Ouch

I'm not a fan of appealing to comedy to make a political point, but I almost felt sorry for the GOP with this one:

At the end of the day, charging forth into battle with the GOP on your side is like storming the beaches with an accordion.  They have proven themselves worthless time and time again.  Reagan was a fluke, not the rule.  While I have no doubt about the sincerity of some in the GOP, the party as a whole looks on people like me as an annoyance at best.  And when it comes to fighting for the most important virtues and truths, I don't see them being worth much in the long run. 

And I know, there isn't much else politically to grab at this point.  Nonetheless, I never kid myself that the GOP is, at best, like grabbing a life preserver that is taking on water.  

Why orthodox Christians putting their hope in the GOP is a profitless endeavor.

Exhibit A.

Of course the problem isn't the bill, which goes out of its way to enshrine gay marriage as a core American value.  It's that it accepts the premise that once you let those rascally conservative republicans do something like limit abortion rights, the next thing you'll have is lynchings and gas chambers and women dying in back allies and tortured homosexuals.  That's what this bill was all about, riding that wave of media hysteria that claimed with Roe overturned, the next thing they'll do is go after gays, interracial marriages, and other nasty things. 

The idea that 'once a conservative wins, the universe is that much closer to exploding' is an oft invoked media narrative.  Time and again whenever the press reports on a conservative proposal, it's framed as either an immediate threat to various groups, or a stepping stone toward Jim Crow, swastikas and pogroms.

The Republicans who voted for this are either too thick to know this, or they don't care because they are no more conservative than Bernie Sanders.  Or, like many conservatives, they operate on the idea that if we just insist we're not like those nasty racist sexist bigot conservatives over there, they'll like us - they'll really, really like us!  Foolishness of the highest order.

In any event, the GOP is all there is for those who don't want to support a party beholden to the secular paganism of the global Left.  Those who don't want to crawl into a cell and let the world burn that is.  Because the Left is a movement increasingly clear in its designs to destroy liberty, freedom, equality and the sanctity of life.  

Nonetheless, never forget how flawed this alliance is for those who seek the right means to the right ends.  At best it is the least of the evils.  At worst it's a terrible and ultimately fruitless waste of time. 

Why conservatism never wins

Because, well, define conservative.  I remember ages ago, in the stone age of higher education, we used to have 'comment boards'.  Those were bulletin boards where people would post an article or even write up a little paper, tack it to the board, and await comments.  One I recall was a story about how Scottish Fundamentalists had derided Jerry Falwell as a liberal.  I knew then that the term 'liberal' no longer had any meaning.  Conservative, too.

Donald McCleary, at the always interesting and informative The American Catholic, had this little reminder about why conservatism is a doomed alliance for Christians.  Not because of any evil or wicked conspiracy to destroy.  It's just that change, as they say, is inevitable.  So with each passing generation, what conservative means changes as new generations seek to 'conserve' entirely new understandings of what needs conserving. 

My oldest son, who had flirted with a career in politics, noticed that.  Since he takes his Catholic faith pretty seriously, he couldn't align with the Democrats, though he didn't say they were always wrong about everything.  Nonetheless, he felt the Republican Party was the better bet, all things considered.  Yet as he mixed and mingled, he noticed something.  Beyond the obvious, that many in the GOP are no more conservative than a liberal Democrat, he noticed many who called themselves conservative weren't what you would think was conservative at all.  This was especially true among the younger conservative Republican sector.

Many his age or thereabouts had no problem with LGBTQ interests or gay marriage.  They might oppose abortion, but to a limited degree.  Or they may be more open to it.  Perhaps socialism does work in some cases.   America is and always has been a racist nation, that much is true.  And on and on.   These were, again, the ones his age who wore the label 'conservative GOP' with honor. 

That's because that's what they've been born and raised into.  They may not go crazy communist or want America and the Christian West burned to the ground.  That's how they understand themselves as conservative.  But the conservatism they espouse are things that may well have shamed a 1960's counterculture hippie broadening his mind at Haight and Ashbury. After all, to many my sons' age, what us old timers call radical left is as 'status quo' as a tent revival was in the 1920s.  

That's why conservatism loses.  At the end of the day, it sees itself all too often as merely conservative compared to the liberalism it opposes.  That is, it stays firmly three steps behind and four years away from liberalism.  But as liberalism, or change, or progress, moves inevitably farther and farther away from today, the conservative inevitably moves, too.  He may still be three steps behind, but now he's five miles away from what older conservatives ever would have identified with.  He's still conservative compared to the liberals he sees, but he misses that the conservatism he's defending would likely have been too liberal even for yesterday's liberals. 

By the by, that might also explain why so many from my Protestant days who aligned so strongly with the Religious Right and conservative Republicans are the ones partying at gay wedding receptions and calling down religious liberty as the systemically white racist trick that it is.  They're still conservative Christians. And they're doing what conservative Christians do, and that's conserve.  It's just that they're now conserving what they and most 20 years ago would have condemned.  Such is conservatism in a nutshell. 

The birth of Jesus has served its purpose

Yep.  It's that time of year again, when we can stop wasting time with that Jesus born in a manger rubbish and get on with the next consumer feeding frenzy.  

I love the two shoppers looking at the paltry remnants on the shelves.  It's as if the store is saying, "Sorry about your luck, but you should have given a damn about Jesus a week ago when it was good for the bottom line!"

