There will be lots of analysis of why Romney didn’t win. He wasn’t conservative enough! He wasn’t moderate enough. On and on it will go and in the rush to put the blame on Romney for why Republicans didn’t take back the White House and the Senate, we will forget to put the spotlight right where it belongs…on the Republican Party and conservatives as a whole. If we are willing to fully look in the mirror and are willing to live by the scripture verse, Matthew 7:5 “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” we will not only retake control of DC, we will change this country for the next three generations.
Some of my greatest triumphs in life have come after some serious soul searching, the willingness to admit that I was wrong and the courage to change the direction I was going in. If you want a place you can go and read how awful Obama is and how the commie Democrats are destroying this country, then this is not the column for you. It may be true that the Democrat agenda is going to destroy this country, but they wouldn’t be able to get away with it, if the Republican Party was a true alternative and had even the basic capabilities of communicating real conservatism to the American public.
There are some serious issues within the Republican Party and “conservatism” that we must address and correct, if we are ever to be a majority party into the future. I am going to rip apart the façade that many conservatives think is real conservatism and in the process discover the gold that lies beneath. I am going to be brutal towards our own side and some of you are not going to like it, but it must be done. So if you decide to read on and to continue reading future installments of this column, understand that I have a few rules about comments.
Rule #1 – You are never allowed to comment along the lines of, “but the Democrats do it too”. That comment just p****s me off! I don’t care if the Dems do it too. The whole point of being a Republican is that we are supposed to be different than them.
Also bundled into rule #1 is there will be no comments like, “It’s not fair, the Republicans are held to a higher standard”. Damn right we are and so should we. If I didn’t want to be held to any type of standard, I would be a Democrat. Not only as a conservative should you be willing to be held to a higher standard, you should be willing to live by one as well. At the very foundation of our problem is that for too long we have allowed elected Republicans to live by a lesser standard.
There is an old story about a King that one day decides to walk through the streets. On this walk he sees a poor orphan boy. The boy was dirty, wore disgusting clothes and was scavenging through garbage for food. The king had pity on the boy and brought him back to the castle and adopted him as his own son. Several weeks passed and the king noticed that his new son was still wearing his old dirty clothes, never bathed and would often eat just the scraps of leftover food he found in the trash. The king confronted him and said, “You do not have to go back to your old life. You are a child of the king. Now act like it!”
How can we call America to a higher standard and to make tough choices, if we are not willing to live by those higher standards and demand that those that represent our cause do the same? How can we expect America to embrace conservatism when we do not even demand it of our own side and even worse we don’t know the difference between conservatism scraps from the garbage and the real thing fit enough for a child of the king?
Join me on this journey and at the end of it, maybe we will have the courage and the numbers to force the Republicans to look in the mirror and pull the plank out of their eyes so we can go about fixing this country.
Image: courtesy of Firewood by Petr Kratochvil
