The Conservative Soldier

An indignant edginess is about the only characteristic that unites participants in the Occupy movement. How many protestors routinely threaten to eat other people, namely productive, successful Americans? Lovely sentiment, isn’t it?

But since anger apparently is in vogue it would behoove Republicans, Conservatives, independents and recovering Obama backers to get with the times. This is what happened in South Carolina last weekend when folks held their noses and voted for Newt Gingrich in the GOP Presidential primary. They’re angry and Newt best embodied that animosity.

It does not qualify him to be elected President necessarily, but Newt is one angry guy. He’s mad as hell at the ads run against him in Iowa. He’s mad at inane media inquisitors; CNN’s John King being the most recent. He’s got to be absolutely boiling that his ex-wife waited until he surged in the polls to become bitter about their long ago divorce.

Mitt Romney has the capacity to tap into this anger and, if he does so in a hurry, could once again reclaim his status as a worthy frontrunner for the nomination. Romney needs to express indignant rejection, not merely aggravation, when an opponent (or 27-minute movie) criticizes the wealth he has amassed. He needs to blow his stack when someone suggests he picked at the bones of crippled businesses like a “vulture” when risking venture capital. He should furrow his brow and jut his chin, Clinton-style, when accused of paying too little in taxes and when demonized for leveraging legal offshore investment tools.

Why would Romney want to break out of his steady demeanor now? He needs to show an extremely fed up electorate that he has fire in his taut belly, not in a screaming Howard Dean way, or a brooding, vindictive Richard Nixon way, but in an impassioned, liberty-or-death way.

If Romney can show voters that he’s not some empty, detached rich guy but, to the contrary, someone willing to fight and lead he can win over some of the fence-sitters or Newt leaners.

He once told a crowd that when a Romney drowns, you first look upstream, speaking to the family’s tenacity. Romney needs to dust off that line and put it back to work in 2012.

Failure to persuade the public that he’s got some emotional embers burning inside him will handcuff Romney when he pledges to take on President Obama (and most of the mainstream media) on a whole range of issues. He can’t be believed until he takes the gloves off in the GOP nomination race.

Voters are looking for a candidate who can channel their gathering rage, who will not only defeat Obama in November but will utterly repudiate the reckless direction in which he gradually has moved the country. They do not want empty slogans, otherwise they could go join the Occupiers. Americans who are feeling the country slipping away, some for the first time in their lives, want a President who is a stable grown-up, who can lead a fight to restore our values, repair our economy and return Constitutional sanctity to the corridors of power in Washington.

South Carolina primary voters took a flier on Gingrich in the aftermath of some powerful expressions of conviction during the debates preceding primary day. But if Mitt has a history of making money and “evolving” on issues, Newt most certainly has a history, too. The Hill captures it today in an interview with a Claremont McKenna College professor named Jack Pitney.

“Gingrich does well when he puts on a show of aggressiveness. He does not do well when he is genuinely angry,” said Pitney, who worked for Gingrich in the House in the 1980s. “Romney wants to play with Newt’s head and make it explode.”

It will be good practice for Romney as he prepares to face the angry Occupier of the Oval Office.

The forces at play behind shifting poll numbers in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination are complex and numerous. Ultimately, the contest seems likely to come down to Mitt Romney versus the anti-Romneys (a.k.a., the not Romneys).

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have sharpened the boundary separating the sides by making the desperate calculation that Romney can be recast as a sinister mogul who trampled the helpless and gullible while running the venture capital firm Bain Capital in the 1980s and ‘90s.

It is not surprising but still astonishing that in a “sound bite” culture we can observe a major part of someone’s life’s work swiftly dismissed by a play on words crafted, no doubt, by an over-caffeinated campaign aid.

“Vulture capitalism” (Perry).

Despite devotion to his faith and, by all reasonable measurements, success in high stakes business ventures Romney is being vilified as a “vulture capitalist” because, along the way, there were not 100% equal outcomes for every entity into which his venture capital group took a financial stake.

Let’s see, what else? Romney’s Mormon mission work is dismissed because the mainstream media doesn’t wish to “go there”. He ran a worthy campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994 but came up short when Kennedy unleashed the original Bain-is-evil narrative. Romney’s arrival on the scene as head of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee is mentioned in passing, as if it was some honorary or figurehead role connected to a routine sporting event. It was not.

