There were a number of comments to my ONE YEAR AND COUNTING post that I wanted to answer, but I soon figured that the answer was going to be huge. The post itself, as I said, was for me a short one. But there is more behind it that I did not put in.
There was a hint that my course of action was optimistic. Those who know me are laughing their asses off at the implication. I am one of the world’s greater believers in worst case planning, and that the “better angels of our nature” are both rare and loath to be seen. Heinlein was right in this as applied to the bulk of the population; Never appeal to a man’s “better nature.” He may not have one. Invoking his “self-interest” gives you more leverage.
I am also a student of history. Nothing involving human beings is simple, and despite the cultural blinders placed on our society by TV screenwriters; major problems cannot be neatly solved in 22 minutes plus commercial breaks.
Will fighting for a Patriot Congress over an Institutional Republican™ Congress suffice in and of itself to save the country and Restore America? Not only no, but bloody hell no. Is it a necessary step and a vital component of any effort to accomplish those goals? Abso-f’ing-lutely.
Now comes a glimpse into the twisted worldview of Subotai. MOPP Level IV protection is advised for those who fear non-PC contamination.
1) We are no longer E Pluribus Unum, and have not been for at least a political generation [18 years, from birth to ability to vote]. Within our national borders there are at least 3 forces contending for supremacy with widely differing and incompatible goals.
a) TWANLOC [Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen, which I have described before.] While technically we both speak English, we do not speak the same language. Words, starting premises, and the view of cause and effect are different between us. We view our history very differently, with them viewing it as being a crime against humanity that must be atoned for through our destruction. They have contempt for the traditional Judeo-Christian Western European culture from which ours is derived; except for Fabian Socialism, Jacobin-ism, and of course Marxism-Leninism. It includes what Rasmussen in his polling calls the “political class” of both major parties, their dependents, and enablers; or what Codavilla has called the Political Elites or the Ruling Party and their dependents. While we are within most of the same national borders as they [the southern border being totally optional with them], our conceptions of being American could not differ farther. And by their own public words, the openly Leftist among them wish our literal death.
b) What Codavilla refers to as the Country Party and I think is better formulated as Patriots. Largely mirror-imaging a); it consists in great part, but not completely of the TEA Party and its ideological allies which actually covers a pretty wide spread.
c) An extensive and growing movement of OPFOR’s. Foreign based, not professing any loyalty to America, from differing sources. Be they Wahabist, La Raza, or other ideology; their goal is not to rule the US, but to destroy it.
2) These three groupings do not comprise all the US population. The mass of the US population is not politically aware enough to be formally, consciously affiliated with any of the above. We are not a country of political junkies on either side. Which in many ways is a good thing. Complicating this is the fact that among them, as among all people there is the division laid out by Col. Grossman: Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves. LC’s know this distinction.
3) The domestic battle is between TWANLOC [including the Political Class as described] against what I call the Patriot movement. Their goal is the perpetuation of their kakistocracy with greater or lesser degrees of collectivism and tyranny according to which wing. Ours is the restoration of a free, secure, and prosperous Constitutional republic operating as a capitalist free market. What in short form I call Restoring America.
4) In the battle between TWANLOC and Patriots, the major parties do not line up one on each side. The Democrats are the enemy. There are no elected, appointed, or party officials who are not. They are not allowed to be. There is no such thing as a sogannante “Blue Dog” Democrat as they define it. There are “Blue Dogs”, but that is just their word for a Democrat who makes speeches at home slamming the very things that he can be relied on to always vote in favor of when he is told to.
5) The Republican Party is split between the Patriot Movement, and what I call the Institutional Republicans. It is the Institutionals who refuse to fight the Democrats, who always seek a losing compromise, who consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, who crammed McCain down our throats, sabotaged Sarah during the campaign, and are seeking an “honorable loss” in 2012 by forcing Romney on us.
