DANIEL GREENFIELD: NO COUNTRY FOR LIBERAL REPUBLICANS
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/no-country-for-liberal-republicans/
To the left there is no such thing as a good Republican. Not unless he is a dead Republican.
Dead Republicans are held up as examples of moderation who wouldn’t fit in today’s extremist party. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, once damned as deranged extremists lusting to blow up the planet, are temporarily rehabilitated and compared unfavorably to today’s Republicans and favorably to today’s Democrats.
From such exercises in posthumous political rehabilitation, we learn that Reagan was more like Obama and that whichever Republican has drawn the ire of the media this month is the rebirth of segregationist Democrats like Albert Gore Sr and Robert Byrd.
The good Republican who has the bad taste to stay alive will only enjoy a temporary vacation in the good graces of the media. It does not matter how often he pays fealty to global warming, gun control, gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens, or his willingness to appear on morning shows to bemoan the extremism of the Tea Party; the time will come when he will be dragged out of the Saturday Night Live studio and the CNN green room, hung from a tree and beaten with a stick for the enlightenment of the people.
There is no help for it.
The good Republican is the living exception that proves the rule that all other Republicans exist only to take food stamps out of the mouths of welfare recipients when they aren’t randomly pointing at maps and bombing countries. His job is to agree with the mainstream media on every important issue, but is allowed to maintain his ‘pragmatic’ credentials with occasional decorative budget cuts that are vociferously protested by activist groups more for the publicity than because of their negligible impact.
And then one day, suddenly, the good Republican who has held all the right opinions, is pounced on, beaten, bloodied and dragged through the mud. At innumerable sweaty press conferences held to apologize for some sin that wouldn’t even make the last minute of the evening news if it were carried out by a member of the progressive club in good standing, the former media darling wonders why this is happening to him. It is happening to him because the left doesn’t believe in exceptions to its rules.
The good Republican thought that he had made peace with the left. All he ever had was a temporary truce of mutual convenience that ended once he moved from convenient to competitor.
In the last two elections, the bloodthirsty neo-confederate party of hate served up a liberal Republican, currently championing Obama’s illegal alien amnesty, and a liberal Republican, currently being blamed by Obama supporters for inspiring ObamaCare. Its fantasy candidate for the upcoming election had spent the last election hugging Obama, and then signed off on tuition for illegal aliens and banned gay conversion therapy, and was, until a few weeks ago, being praised as the ultimate good Republican; only to be subjected to the same ritual media humiliations as McCain and Romney.
The same media that insisted that the murder of four Americans in Benghazi was not a scandal and that the murder of Brian Terry in Operation Fast and Furious was not a scandal is bleating that a little traffic is a scandal. Not a little traffic in assault rifles, as in Fast and Furious, but in the distance between cars.
During the government shutdown, Obama escalated his political war with Congress by barricading war memorials, shutting down private parks and shuttering private restaurants.
Senior citizens were left homeless when they were evicted from cabins on Federal land and inns were forcibly shut down by park rangers who were deployed to keep watch to see that no one went inside. Joggers on Federal land were given tickets and veterans were barred from entering their own memorials. When a group of elderly tourists tried to take a photo of Yellowstone erupting, armed rangers showed up to bellow at them that they were illegally “recreating”.
A park ranger admitted to the Washington Times, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can.” If Christie was indeed responsible for Bridgegate, he was only following in Obama’s footsteps.
But no one in the national media thought Shutdowngate was worth commenting on. It wasn’t as if it involved something as grave and serious as New Jersey traffic.
A senior Hillary adviser had orchestrated a Gore primary win by sending the environmental activist’s motorcade to tie up traffic to prevent Bradley voters from reaching the polls. But that was New Hampshire traffic which is in a whole different moral universe than New Jersey traffic.
There are two wholly different sets of rules for the left and right sides of the political interstate.
In the last election, Mitt Romney had been dubbed a gaffe-prone idiot for expressing concerns about security at the London Olympics, which was then in a shambles, while Obama’s belief that Austrian was a language and that the country he was aspiring to lead had 57 states were put down to tiredness.
According to the media, a gaffe is something that a Republican says. A scandal is something that a Republican does.
There are two lanes of political traffic in the media. One is reserved for the left and the other for everyone to the right of the left.
The good Republican imagines that if he is decently centrist enough, he will be allowed to drive on the luxurious wide lane to the left where all traffic violations are forgiven and there is no speed limit, but unfortunately for him, he is still stuck in the same right lane as Michele Bachmann, Allen West and all the other enemies of the state where driving at any speed is considered an unsafe traffic violation.
In a country where the center is defined by the institutions of the left, the center ceases to exist. That center which the good Republican strives for is a mirage made of moonbeams and shifting goal posts.
Good Republicans don’t win elections. No “moderate” Republican has made it through two terms in office since Eisenhower in the fifties. Ike’s vice president was impeached and his vice president’s vice president lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush, a centrist figure, lost to Bill Clinton, while his son, who was mocked by the progressive intelligentsia as a warmongering chimp, got his full two terms.
In a radical country, the good Republican has no future. The Mensheviks did not survive the Bolsheviks and the good Republicans will not survive the Democracy Alliance, the Center for American Progress and the whole leftist network weaving its web around the Democratic Party and the rest of the country.
This is no country for good Republicans, for good government pragmatists and for centrists and liberals. To the left, a good Republican isn’t someone who shares their views on gay marriage, abortion, global warming and gun control. The only good Republican to the left is a dead or disgraced Republican.
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