not we adhered to truth, and fought for it with all our might.

Here is a history of the holiday.

And the poem I always think of on Veterans day and Memorial day:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields. – Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Canadian Army

Did you enjoy voting this past week? Thank a veteran.

And a timely warning, too:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps “to renew our diplomacy.”

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

In Germany it was, of course, the Sturmabteilung, in Italy it was the Fascisti, while in Russia it was Military Revolutionary Committee and Red Guards. The commonality is a paramilitary organization outside the control of the normal authorities and owing its allegiance to a political faction. We don’t want such things in America. Ever.

What Obama proposes – civilian national service – is actually a negation of service and of volunteerism. Lured by grants and subjected to peer pressure, the kids who will be sucked into such a program will be easy pawns for whomever commands the organization – and we can just imagine what sort of kook leftists dregs of the “community organizer” world will be placed in charge of such an organization. The safety valve for America is that such a grouping will almost certainly disintegrate into a cash machine for various connected liberal and leftwing politicians and groups – but the worry is that it might be used to intimidate opponents of leftwing opinion. Just the sight of a paramilitary force cruising through a neighborhood will intimidate those who don’t agree with the commanders of the force…no one has to be locked up or even harmed, for the most part. And, of course, if anyone takes forceful exception to paramilitary goons patrolling the local neighborhood, that person will be immediately classed as a criminal.

Provide government funds for the Scouts. Shell out cash for Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Open the floodgates for money for various religious youth organizations. But don’t, even for a moment, have a youth organization directly funded and controlled by the federal government – in that direction lies tyranny, and civil war.

This blog post was a long time coming. With the disastrous election behind us, the conservative blogosphere has an opportunity to play a role in delivering the Republican Party out of the wilderness… if we’re up to the challenge. Right now, however, I don’t think we are.

2004 was a good year for us, but it has been downhill ever since. The conservative blogosphere has become a series of self-serving cliques rather than a movement-serving community.

Back in 2004, we were all united because we had the same goal, and we worked together to achieve it. But now conservative bloggers, unable to duplicate the fundraising prowess of the left-wing blogosphere, have made their objective to try to recreate the party in their own image from the top down rather than by true grassroots buildng from the bottom up..

Conservative blogging used to be about building community. But it has become something that is elitist, DC-centric, and contrary to grassroots empowerment.

Look at some of the top blogs we have on the right… they’re run by people who are in the business of politics… I know and like many of them, but so far I haven’t seen huge successes from their work. I do applaud their efforts to help the party, and admire their dedication… I am just not convinced the current approach will help the cause. For instance, there are weekly “Conservative Blogger Briefings” and conference calls that I and many other bloggers are invited to, but if you live outside of the Washington DC area or have a full time job, you can’t take part in them. Even if you could, I have failed to see how they’ve helped the movement.

As the founder of Blogs For Bush, one of the most successful blogs during the 2004 presidential campaign, I have been effectively shutout because I don’t live in Washington DC and don’t blog full time for a living. Other successful blogs and bloggers have moved down the path of conglomeration… not so much to serve the movement but to serve their own ambitions and egos. Blogging for them is a business venture.

We were destined as a community to fail our party’s nominee when we made the primary season the quest to find the next Ronald Reagan. While the Democrats were pretty much united around one of two candidates, we were divided amongst all all of ours. And look at the result. Turnout this year was virtually the same as 2004 despite the huge operation Obama had. This means that given the huge deficit McCain had in the popular vote compared to Bush in 2004, too many decided that since McCain didn’t score high enough on the “Ronald Reagan Scale” that they weren’t going to help him win. There is more unity in the conservative blogosphere when we want to punish Republicans for not being conservative enough.

Whether it was blog posts about protest votes for a third party candidate or not wanting to make calls for GOTV, the conservative blogosphere just kept demonstrating that the impossibly high standard they set for McCain was enough reason to use their power to prop themselves up as arbiters of conservatism, rather than to encourage their audience to vote for the one man who could stop the Orwellian nightmare that Obama has promised to create.

And from the look of things they still don’t get it.

Perhaps my clout in the conservative blogosphere isn’t what it used to be, and none of the people who should read this will take my critique seriously because I am not a former campaign worker or some other blogger never bought me out to write for their own blog, but I did create something that worked back in the day, and while blogging has changed over the years, the formula for success has not changed so much.

Here is what I think the conservative blogosphere needs to do to get back on track: Continue reading →

Comrade Obama is planning on turning the White House into a taxpayer-funded campaign operation:

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

[…]

The nucleus of that effort is an e-mail database of more than 10 million supporters. The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign, though it wound up never needing the loan, senior aides said. At least 3.1 million people on the list donated money to Obama.

Millions more made up the volunteer corps that organized his enormous rallies, registered millions of voters and held countless gatherings to plug the senator to friends and neighbors. On Election Day, they served as the backbone of Obama’s get-out-the-vote operation, reaching voters by phone and at the front door, serving coffee at polling stations and babysitting so parents could stand in line at voting precincts.

This is scary stuff… Piece by piece, our Republic will crumble, our freedoms will be taken away.