They are more concerned with defeating conservatives than they are with defeating Democrats. The actions of the Institutional “leadership” since January 2009 show this. In my state, rather than allowing conservatives to run and defeat a Democrat, they gave away two US Senate seats and the governorship. In 2010, the TEA Party candidate won the Republican governor’s nomination fair and square. The Republican Central Committee sponsored and funded a third party candidate [Constitution Party] in order to deliberately split the vote. They knew the Democrat would win [he did] if they did it, but it kept the TEA Party from winning the governorship. They did exactly what they claim the TEA Party is doing.
The last straw for me, after all the open warfare by the Institutionals in this state against conservatives, was an action filed by the Democrats in Federal Court. We have a Taxpayer Bill of Rights in our state constitution that limits government revenues and expenditures without voter approval, and mandates that revenues over the limit [the limit is flexible for population growth and inflation] have to be refunded to the taxpayers. It is an effective short leash on the government.
The Democrats filed suit to void it, on the grounds that it was passed as a state constitutional amendment by citizen initiative. We have initiative, recall, and referendum here in our state constitution, going back to territorial days. They [Democrats] claim that since the US Constitution guarantees “a Republican form of government” to all states, and that “a Republican form of government” means representative democracy only; citizens’ only role is to vote for candidates and that initiative, recall, and referendum are unconstitutional. Given our Federal court, it is likely that the Democrats will win until it gets to the Court of Appeals.
The kicker is, though; that half of the current and former leaders of the Republican party and Republican legislature have signed on alongside the Democrats suing to take away our rights. And the other half have given their tacit approval. They are not the friends of Liberty.
Thus, as I said in ONE YEAR AND COUNTING, Patriots have to concentrate on taking seats away from RINO’s and DIABLO’s as much as they do on taking seats away from Democrats. If we get a critical mass of Patriots, it may be possible to fight the enemy instead of always giving in in the end.
As noted, this is not going to Restore America by itself. At best, it buys some time to fight some more. And the fight is going to be nastier from both segments of the enemy, than anything we have seen in electoral politics.
First, a little secret. It is not in the interest of the Institutional Republican Party to win any presidential election that takes place in 2012. Just as they really did not want to win in 2008.
McCain did not want to win, if it meant telling the truth, or any amount of it, about his Democrat friends. And he had no chance until he named Sarah. And it was his people who sabotaged her when she was gaining momentum during the campaign. And it was him who cut back campaigning every time he started gaining.
I do not believe the Institutional Republicans want to win the presidency, at least until they have purged us conservatives. The way things are going, the Republicans are pretty much guaranteed to hold the House and pick up the Senate. Right now their excuse is that if they do not have either, both Houses by a veto-proof majority, or the presidency; they cannot fight the Democrats, so it is still go-along, get-along. IF there is a Republican president and control of both Houses of Congress, they have no excuse at all. They will have to either do something to fix the country [and break their own rice bowls] or have a literal open revolt by conservatives and a Third Party that will doom them like the Whigs. The conservatives I know are not in any mood to put up with being patted on the head and patronized any more. The only thing keeping many conservatives even nominally in the party is the desire to get Obama out, and not wanting to split before the 2012 elections. AFTER 2012, all bets are off. If Romney accidentally wins and nothing happens, there will not be a Republican party by 2013.
From a purely cynical, political power perspective, for the Institutionals the best case scenario for 2012 is for Obama to win the presidency and for the Republicans to hold both Houses with less than a veto-proof majority in both, and less than a cloture majority in the Senate. Then they have their excuse for not doing anything, and can try to sucker us in again. Of course, they assume that Obama will stay within something close to constitutional term limits. If they get a veto-proof majority, or the ability to force cloture, it means that the inevitable defections by the 1/4-1/3 of the Republicans to help the Democrats will stand out like a sore thumb. And once again, conservatives will bolt.
I no longer look to the Institutional Republican party with any affection or trust. I have seen them screw the country over too many times, sucking up to the Democrats. I will stay registered in the Republican party until after the nominating process is over, because we have to fight for Patriots in local offices. None of those are in the Democratic Party, and we have to support those that exist in the Republican. I expect that if electoral politics are still relevant by 2014, there will be some sort of Patriot Party under whatever name. And I rather suspect that Sarah will be there.
