Appearing on Sean Hannity’s syndicated radio show, Ann Coulter continued her defense of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, telling the Fox host that her fellow conservatives unfairly paint the Republican governor as “too liberal.”
Coulter Swipes At Palin In Comment On Thatcher
April 9, 2013 by 6 Comments
Where The Conservative Media Went Wrong
November 28, 2012 by 13 Comments
Conservative columnist and author Ann Coulter is trying to rationalize her outspoken support for Mitt Romney in the wake of his stunning defeat. “Romney was not the problem” is the title over her latest column. “Don’t Blame Romney” was the title over her column immediately after his defeat. “Romney is What the Country Needs Now” was the title over her column just before the election. She had confidently predicted a Romney victory, tweeting, “I can’t see a scenario where Romney wins less than 273 electoral votes.”
Since the stakes were so high, it is imperative that if conservative columnists and commentators are going to perform a useful educational function going forward, they should realize where they went wrong and why. Michael Barone, who had predicted a Romney landslide win, tells PJ Media that Romney was “outhustled in a base turnout election” and that voter fraud was not a significant factor.
Steve Baldwin, former Executive Director of the Council for National Policy and a former California state legislator, says the problem all along was that “…as any conservative from Massachusetts knew, Romney was a liberal at heart who, as Governor, led the nation in passing three of the left’s most sacred issues: Same sex marriage, Cap and Trade, and government control of health care.” Baldwin’s report, The Buying of a Movement, contends that Romney never had a conservative worldview but that he cultivated support among important parts of the conservative movement and media in order to remake himself for a presidential run. However, a significant number of conservatives nationwide clearly did not buy the argument that Romney was a legitimate conservative. They found their voice in websites like Renew America, founded by Stephen Stone and associated with Alan Keyes.
One of these issues—same-sex marriage—is worth a detailed examination. After attending Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida, Ronald Radosh reports that leading conservative analysts and political leaders have concluded that the Republican Party has to move left on issues like illegal immigration and cultural issues. Regarding the latter, he notes that gay marriage initiatives were passed in four states on November 6. “We need a truce on divisive social issues” is supposed to be one of the verdicts from these conservative thinkers.
They need to think harder. First, the movement for gay rights, which is funded by billionaires like George Soros and rich homosexuals, will not accept a truce. Second, in the four states where gay marriage won on the ballot on November 6, the vote tallies against gay marriage surpassed the vote totals for Romney. In Maryland, Romney was behind the vote for traditional marriage by 12 points. This is telling. It means that a certain number of people voted against Obama’s position on gay marriage, but they did not vote for Romney. This suggests that Romney failed to galvanize social conservatives on his behalf.
Although Romney’s position was that he was in favor of traditional marriage, he did not campaign on the issue. What’s more, he had said publicly that the spontaneous public protests in favor of Chick-fil-A over its CEO’s comments in favor of traditional marriage were not part of his campaign. In addition, during the campaign, he reiterated his support for opening up the Boy Scouts to homosexuals.
Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel recognizes the political reality. On the group’s “Faith and Freedom” radio show, he pointed out that Romney failed to speak out in favor of traditional marriage, including in the four states with gay marriage on the ballot. In addition to Maryland, they were Minnesota, Maine, and Washington. “Had he done so,” Staver said, “his numbers would’ve gone up and I bet the marriage polls would’ve gone up.” Instead, he noted, Romney was a “one-note” candidate who focused almost exclusively on the economy.
George W. Bush, when he was running for re-election in 2004, was smart enough to realize that he should campaign for president by emphasizing support for traditional marriage. Bush had endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Many commentators believe that the anti-gay marriage measures on the ballots in 11 states in 2004 helped drive Bush’s re-election. The ballot measures passed easily, receiving on average roughly 70 percent support. The belief is that some of this support went to Bush as a result of his campaign emphasizing traditional marriage. In other words, social conservatives were motivated to go to the polls, and some of this support rubbed off on Bush. In the swing state of Ohio, which Bush won, it was seen as critical.
The rationale behind Romney’s candidacy was that the economy would propel him to victory. How many times did we hear the claim that “No President since FDR has been re-elected when unemployment is above 8 percent?” Emphasizing his business acumen, Coulter had confidently predicted, “Romney will be the most accomplished incoming president since Dwight Eisenhower.”
Bombarded with messages from the Obama campaign and the Soros-funded propaganda machine, including the Super PACs he funded, voters found Romney’s private sector experience on Wall Street and wealth more objectionable than Obama’s record as a Marxist president. Of course, Romney, acting on the advice of Karl Rove, never uttered the word “Marxist” or “socialist” when talking about Obama. Romney ran a campaign that was designed in part to win the votes of those who went for Obama in 2008. It was a disaster in the making that many prominent conservatives in the media did not see coming. Some still do not want to grasp the magnitude of the defeat.
Read more stories like this at www.AIM.org.
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons)
Ann Coulter ‘Too Hateful’ To Speak, But Bestiality Speaker Okay
November 19, 2012 by 10 Comments
A few days ago, Father Joseph McShane S.J., the president of New York’s Fordham University, called Ann Coulter “too hateful and needlessly provocative” as he ordered that she be disinvited to speak at Fordham. Then he had no trouble approving “ethicist” Peter Singer as a speaker. Singer is a man who promotes the murder of children he would consider “defective” within the first two years of their lives.
