How many dreams have died on the edge of a comfortable bed? It’s a good question.
As I think about it this morning, sipping some nice licorice tea, it seems to me many of us are being ridiculous. Yes, that election was a disaster in many respects, but did it tell us we were wrong? Of course not. It told us we have failed to create a simple message that even the complicit media couldn’t spin in negative ways.
What you say is OFTEN vastly less important than your image, and HOW you say it. I will give you a homely example.
I debated in high school, of the Lincoln-Douglas variety. We were not poor, but somehow managed to live like we were, and in my first debate I literally wore my first dress shirt and tie. I was a high school freshman. My father was an engineer, and dressed like one. I wore one of his shirts and a clip on tie.
I made it to the Octofinal round in a relatively large tournament, and thought I had beat my opponent handily, but the judges unanimously ruled in her favor. The policy was for them to share their scoring criteria, on written sheets. There were three, I read the first two, and didn’t understand why I had lost. The third, however, had a short comment “you would have more success if your belly button wasn’t showing.” I looked down and realized that my stiff shirt, made of some synthetic fiber, had a habit of folding in an unfortunate way.
[There was no one there on my side to tell me. This was one of countless times I’ve faced a challenge alone. It has made me who I am, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else. I like an occasional compliment, but I don’t need ANY, ZERO external validation to trust myself and my ideas. And actually, thinking about it, it makes me laugh to realize that’s about what I have for most of my ideas. Ah, so be it.]
Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were exposed belly buttons. They didn’t just hurt their own races, but the national races as well. They made it easy to portray the GOP as a the party of religious loonies.
On that topic, I would add that America will NEVER, EVER, EVER become a nation of committed Christians again. EVER. Not going to happen. Period. The tide may go out slowly–my guess–but the scientism of our age is ascendant, and simply incompatible with the theology of Christianity. That is why I feel it structurally necessary to create a church. We cannot move backwards. We have to move forwards.
Christ was not a human sacrifice demanded by God for his own edification. As I have pointed out from time to time, if the goal was for Christ to be a sacrifice, why wasn’t he ritually slaughtered on the altar in the Temple where all the other sacrifices were killed? My view is that Paul and other early theologians simply got the message wrong. I won’t go into that further, but I seem to recall discussing this in my Grand Inquisitor piece.
The net with regard to social conservatism is that it is a creed which is waning, and which will find it ever harder to win elections. What I would submit is that this is a time for private piety, and public intelligence. We need to concern ourselves more with BORN Americans, the 310 million or so of us (less political and financial elites: the 1% Obama protects so assiduously) who are going to face very tough times when our national economy collapses in a predictable way.
Back to my main point, what I think we all need to grasp is that the Left in this country has created the political equivalent of what Proctor and Gamble does when rolling out new products. They focus group test words and ideas, make sure the resonate with the right people, then simply say them over and over. In the case of Barack Obama, he doesn’t even need to TRY and correlate reality and rhetoric, since the media covers for him.
But the fact remains that we are right. We are increasing our debt $5 trillion or more EVERY YEAR. Grandma is going over a cliff. Grandma is going over a cliff, and it won’t matter if it is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House when the shit hits the fan. We have about ten years before something like my financial plan becomes necessary.
Republicans need to do two things: become the party talking about this–and the fact that taking up the ENTIRE revenue of the United States at this point would not prevent the necessity of drastic cuts–and understand time will be needed for this message to sink in.
In the meantime, we can have our cake and eat it too. Boehner can simply say “Look, we think these tax increases and spending increases are a bad idea. We think the economy will suffer from them, joblessness will go up, and economic misery will go up. But we’ve been wrong before. We are going to give Barack Obama HIS PLAN, what HE wants, what HE says is needed, and wait and see what happens.”
And in point of fact the tax increases under Clinton did not have negative effects, so it is POSSIBLE these won’t either, but the much larger likelihood is that we are going back into recession due to concern about spending, the fact that Obama is President, and the vast and unknown costs of Obamacare.
The most forward thinking Republicans might even consider beginning to talk about my plan or something like it. My work output is becoming slowly more coherent, and rewriting that plan in book form is one of my top priorities, so I may have something better within a year or so.
The reality is that nations with our level of debt do wind up defaulting, to some greater or lesser extent. None have defaulted in my understanding in the favor of the People (although I’ve seen claims Iceland did recently; I have not studied this in depth), but rather in favor of political and financial elites. My plan is populistic, and would in my view receive widespread public support, even though of course it would also scare the crap out of a lot of people, and receive ROBUST opposition from the banking sector.