6) Will electoral politics be relevant in 2014, or even in 2012? Even my less pessimistic friends [yes, Clay, I’m looking at you] who used to think that I was being overly cynical are now acknowledging that it must be a factor to be considered.
a) On September 27, 2011 Democrat Governor Beverly Purdue publicly called for the cancellation of the elections in 2012.
b) At the same time, Peter Orzag, up until recently Obama’s White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget; published an article in THE NEW REPUBLIC, a magazine known for floating Democrat ideas to see the reaction. In the article he called for reducing the amount of democracy in the American political system to make it more efficient, and turning over many functions of elected officials to appointed “non-political” boards.
c) On September 29, 2011, Van Jones, former Obama-appointed Czar and organizer of the #Occupy movement promised an “American Fall” akin to the “Arab Spring” where the governments were overthrown.
7) So we fight the electoral battle, knowing that between threats of cancellation, rebellion, and vote fraud that it may not mean anything. Why?
First, because that is the battlefield that we are facing now. We cannot yield to either manifestation of TWANLOC and give them a free victory. We are not Institutional Republicans and we do not engage in pre-emptive surrender. Especially since we know that any loss by our side may be the end of a Constitutional republic. So we fight on. And hell, we may actually win; although the odds are against it.
Second, because every battle shapes the next battlefield. And if we are forced to cross the Clausewitzian “=” sign it cannot be before conditions allow it. I know that Draco and some others have read Clausewitz’ On War. I reference Book 1, Chapter 1, Item 23:
The war of a community—of whole nations and particularly of civilised nations—always starts from a political condition, and is called forth by a political motive. It is therefore a political act.
It is frequently mis-stated as “War is politics carried on by other means.”, which is the equation I refer to. And that is one interpretation. But there is also the interpretation that war and its means, must accord with the political goal they are intended to achieve. Further, that the means of war are circumscribed by the political realities surrounding it. Something we see everywhere our troops are engaged.
People were not ready to take up arms and reject what was, after all, their legitimate government and ruler King George III in 1764 when the Currency Act came from London in 1764, or the Stamp Act and Quartering Act in 1765. People met. They remonstrated with the Crown. They petitioned. They insisted upon their rights as Englishmen, which were theirs as subjects of the Crown. And they were ignored, or insulted and abused. Petitions were met with further Parliamentary Acts; the Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts.
There was a decade of political and social conflict before the will of the American people crystallized, and indeed we became Americans instead of British. The British were no longer our countrymen. The Sons of Liberty, the Minutemen, the Continental Line did not spring forth full-formed, armed and panoplied from Athena’s brow. They were the product of a political struggle over that preceding decade.
That struggle was the necessary precursor before this:
could occur, followed by this:
If our forefathers [Yeah, the branches of my family came from Germany in the 1880’s and China in the 1920’s; it is part of the miracle of America-that-was-and-will-be-again that they are the forefathers of all who become Americans.] had not engaged in the political struggle, if they had not put their collective asses on the line, if they had not risked death by overt and covert government means; then the combined militias of all the villages around Concord and Lexington would not have engaged the British at Merriam’s Corner and chased them back to be besieged in Boston. Without the spirit of American Liberty having become part of the air that we breathe beforehand; when Patrick Henry drew the line of “Liberty or Death” in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Speaker would have had the Sgt. At Arms arrest him and deliver him to the Royal Governor on a charge of Treason.
Without the constant political agitation of Patriots from the 1760’s on, the words of James Otis [who himself eventually died from injuries sustained in a beating by Crown agents] would not have come true in the 1770’s. We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills … we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.
Do I think that we will, in fact, triumph politically in a sort of electoral Cannae that breaks the power of TWANLOC? No, for I am not an optimist. Do I think that what we do will shape the battlefield for struggles to come; perhaps struggles when all turns on the efforts of Oathkeepers? I think, I hope, it is so; for the sake of my children, my countrymen and their children.
Do I think that we will all meet at the end atop the equivalent of Redoubt #10? I KNOW that is not so, and can only hope that there are enough who make it to keep faith with those who do not make it to the end.
We walk in the footsteps of giants.
REMEMBER WHO WE ARE.
LC Subotai Bahadur, Lord Pao An