Greetings, all.
I haven't been around these parts for quite a while now, largely owing to my new responsibilities, which have consumed an average of 60 hours per week for the past six weeks. I've been catching up on sleep much of the rest of the time, or else I've been consumed with the mundane chores attendant to blissful domesticity, e.g.: chopping wood to feed the stove, blowing snow off the driveway, repairing drafty doors and leaky pipes, etc.
I find myself now trying to catch up on what I have missed - and there has been a good deal of food for thought, including this excellent thread. There are many comments here that I'd like to address individually, but I'll settle on just a few:
240b:
Obama will be the best thing to ever happen to America. He is destroying the Washington establishment. In a few years, after Obama is long gone and no one in high school even knows his name or who he was, America will be stronger for it.
I believe that is a distinct possibility in the long run. But I am concerned most now about what will come in the relative short-term, and it will be nothing less than disaster: economic ruin, domestic unrest, and likely terrorist acts fomented by those who this horrid Administration has willfully encouraged. May God help us all, and may we find the courage and strength to help each other.
Alicewonders:
How can we entrust the GOP as currently led to wage this do-or-die battle? We can't! They run for cover as soon as the going gets rough. People like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and a few other courageous people are willing to put their necks on the chopping block to actually stand up and fight this monstrous rape of our life, liberty and pursuits of happiness!
I could not agree more, nor said it any better. That won't stop me from trying, however.
The present GOP leadership lacks any relevance or political force. It is not that they believe in nothing; in fact, much of what they appear to believe is essentially correct. Instead, their irrelevance proceeds from an unwillingness to publicly defend those beliefs, an inability to effectively communicate them, and a disinclination to risk placing the interests of their constituents above their future career ambitions.
John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor (and a few others) are not all of the same kind, but there are at least four qualities of which they share an absence: leadership, vision, courage, and will. As a group, they are not statesmen, but rather future members of the Lobbyist Class.
Bigun:
I have labored in the vineyard of the Republican party for more than 40 years now (since 1972),observed the 11th commandment for most of that time, and what has it brought me? NO MORE will I be silent when I see fellow Republicans aligning themselves with the forces of EVIL!
I suppose I gave up the practice of not criticizing other Republicans when I came to realize that marching in lockstep was a feature of Progressive Left that we'd do well not to emulate. Reasonable people can differ on many things, whereas an enforced intellectual uniformity is the product of fearful and unreasoning minds, sometimes of the kind that openly welcomes political repression.
That conservatives sometimes disagree and vocalize their differences is
not evidence of weakness, but of inner strength and of a belief in free speech, free minds and a free marketplace in which differing viewpoints may be tested and refined.
It is the opposite of the intellectual world which Barack Obama and his Progressives are presently intent upon creating.
