Lies My RINO Told Me

here are other lies that are endlessly repeated, but these are the top five. We hear them every two years, and frankly, they are getting stale

Lies My RINO Told Me

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Every election cycle we hear the same arguments from the RINO/Establishment class. These claims cannot be justified in any way, and yet they are articles of faith, venerated words of wisdom, absolutes in the political world, and the Establishment asks us, nay demands, we follow their prescribed political program lest disaster overtake us. These overarching truths have little to no evidence to support them, and at this point, given the utter failure of their employment in the real world of electoral politics, can be classified as outright lies. Their purpose is to anesthetize the Conservative base, to lull us back into our collective intellectual coma, to force us off the field so that the elites can continue to run the show. What, pray tell, are these lies?

Lie #1 - There is a Conservative Litmus test for candidates and we refuse to accept any but the most pure of heart.

This particular error was recently promoted atAmerican Thinker by Mark Griswald who stated:

“And Republicans, or should I say a subset of Republicans, engage in a quadrennial event referred to by some as the conservative litmus test, or the circular firing squad, in which they enjoy comparing their chosen Republican presidential candidate to Ronald Reagan and comparing every other Republican candidate to Karl Marx (or possibly Groucho Marx).  The length of this festival of futility usually runs from late November in the year preceding a presidential election and can end as late as the first Wednesday in November of the following year if the Democrat ends up winning the general election.”

This is demonstrably false. At this very moment in the political season Donald Trump is well in the lead of the Republican field. Trump is in no way Ronald Reagan; he doesn’t even play him on TV. Trump has never been a staunch Conservative, and yet he is wildly popular among many of these benighted litmus test shooters. The reasons for Trump’s popularity are outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say it is largely because he is not Jeb Bush, or any subset thereof. And he stands for something, rather than offering the same content-free kumbaya speeches we have come to expect from our betters in the GOP. People will overlook a lot for some refreshing honesty. (I personally don’t see it with Trump, but that just illustrates how wrong the claim of a litmus test really is.)

Those who make this “purity” claim ignore the many Conservative supporters of George W. Bush in 2000, ignore the fact that the very same Conservatives supported his father - a proven RINO. Apparently not letting the Establishment choose the candidate is somehow, in the eyes of the RINO wing, a type of treason, as though Conservatives have no right to ask for someone who mirrors their ideals.

And given the fact that Conservatives have been betrayed over and over by people who have been our best friends until they get into office, is it any wonder we seek someone who appears honest? Take John Boehner; he was a lion of Conservatism, a man who railed against his own party for being squishy and weak. In the end Boehner morphed into Gerald R. Ford with a tan. He is not alone in this; Eric Cantor did the same. John Kasich used to be a staunch Conservative and now he bashes our side. So did Newt Gingrich. Pat Toomey. In point of fact, we have a dreary history of Washington swallowing our best and brightest (Nikki Haley being the most recent example of a turncoat Tea Party member, but there are plenty of others.)  Since we cannot trust politicians to keep faith, we must find a candidate we believe will at least be honest and not just use us to get elected.

Traitors used to be executed by firing squad. If there is a circular firing squad it is a citizen’s duty.

Reagan himself was once a Democrat, by the way, and he never stopped being one. As The Gipper himself put it, the Party left him. And Reagan made some huge errors, such as signing Simpson Simpson. But we forgave him because his heart was in the right place; he wasn’t just lying to us then turning his colors.

Lie #2 - An Angry Candidate turns off voters and is unelectable.

Is that so?  What evidence is there to support this claim, at least at the Presidential level.

We just don’t know because the GOP has not run an angry candidate. Was Romney angry? McCain was an angry man - angry at the GOP base, but lovey-dovey with the media and the Democrats. Bush Jr.? Bob Dole? Bush Sr.?  All of these candidates eschewed anger for reasonableness, for clear-headed policy wonkishness and comity. People have forgotten, but Ronald Reagan actually WAS an angry man in many ways; Reagan coined the term “liberal” as an insult, for example. Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire” and mocked Jimmy Carter with “there you go again!”.

What RINOs fail to grasp is there is a huge difference between being angry and being nasty. Reagan was righteously angry. He saw America being destroyed by the Left and by the petty power dreams of Democrats and fellow traveler-Republicans. He would never have been elected had he NOT been angry. But he was not nasty, and he balanced his anger with his optimism. Sadly, we are told to not be angry and to hold a false sense of optimism. These things are evident to voters, who can smell b.s. A Republican who is NOT angry comes across as a smarmy politician, someone who doesn’t believe in what he says but is simply trying to win votes for his political fortunes. Barack Obama has wrecked the country; that must make one angry.

And Reagan proves the point that there is no Conservative Litmus test.

Richard Nixon was seen as an angry man, and yet he was elected to office. Only Barry Goldwater could be defined as an angry GOP loser.

So there really is no evidence that being angry means you are going to lose.

American Thinker’s local Establishmentarian James Arlandson thinks so. In his AT piece he states:

“Trump:
He was much smoother this time – getting better each time.  His bluntness appeals to certain voters.  Was Nikki Haley right about loudest voices and anger from some in the GOP?  Yes, Trump says.  “I am angry!”  Then he gave a rundown of the country’s mess, saying our country is run by incompetent people”
[...]
“The selfie voters and forty-two percent see, I believe, exactly what he says: an angry man.  Will this appeal to them?  Highly doubtful.”

And yet Trump is the epitome of a crossover candidate, one who is appealing to new demographics.

#3 - Republican candidates must appeal to the center to win the general election.

Arlandson also argues that point in his piece:

“What do the selfie- voters and the forty-two percent see?  A confident man.  But is he too conservative for them?  The primary voters need to take that into consideration.  They also see someone who, in my view, is not that appealing in the externals.  He seems a little too scary, as if he would move too fast as president.”