PREVIOUS: Big Brother Is Coming, Part 1

Even if Obama and his minions would prefer otherwise:

OSAMA bin Laden is planning an attack against the United States that will “outdo by far” September 11, an Arab newspaper in London has reported.

And according to a former senior Yemeni al-Qaeda operative, the terrorist organisation has entered a “positive phase”, reinforcing specific training camps around the world that will lead the next “wave of action” against the West.

The warning, on the front page of an Arabic newspaper published in London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi – and widely reported in the major Italian papers – quotes a person described as being “very close to al-Qaeda” in Yemen.

The paper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who is said to be the last journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in 1996. According to the report, bin Laden is himself closely following preparations for an attack against the US and aims to “change the face of world politics and economics”. The operative is quoted as saying that “this will be shown by the fact that we now control a major part of the south of Somalia”.

Given the fact that I think bin Laden is dead – killed in the Tora Bora in December of 2001 – I take this report with a large grain of salt. On the other hand, I post it because (a) it might turn out to be true, even if we never see it due to disruption by our side and (b) because it is a dead certainty that our terrorist enemies will want to test Obama’s mettle early on to see what they can get away with from the new Administration. This would also have happened had McCain been elected – the whole world, indeed, wants to get the full measure of the new President. The problem with al Qaeda is that they usually get the full measure of something by killing lots of innocent people.

We can stick our heads in the sand and think that France and Iran will save us the trouble of fighting this war, but our enemies hate us for what we are, not what we do and they will keep coming at us until they are taken or destroyed. The central fact of our life is this: the enemy hates President Bush, but they also will hate President Obama. The only difference will be whether they’ll hold Obama in the awed and fearful respect they show to Bush, or whether they’ll run wild convinced that Obama has pulled the plug on the war and its only a matter of time before evil men take control.

From a radio interview:

Q — Why did your campaign lose?

A — I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration, how have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration?

If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party had been representing. People desiring change I think went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. … It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.

It is a certainty that the run up of debt, the various Congressional GOP scandals and the long war with its errors (real and imagined) played a huge role in our defeat last week. McCain’s mishandling of Palin’s roll out post-convention also played a role, as did McCain’s decision to eschew attacks on Obama over his racist, anti-American pastor of 20 years standing. The final nail in the coffin was – in retrospect – McCain’s decision to get deeply involved in the bail out. All that accomplished was to remind people what they didn’t like about the GOP Congressional delegation, that McCain is part of the terribly unpopular Congress and that he’s in the same party as George Bush. Pretty much, take any of the varied factors which contributed to the defeat and turn it around, and McCain stood a good chance of winning.

On top of all of this, however, is the current institutional weakness of the GOP. The Democrats have a motivating desire – they want power; all of it, all the time, in order to enrich themselves and their cronies and remake the United States in their sophomoric image of what America should be like. They don’t care how they acquire power and will use everything short of rape and murder to obtain it. Ok, fine; they probably also wouldn’t use cannibalism. I think. Maybe…. Meanwhile, the GOP doesn’t know what it wants. Conflicts between social and fiscal conservatives, various fights over how libertarian we should be and then whether or not we should work with or fight tooth and nail against the Democratic party push and pull the party in various directions and make it nearly impossible to have a coherent message for the elections.

The first task of the GOP is to sit down quietly for a bit and think:

1. What do we want?

2. How do we want to do it?

Until we’ve got good answers to both questions, we’ll continue to flounder about and fail to create that generational majority we’ll need to really reform America and excise the left wing poison in our system. Answering those questions might not be necessary for electoral victory – Obama’s almost-certain-to-fail policies may well usher us, deserving or not, back into power – but they are necessary to make our efforts worthwhile and lasting. Governor Palin is at least understanding why we lost, and it will be up to her – and others – to figure out over the next four years what we need to win.

Looks like the future Redistributer-In-Chief doesn’t even want to bother with Congress, he want to impose his agenda before he even finishes his first bowl of corn flakes.

President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush’s executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” Podesta said. “I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Yeah because the course the Democrats have taken us on is so wonderful… before they took control of congress we had growing economy… they really screwed that one up… I am tired of President Bush being the scapegoat for the mess the Democrats got us into.  Barack Obama can only dream of being 1/12th the president George W. Bush has been… and Obama knows it, so he has to act like a dictator in order to prove himself.

These next four years are going to be scary.

UPDATE: Georgia congressman warns of Obama dictatorship:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

Keeps getting creepier:

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

“Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

Some American common sense remains – from the comments in the linked article:

What next? Bow before His Excellence? Chant “Yes We CAn” while goose-stepping down the street in his Civilian Paramilitary Corps? Everyone REQUIRED to serve.

National holiday! This is OUTRAGEOUS! I doubt they would have promoted one for Hillary…especially even before she took office.

Man…this is getting TOOO weird!

WAKE UP, PEOPLE!

We’re swiftly getting past that “its just a few zealots, relax” statements from the left – the man has slavishly devoted followers, and that is unhealthy in the United States of America. It is up to Obama and his people to quash this sort of thing – if they don’t, then they provide tacit approval for it, and thus become complicit in this neo-Leninst nonsense.