GOP Should Seek Clarity

The DC Examiner:

Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?

One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?)
By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.

Read the whole thing.

Tommorrow.

I feel like Tommorrow means something, and I feel like it doesn't. It seems to me that we have but one final chance to pull back from the abyss, from the slow strangling descent into a New Class-managed Dark Age. On the other hand, even the forlorn hope of Dem-Plosion will result in nothing but the opportunity to slowly slip the Progressive Leviathan's grip. That crazed radical Paul Ryan, the man who's out of his mind, is planning on taking the next 75 years to restore us to fiscal sanity.

Given the high that the Democrats experienced 2 years ago, I don't know how the GOP can claim a mandate for their more radical (and necessary) plans. It might not at all be possible to forestall the utter and complete collapse of legitimacy.

The people are sick of Democrats. They're sick of Republicans, too. They're sick of "independents". They're bone-weary of Congress, the White House, the lobbyists, the activists, bureaucrats, the media. Everyone but the army can go to hell as far as most voters are concerned.

If that keeps up, then some tommorrow down the road, the other shoe will drop.

Conservative Priorities

Over at The Other McCain, Smitty has a solid post, Dodging Federalism, in which he points out that fiscal conservativism must come before social conservatism:

Social conservatives, and I am one, need to grasp that worrying about private behavior at the Federal level (e.g. variations of marriage) sets the precedent for much evil, like abortions and the Department of Education...

Traditions are organic; politics are plastic. The one can support the other, but cannot substitute for it.