What does James Alandson base this determination on?  In the usual RINO fashion he is saying we cannot win with bold colors, but must rather offer soft pastels. Conservatism is not a popular thing, we are told, and we must move to the center, be all things to all people, and coax the voters with likeable personalities and content-free campaigns.

How well has that worked out for us?  Since 1984 the GOP has offered this same campaign stratagem, and it has been at it’s absolute best a recipe for a photo finish. Bush Sr. won only because he claimed the mantle of Reagan. Bush Jr. actually lost the first election and won by a slim margin his re-election - at a time of war when Americans are loathe to change horses midstream. We’ve had a parade of “bum of the month” candidates; Romney, McCain, Dole. Prior to Reagan we had milquetoast candidates such as Gerald Ford. The GOP has offered only three actual Conservatives since the Roaring ‘20’s and Calvin Coolidge, and only one of them lost. But we are told with absolute confidence that Conservatism is a loser.

Where is the evidence? 

(By the way, what does “move to fast as President” mean?  Has Mr. Arlandson missed the fact that Barack Hussein Obama moved faster than a jackrabbit in love and was re-elected by a solid majority?)

#4 We have to choose our candidate based on “electability”.

Robert Morrison appeals to this RINO argument at AT as well:

“But we cannot discount likeability. George W. Bush doubtless owes his two squeaker elections to things like Al Gore’s impatient sighs in the 2000 debates and blueblood John Kerry’s haughty disdain for his opponent four years later.
Ted Cruz has made a point of his willingness to buck the Establishment in Washington. That’s certainly positive. But he has seemingly bucked everyone else, too. There are virtually no endorsements of Cruz from any of his congressional colleagues. He also seems not to know how far to take his criticisms. He called his own Majority Leader a liar on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That conduct used to get a senator censured. Question: If he cannot get along with his own party members, how likely is he to get along with any of the Opposition?”

Who exactly decides the “likeability” factor? It is generally the news media, the Democratic Party, and the Establishment wing of the GOP.

Mr. Morrison seems to think that being unpopular with his colleagues makes Ted Cruz “unlikable” but isn’t that rather a testament to his honorable nature?  During the election of 2008 we were told about how John McCain’s “maverick” status was such a boon, and yet now Ted Cruz’s same status is “unlikeability”. McCain WAS unlikable; a testy old codger who would have been yelling at children on his lawn had he not been running for President. And McCain’s most unlikable feature was his tendency to knife his own friends in the back. McCain’s “maverick” status was conferred on him because he bucked his conservative base on numerous issues. Cruz bucks his RINO colleagues in the Senate to fulfill his campaign promises. Who is the more likable?

So often the RINOs cite William F. Buckley’s polemic about supporting the most conservative candidate who can win. I would suggest we modify that adage to say we should support the most delectable Conservative who won’t betray us. Recent history has been most unkind in that regard, and as a result far too often we end up with a Progressive instead of a Conservative. America has continues it’s long, horrible slide into the abyss precisely because we keep nominating candidates who are great lions until they get into office then move to the left. We cannot make any headway in rolling back any of the things the Left has shoved down our throats because our side is afraid to fight. Even if we are going to lose, better to die as brave men, with one swift stroke of the sword, than cowering in our beds, hemorrhaging from a thousand paper cuts.

Morrison also argues that we must be immigration friendly to a fault, which brings us to RINO lie #5:

#5 “We cannot restrict immigration - either legal or illegal - or we will suffer political catastrophe”.

Morrison argues at the end of his piece that a desire to restrict immigration is a political loser and the Party will suffer. He claims Eisenhower and Reagan prove that being immigration friendly is critical to success.

Interesting; Ike kicked nearly two million people out of the country with Operation Wetback. Reagan tried to tighten border security after the Simpson Rizzoli Simpson amnesty, and he always called that his biggest blunder. Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, shutting immigration down completely.

The “Know Nothing” Party opposing immigration in a nation with a large frontier that is labor starved is a world of difference to a reasonable desire to stop millions of people from pouring in illegally at a time when our nation is heavily populated and unemployment or underemployment is rampant, when America is threatened by terrorists who can walk across the border, where political correctness and multiculturalism guarantees that the new immigrants are unassimilatable. America is the third most populous nation on Earth, yet we take in the highest number of immigrants of any country by far. Any reasonable person asked believes we should restrict people from breaking and entering. Nobody is asking for restricted LEGAL immigration (which, frankly, we need to restrict at this point and is popular with the American people https://www.numbersusa.com/news/poll-majority-americans-do-not-favor-higher-legal-immigration-recognize-current-levels). But that isn’t good enough for the RINO class, the whores to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who want foreign labor because it is cheap. Closing the border is popular with the public, no matter what the GOP elites would have us believe. Even legal immigrants like the idea.

And nobody except Muslims and politicians worry about pausing immigration from ISIS controlled territory. This is entirely common sense, yet the GOP Establishment argues we have no right to stop anyone from coming here.

But the RINO position is that we must not stop people from coming here - period.

And this is justified by the argument that we must have the Latino vote to win elections. Well, first off, what does that actually accomplish? Our purpose is to unify the country. Pandering to a Balkanized voting block does nothing but feed the current crisis. Also, it is not true that we need Hispanics to win; Mitt Romney would still have lost had he garnered a majority of Hispanic votes. He would have had to win the whole enchilada; he was too weak with his traditional base for Hispanic votes to matter. The GOP can win without the Latinos.

There are other lies that are endlessly repeated, but these are the top five. We hear them every two years, and frankly, they are getting stale. I wish the RINO community would at least try to update their arguments, give us something fresh for a change.

Better yet go away. We’ve had enough of your condescension.

By Timothy Birdnow 

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Joseph F Barber