cosmoscon

It appears the Republicans in the House and Senate are ready to stop the shutdown and get absolutely nothing in return.  But never fear, I bet they tell us they’ll get tough on the next fight.

Just like McConnell promised in January:

“The tax issue is finished,” Mr. McConnell said on the ABC News program “This Week.” “Over. Completed. That’s behind us.”

And later in the NY Times story:

“Mr. McConnell repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he supported Republican senators who have suggested that a default – and even a brief shutdown of the government – might be necessary to secure deep spending cuts.”

“My answer is hopefully we don’t need to get to that point,” he said on ABC.  “The president surely must know we’re spending way too much.  So why don’t we do something about reducing spending?”

Yes, the old saying is true – there is nothing new under the sun.

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9

We’ll just keep caving and kicking the can down the road.  I hope I’m wrong but I know the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – and I’m not insane.

Even though I will continue to fight for Conservative principles until I die, I can’t help but think we’ve reached a point where we’re fighting a lost struggle (or Kampf Verloren in German, Hey it’s the only foreign language I even halfway know so indulge me…).

After last year’s Presidential election I felt that the US reached a tipping point.  We now have a significant number of voters plugged into the Progressive/Liberal hive mind who  are convinced the Federal Government exists to give them free shit and there are enough of these Liberal zombies to elect people who promise to keep giving them free shit.

It’s mathematical that eventually we’ll run out of people like me (who pay taxes) and then it’ll all come crashing down.   Those of us who point that out and advocate a life of hard work, point out that our actions have consequences and stress that Freedom can only exist with a limited Government are labeled racists and heartless.

I sometimes feel like Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a rock up a hill only to watch it roll back down and repeat this exercise for eternity.

Sorry for the gloom and doom but I feel the House Republicans are about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and it’s depressing.

Let. It. Burn.

Every day that the partial Government shutdown goes on the more I’m realizing this could be a real game changer.

First off, unlike what Obama’s handlers thought would happen, Obama’s approval rating is going down.  The State Run Media is doing their best to shield him but the Low Information Voters may be waking up.  Obama’s overall approval rating is now at 37% according to the AP article and that’s not good considering the large megaphone POTUS wields.

There are now dissentions in the ranks as John Stewart grilled HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Wolf Blitzer is thinking it may be a good idea to do what the House suggested – delay the individual mandate of Obamacare for a year.  The Horror!

But the real light at the end of the tunnel that I see is coming up to the Debt ceiling limit drop dead date of 17-OCT-13.  If the House Republicans can stick to their guns then they may be able to push through this with some real budget reform and cut our Federal spending in a meaningful way (which is the goal anyway).

Failing to raise the debt ceiling limit does not have to be a catastrophe for the US.  Here is a great article showing how the scare mongering of the Left about the US defaulting on its debt if the debt ceiling isn’t raised is just a lie.  Here’s the money quote (emphasis mine):

“The White House wants people to believe genuine default is likely even though tax receipts this fiscal year are expected to be more than $3 trillion and interest on the debt is projected to be only $237 billion. In other words, the Treasury will collect more than 12 times as much revenue as needed to pay interest on the debt. Even someone like me, with my well-known views on the incompetence of the federal government, thinks that the Treasury Department will have no problem figuring out how to avoid default.”

Just like many American families have faced in the past, the US Federal government has reached a point where their credit cards are maxed out and they no longer have enough money to continue spending to a lifestyle that they’ve been accustomed.  If the Federal Government were a typical American family then they’d sit down and itemize their ‘must haves’ and eliminate spending on their ‘like to haves’ so that their creditors are paid and their spending is less than or equal to their revenue.  Speaking from personal experience, this process is not fun but it is necessary.

The Federal government has needed to do this for decades and we’ve heard politicians promise of going through the budget ‘line by line’ to figure this out but it’s never happened.  Since the ‘line by line’ approach appears too difficult to do then there is another way and it will happen when we reach our debt limit.