He was governor of a state. Not a perfect governor. But simply compare Romney’s record to, say, that of a Governor Pat Quinn in Illinois (and his predecessor, Rod Blagojevich), or a Jerry Brown in California (and his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger), or the former governor of New Jersey, John Corzine, and you must conclude he was a competent public servant, the ill-conceived Romneycare health care albatross notwithstanding. Ronald Reagan’s years as governor of California were not without their thorns.

Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, by contrast, has no record as a business executive, no record as a missionary, no record heading a global sports event in which U.S. corporate sponsors alone invested $760 million (after the Salt Lake Olympic bid was rocked by allegations it bought votes from the International Olympic Committee), and no record as a governor.

Which, to state the obvious, also means he had no record whatsoever as candidate Obama in 2008. In fact, if his record is viewed in its totality pre-White House a speech writer might be tempted to come up with a sound bite that rings with familiarity. “Vulture opportunist”?

Romney in 2012 must navigate a vicious gauntlet because he made a fortune in the world of private equity, but Obama never was asked to explain why he deserved to receive millions to write a pair of books about how his childhood left him predisposed to doubt American exceptionalism and pursue radical associations.

The media have decided they must know exact head counts on how many people were hired and fired by companies in which Bain Capital invested over the years. They are indignant that in some cases Bain swept in, using its own money, to give a lifeline to a dying business and, in doing so, frequently streamlined its work force and cut fat out of its budget. The nerve! What a cold, cruel young capitalist Mitt was!

The question never is asked: What would have happened to these companies and their employees without the shot in the arm delivered by Bain? (The answer: Many would have just shut down and sent their employees home, jobless).

Writes Yale Law School corporate law professor Jonathan Macey in a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (Jan. 13, 2012, “How Private Equity Works”):

“The alternative to the leaner, smaller firms created by private equity are bankrupt firms that do not employ anybody (my emphasis). And private-equity firms tend to use more incentive-based pay than other firms. A 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that the companies in which private-equity firms invested had low employment growth relative to their peers, and their employment growth rose after they were acquired by a private-equity firm.”

An objective assessment of the last four decades of Romney’s life is that he has converted an upbringing that set him on a path of unlimited potential into a life of achievement and commitment, to faith, family, career and country. The most scandalous moment in Romney’s life over the past decade might have occurred on the opening day of the Salt Lake Olympics. He was in the lead bus of a caravan headed to the skiing competitions in Park City, Utah. Overzealous security tried to block the procession from reaching its destination. Media reports had Romney bounding from the bus to inform a trembling security officer that he needed to get out of the f—ing way so that Romney and his bus full of Olympic dignitaries could proceed to their appointment.

In any case, no one need be a blindly loyal Romney supporter to recognize/appreciate how his Presidential candidacy is scrutinized in contrast to the improbable candidacy of one junior Senator Barack Obama. While the mainstream media simply took the short-form bio on Obama - in a word, the bio in which he was proclaimed the nation’s transformational black messiah - and ran with it, other observers of the political landscape were digging a bit deeper.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Aug. 2008: “Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself. Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States.”

David Freddoso, author, “The Case Against Barack Obama”, 2008: “(Illinois Senate President Emil) Jones gave (State Sen.) Obama high-profile legislation in its late stages, sometimes taking bills away from their original sponsors. He gave Obama committee assignments that would cement key constituencies for his (2004 U.S.) Senate primary.”

Michelle Malkin, author, “Culture of Corruption”, 2009: On page 228 of Malkin’s book, which exposes Obama’s numerous associations with radical activists, she quotes Obama speaking to leaders of ACORN, an organization committed to vote rigging.

“I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and a half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. … I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.”

Dinesh D’Souza, Forbes, Sept. 2010 (author, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”): “It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. … In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources.”

Against this recap of the red flags missed by so many amid the 2008 election when they took a flier and voted for the unknown Barack Obama (who, Bill Clinton once famously lamented, should have been “bringing us coffee” around the time of his ascension) comes today’s latest polling data.

The Rasmussen Report finds in its newest poll that 37% of likely voters rate Obama’s handling of economic issued as “good or excellent”, his highest positives since July. 37 percent.

I’ll take cream and sugar, please.

The Arizona Republic newspaper assigned a reporter the tedious duty of exploring root causes of the precipitous decline of civility across the land. The lengthy “investigation” is published today, nearly one year after a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Tucson was shot in the head in broad daylight in a grocery store parking lot.