Ages from now conservatism's blind, slavish devotion to corporate interests and board room priorities in the name of defending Capitalism and the Free Market will be seen as one of the great strategic blunders of human history.  A free market is one thing.  A soulless consumerism that becomes so jaded it can watch corporate interests piss all over the sacred and virtuous for a buck is a threat to our most cherished values.  The result of ignoring this fact speaks for itself as we watch corporatism emerge as one of the single greatest threats to all we hold dear that we've ever encountered.  

I'm disappointed but not surprised

One reason we have a president like Donald Trump is that American conservatives were tired of being shafted by the only party that wasn't at war with them.  As the March of Youth for Liberalism this weekend demonstrated, there is no level to which the American Left won't sink in order to gin up support for its cause.  That the overwhelming majority of the march was focused on issues and solutions that would barely phase the majority of casualties in our modern age of violence is entirely irrelevant.  It was using kids as shields for the greater cause of teaching a new generation to demand 'other' Americans sacrifice for their safety.

Conservatives have been fighting this growing plague for decades, turning to the only party not wholly and entirely invested in the post-Christian, post-Western, post-nationalist Left emerging across America and Europe.  And yet that same party continues to payback their support with the most limp-wristed, lame and impotent responses.

So whatever has happened in this charade of budget deadlines and budge compromises, there has been one ongoing consistent: Planned Parenthood continues to be funded at all times.  Supposedly conservatives are continuing to insist that abortion is the great moral crisis of our age.  After all, eliminate the right to life before it begins, and all other rights fade away.  Even as many post-conservative Christians throw abortion under the bus in order to curry favor with the pro-population control Left, conservatives are supposed to be about keeping it a central issue of the day.

So what happened?  Once again, the Republican majority congress sent a temporary budget to Donald Trump - their knight in shiny armor - that ensured Planned Parenthood would continue to be funded.  Supposedly this is why Trump was brought in, even if his own views on defunding Planned Parenthood, just like most of his views, were not easy to pinpoint.

But we know for a fact that each time he has had the chance, he has done nothing to get the Republicans, who control congress, to actually do one of the chief policy demands of conservatives, and that's defund planned parenthood.

It's been compared to Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, the way the GOP has treated American Christian conservatives over the last couple decades.  Sometimes, I'm inclined to agree.

…Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), joked that “It’s a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni…wait, what?”

The difference between Trump and Sanders

As my son put it, Trump says what he wants to say.  Sanders says what he means to say.  This isn't an endorsement of Sanders, BTW.  I cannot - I will not - endorse a politician who is part of a party that has embraced a movement dedicated to my elimination.  Liberalism, as it is commonly known, is allied with one of the great heresies of the ages, one that sports blasphemy, debauchery, apathy, narcissism and tyranny as its end game.  That's not to say the GOP is God's party.  It isn't.  It never has been.  When I was a Protestant minister, I was hard pressed to find many colleagues who didn't view the GOP, and Conservatism in general, as a force that was simply less hostile to the Faith and its beliefs. Not that it wasn't hostile.  It simply was less so.

But Trump and, to a lesser extent, Cruz? Hillary's only hope is for them to get the nomination, and that's saying something.   As I'm seeing more and more, the legacy of Obama is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  A radical left of left socialist, and a demagogue who taps into the worst stereotypes of those he says he wishes to represent.  2016 should be interesting.

Rush Limbaugh doesn't get it

Rush Limbaugh represents one of the most difficult Republican demographics.  His is the portion of the party that believes it's kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and if you can't put a price tag on it and sell it, what the hell are we talking about it for anyway?  I don't listen to Rush that much, though I try to hear when I have the chance, so my opinions are formed by what I hear him say.  I happened to hear him the day after the election.  OK, I admit, I made sure I heard him, because I was curious about what his take would be.

He rightly poo-pooed the notion that Republicans lost because they're too conservative, too pro-life, too anti-gay, sexist, or racist.  The Republican party has fought those labels for years, and sometimes prevailed despite them.  Though I admit, with the shifting demographics, and the ease with which up and coming minorities accept that portrayal, it does make me wonder what future the Republican party has. 

Nonetheless, it clearly wasn't that.  On one level, yes, we are becoming a more liberal nation.  The votes to allow gay marriage and legal pot were just small examples.  Things like gay marriage, legalized drugs, and free contraception are increasingly seen as important as the right to private property or free speech used to be.  But there are still enough people who don't accept those things, that the Republicans, with the right candidate, might be able to bring them together.  Who knows?

But what it wasn't about was a bunch of sissy, lazy pantywaists who just want to live on the government dole, who have no ambition, and who are useless drains on society because all they want is a handout.  He mentions nothing about Romney's flip-flops.  He mentions nothing about Romney's 47% speech.  He mentions nothing about Romney giving the impression that, once elected, he might not care about all that social conservative bull.  Yes, I ended up voting for Romney, as I said, to stop what I perceived as a greater threat to my nation and my liberty.  But it was the most half-hearted lever pull I've made since I started voting. Those things were missed by Mr. Limbaugh, in favor of insisting it's all about the green stuff and those who want as much of it as possible. 

Mark Shea once rightly said that the Middle Class who once laughed along with Rush Limbaugh is now the Middle Class that Rush Limbaugh laughs at.  I think he was right.  There is a segment of non-progressives in America who care for large bank accounts, and the right to bomb any country that gets in the way of said bank accounts, and that seems to be about it.  As long as they dominate the national face of the party, my guess is the average voter with a mortgage and a dwindling savings account will have a hard time getting behind a group of people who increasingly seem as if they have no intention of getting behind them.