If you want to find out what spending is ‘essential’ then one way to do it is cut all spending off and then wait to see where the pain comes.  One by one the pain shows up and then Congress and the POTUS can approve that spending.  If the pain never comes from a budget line item, like funding for NPR, then cut it out permanently.   After looking over the list of all Federal government agencies and employees here, you can’t tell me there is not fat to cut.

Force the Federal government to prioritize spending, make meaningful cuts to entitlement reforms and balance a budget.  We can do all that while paying the interest on our debt and reverse the disasterous course we’ve been on for decades.

But all of this won’t happen if the Republicans cave and allow an extension to the debt limit.  We must hit this debt limit to solve our problems.  I don’t see any other way.  Let it burn!

Currently in the US the most significant threat to our Freedom comes from inside our borders.  The enemy is called Liberalism and I laid out my justification for calling it our #1 enemy in a previous post.

Since this enemy is unconventional and so different from our previous Public Enemy #1’s, this makes it difficult to get organized and win this war because we are handcuffed with preconceived notions on how to fight enemies.  We can’t send in a Seal team, park an aircraft carrier off the coast or invade Liberalism.  I must admit that I’ve been at a loss how we Americans who have not fallen under the hive mind thinking of the Left can defeat this enemy especially when Leftists basically control the airwaves and feed their flocks and new converts every evening on the national news shows.

While reading Flying High I found a section of the book that gave a strategy for defeating an enemy of the US and while that section of the book was geared toward a previous enemy of US Freedom (Communism), I think that same strategy, repurposed, can lead us to victory over Liberalism.

In 1960, Barry Goldwater enlisted the help of Brent Bozell to craft an essay on US policy toward the Soviet Union.  This essay was meant as a rebuke to the prevailing accommodationist line in Washington, DC and was published in the National Review and the following excerpt from Flying High Chapter 6 sums it up.

 “It follows that victory over Communism is the dominant, proximate goal of American policy.  Proximate in the sense that there are more distant, more “positive” ends we seek, to which victory over Communism is but a means.  But dominant in the sense that every other objective, no matter how worthy intrinsically, must defer to it.”

Did you catch that?  In the early 1960’s, Communism was viewed as such a threat to US Freedom that all other objectives were subservient to the main objective of defeating Communism.  Later in this section of the book, Goldwater and Bozell went on to talk about how peace, freedom, justice and prosperity are worthy objectives but we must compromise these in the fight to accomplish our victory over the primary enemy of Communism.

Another quote from this section of the book – emphasis mine:

“It may be, of course, that such objectives can be pursued consistently with a policy designed to overthrow Communism; my point is that where conflicts arise they must always be resolved in favor of achieving the indispensable condition for a tolerant world – the absence of Soviet Communist power.”

According to Goldwater and Bozell, if the US has its top priority of achieving victory over Communism, every foreign and domestic policy issue should be judged on whether our actions on these issues helped achieve that main goal.  Forget the fact that some of our ideals would be occasionally compromised, that was a necessary casualty in the overall war on Communism.  We had to focus on the main goal and nothing else.  The goal of defeating Communism was that important!

In my opinion we, the United States of America, have an enemy that must be defeated and we must focus on that main goal and nothing else.  We must defeat Liberalism now and nothing else really matters.

So how do we do fight this war?

Although it’s fun to reveal the overwhelming Leftist bias of so called journalists and expose them on social media, we can’t win over the State Run Media because they’ll continue to parrot the talking points of Liberalism and cast those opposed in the role of the enemy.  The SRM’s Leftist bias is ingrained in their culture and will not be changed – See the excellent book by Bernard Goldberg entitled “Bias” for more on that.

Simply put, we have to vote the Liberals (and complacent Republicans) out of office so they can no longer do harm to our country.   We have to get enough American citizens on our side to defeat Liberals in the House, Senate and White House in the next election cycles.  The people we elect make the laws and until we purge Congress and the White House of Leftists and those who choose to ‘go along to get along’ we won’t accomplish our main goal.