The blood on the pavement had not begun to dry by the time voracious, far left media commentators, Obamatrons all, moved like speeding bullets to declare the Tucson shooter a victim himself. They concluded with Duke-lacrosse team-no burden of proof-swiftness that the deranged punk who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was a hapless vessel filled with conservative talk radio/Fox News punditry/Tea Party blogger “anger”. (Dissent = anger, don’t you know). “They” had, collectively, pulled the trigger again and again, felling Giffords, and murdering a senior citizen, a 9-year-old girl, and members of Giffords’ staff.

Even after it became increasingly clear that shooter Jared Loughner was a deeply disturbed individual who had no regular contact with current events content, and no particular political affiliation, the mainstream, Obama-compliant media stoked the narrative that uncivil, hateful discourse — “hate speech” of epidemic proportion — sparked the horrific shooting spree. The official explanation by the outraged elite media was that Loughner had visited a few web sites including Sarah Palin’s, readied his weapons, jumped in a cab to the Safeway, and released all of his pro-Second Amendment emotion in a hale of gunfire.

Of course, nothing like this took place on that sun washed January day in Tucson, but a paid professional journalist is still connecting Giffords’ misfortune with the demise of civility in our national political discourse. Among the little nuggets in Shaun Mckinnon’s piece:

The shootings at a shopping center near Tucson only brightened the spotlight (on incivility), just as the rancorous health care town halls did in 2009 and the “tea party” infused elections in 2010.

This actually is brilliant in its subtlety, but also a complete distortion. The “shootings at the shopping center” were random acts of a twisted, neglected human being who has been judged incompetent to stand trial. That’s a civilized way of saying Jared is nuts. He was far more likely to curl up with a Bill Ayers manifesto than a Rush Limbaugh podcast. Yet Loughner shares a paragraph with people who reject federalized health care and who embrace the Constitution. We give this guy too much credit calling him a journalist.

The civility police are either lousy at the CSI thing, or they’re bound and determined to force historians to chisel January 8, 2011, into stone as the day civility died (along with innocent people participating in democracy at a “Congress on Your Corner” event).

Incivility in politics does not kill people in broad daylight. Lee Harvey Oswald never so much as raised his voice in the public square. John Hinckley never was spotted hurling verbal arrows at Ronald Reagan from behind the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Incivility” is the radical left’s grandest invention. It seethed for 40 years after LBJ’s big government agenda was both rejected and exposed as folly. And when it minted its messiah from the swamps of Chicago politics with newfound confidence, the Socialist left pledged that free speech would not deter its ambitions to impose full-bore European entitlement utopia on our nation.

Thus, Sarah Palin’s girl-next-door appeal and the Tea Party’s fervent opposition to unaccountable government spending and regulation was deemed as dangerous as drunk driving. Citizens demanding sound policies from elected officials amid heated town hall encounters became vilified for their “hate-laced incivility”. How dare they question an elected public servant.

What the Arizona Republic did not address, and what the media at large will never concede, is that the most corrosive bile coursing through the veins of the body politic in America is not heard on radio talk shows or Sunday morning TV roundtables.

The incivility is spawned in the statists’ utter disregard for the electorate. The incivility is found in reckless agendas that threaten the security and well being of ordinary Americans. The true incivility lies deep in the darkest recesses of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, Joe Biden, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters and Kathleen Sebilius. It is in their DNA. It is this glaring incivility toward liberty, toward American values, that awakens citizens every day to the realization that silent indifference is not a polite response. Indeed, it is a dangerous one.

So we rise up, summon up our ire, and speak up. We participate in democracy to counter the incivility that lurks in the pages of Obamacare and in reams of federal government regulation.

Passionate, contentious discourse was common in the fledgling days of the American experiment, and it has remained a part of our nation’s fabric.

Yet a year after Tucson the false narrative lives on, the narrative that an awakening to the Alinsky-style Obama agenda — and a rejection of same on Election Day 2010 — somehow fomented cold-blooded murder in the Arizona desert. Meanwhile, the President of the United States and his surrogates refuse to condemn the vile, criminal, abusive acts of the Occupy mobs.

In fact, the Republic’s 1,982-word piece on the decline of civility makes no mention of the Occupy uprisings and their trail of destruction and violence.