How do we rally Americans to this cause of defeating Liberalism?  Goldwater has some advice (again from Flying High, Chapter 6) – emphasis mine:

“The people of the world and their leaders do not rally instinctively behind good causes:  if that were true, the plague of Communism would long since have disappeared from our planet.  They do, however, rally behind good causes that are energetically and purposively pressed, and that show promise of winning.  If we simply summon the courage of our convictions, the blessings of a moderately tolerable life will soon fall on others, as well as ourselves.  And future generations will honor us.”

In a perfect world every citizen would read Heritage posts (and the many like them on other Conservative blogs) and realize that our only hope of surviving as the leader of the free world is to vote Liberals out now.  But that is sadly not the case so we have to do it another way.

It is on us to talk to our colleagues/friends/associates and blog/tweet/facebook, etc. in such a way to convince them that we have a valid cause to fight for, we can win this battle and our victory will make the world a better place for our children.

All foreign and domestic policy issues, elections and budget fights from here going forward should be framed into the context of defeating Liberalism.  No compromise.  No appeasement.  No holding on to the status quo.  Every issue must be viewed in the light of our overall objective of defeating Liberalism.

Sad to say but this might mean we support a RINO in purple states so that the Democrat can be defeated.  This might also mean we abandon the ‘purity test’ during Presidential Primaries to elect a candidate that can win in 2016.  It pains me to say this but the reality is that many in the US have been brainwashed by the SRM and other Leftists to the point that they will not even listen to someone who receives a high score by some Tea Party metric.

Going for the home run sounds romantic and gets the Conservatives excited but we face an enemy that is very entrenched and has their defenses fortified.  For that reason we must employ island hopping tactics vs. an invasion of the mainland (just like we did in the Pacific theater during WWII).  This victory will not be won in a year or maybe even 10 years but if we never lose sight of our overall enemy and follow the strategy outlined by Goldwater/Bozell, we can win this war.

The next time you go into a voting booth, write a blog, send a tweet, post something on Facebook, talk politics with a friend or write a check to a political candidate ask yourself if your actions are furthering the cause of defeating Liberalism.

Want to know why I believe we may be beyond the point of fixing this country?

Two tweets from @ThatsWhatsUp333 are given for your consideration (and a screen cap is shown too in case he deletes these).

Sometimes I think it’s easier to teach a dog how to solve a Rubik’s Cube than debate these low information voters (LIV’s).

And see that blue double-D twibbon on his Twitter profile pic?  No, that doesn’t stand for ‘Dumb Democrat’ but it should.  That graphic is pasted on people’s pictures that belong to the #UniteBlue hive mind and trust me; @ThatsWhatsUp333 is not an aberration with this group.

Maybe instead of using graphs, charts, history, economics and math to debate these LIV’s we should use cartoons.  I suggest we start with this one.

Today was a great day with the Republicans in the House finally holding the line and at allowing Harry Reid’s partial government shutdown to happen.

There were many great blogs today on the shutdown but the best, hands down, came from The Matt Walsh Blog.

I will not reveal the literary trickeration he used to hammer home his points but go read the whole thing now.

Yes, the size of our Federal Government is massive and that blog did a great job of making that point.

So what’s next?  How long can this ‘shutdown’ go on?

Here is my hope.  The partial shutdown goes for weeks and maybe months with the House Republicans refusing to make any more concessions unless Harry Reid and Barack Obama offer to negotiate.  Team Obama will be confident in the fact that the State Run Media will continue to push their narrative (and they will) and keep public opinion on their side but I think their plan may be vulnerable.

Let’s suppose that the Government partial shutdown turns into the same nothing burger like the Sequester and every week that goes by more people start realizing that the Seventh Seal is not about to be broken.  Maybe independents and right leaning Democrats start to realize that our Federal Government is too bloated and there is still fat to cut.

Then the leverage in our continuing budget debates shifts from the Big Government Leftists to the fiscally responsible Tea Party.  The Left is then faced with the dreaded rule #9 from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

Hope is not a strategy but right now that’s about all we have.