According an article in First Things magazine, “Singer has spent a lifetime justifying the unjustifiable. He is the founding father of the animal liberation movement and advocates ending “the present speciesist bias against taking seriously the interests of nonhuman animals.” He is also a defender of killing the aged (if they have dementia), newborns (for almost any reason until they are two years old), necrophilia (assuming it’s consensual), and bestiality (also assuming it’s consensual).”
In other words Singer’s “rap” sheet is as ugly as sin. As the founder of a movement elevating animals to equality with humans he has cheapened human life. He is guilty of promoting the murder of the sick and elderly in the name of convenience. He is guilty of promoting the murder of “defective” children to satisfy of his own definition of who has a right to life. He is guilty of promoting necrophilia which is nothing less than Satanic and he is guilty of promoting bestiality – a sin of the gravest degree that certain makes Satan proud.
Nevertheless, somewhere lodged in his own sick mind, Father McShane has determined that the purely political rhetoric of Ann Coulter would be more harmful to his students than the words of the monster Singer. Coulter is therefore not acceptable as a topic for free discussion at Fordham.
The worst thing about Singer is his endearing nature. He is a perfect earthly representative of Satan. By all accounts he is an unassuming charming man who hides behind the same type of masks captured Nazis did when they were put on trial. Despite being evil incarnate they also looked grandfatherly and harmless.
Shame on you, Father McShane! When I was a Catholic grade school student what you are doing was described to me as placing myself or someone else in the near occasion of sin. The question is as always: Why won’t Jesuits defend Catholic doctrine?
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons)
The Republican Party Is An Insane Political Asylum!
November 14, 2012 by 7 Comments
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” Albert Einstein
In the end, it was another Democratic Party rout. On Election Day, President Obama defeated Mitt Romney by over three million popular votes and 126 electoral votes.
The President won every battleground state except one and ushered two more Democrats in the Senate and at least seven more in the House. While Obama recorded seven million fewer votes than in 2008, Romney was one million votes shy of reaching John McCain’s losing total.
Although it was not a landslide, it was nowhere near the nail biter that many GOP pundits and consultants were predicting. In fact, many of these supposed geniuses were forecasting a Romney “landslide.” How foolish do Dick Morris and Karl Rove look today?
In their post-election analysis, many of these same “experts” are giving poisonous advice to a party in serious trouble. They are recommending that the party move in the direction of Democrats on issues such as illegal immigration, gay marriage, drug use, taxes, and abortion to name a few. Following such advice would be the death knell of the Republican Party.
To succeed, the GOP must stand for principles that are starkly different from the Democratic Party; otherwise, there is no compelling reason for any voter to support the Republican Party. Unfortunately, the Republican Party is controlled by the moderate “country club” establishment wing, also known as Republicans in Name Only (RINOS).
This controlling faction is opposed to a true conservative ever getting the nomination of the party. The party establishment has successfully destroyed every conservative candidate for the nomination since Ronald Reagan.
The result is that the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The RINOS have given us Gerald Ford, Bush Sr. and Jr., Bob Dole, John McCain, and, most recently, Mitt Romney.
As is custom, in the last primary season, every viable conservative candidate was savaged by the party elite who backed Romney’s candidacy. They were joined by the Fox News commentators, powerful pollsters like Karl Rove and Dick Morris, and influential columnists like George Will and Ann Coulter. All of them claimed the Romney was the most electable candidate; and, in the end, all of them were quite wrong.
After a billion dollars wasted on feckless advertising, Romney could not even match McCain’s pathetic level of support. He did not inspire or motivate the conservative GOP base and thus lost a quarter of the evangelical vote on Election Day. These voters knew Romney was uncomfortable with social issues and had switched his position on everything from gay marriage to abortion.
In the general election, Romney did not employ the same hard ball tactics against Barack Obama that he effectively used against his GOP opponents in the primary season. Like John McCain in 2008, Romney’s kid glove treatment of the President was an utter failure. There is no better example than in the last debate, when Romney played nice with the President and agreed with many of his positions on foreign policy. Tragically, he refused to criticize the President for his deception and disastrous handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack.
Romney’s campaign was the political equivalent of a football team playing the prevent defense, trying not to lose, but not trying to win. This led the GOP nominee to disregard the “Fast and Furious” scandal and the President’s decision to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens under the age of 30. Worst of all, the President’s unpopular plan to socialize healthcare was not attacked by the Romney campaign, thus wasting a powerful issue. As the father of socialized medicine in Massachusetts, Romney was the worst possible candidate to criticize “Obamacare,” so he solved that problem by ignoring it altogether.
Romney tried to make the entire campaign about one issue, the economy. As a result, social conservatives were given no reason to vote. The grassroots movement that delivered the House of Representatives to the Republican Party, the Tea Party, was completely ignored by the Romney campaign. Tea Party favorites like former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin were not even invited to the party’s convention in Tampa. To add insult to injury, Ron Paul delegates were rudely treated in Tampa, and many of them were denied credentials to the convention. The Romney team wanted a “unanimous” convention, but it was a counterproductive tactic as disgruntled Ron Paul supporters did not forget this disgrace on Election Day.
Will the GOP ever learn? The correct response is not to become more like Democrats but to nominate a candidate with courage who will embrace the conservative principles outlined in the Republican platform. In contrast, Mitt Romney treated the platform like it was the bubonic plague.
The quest for 2016 now begins, and this will be an effort to see whether conservatives can stay within the GOP or find a new home, as recommended by former presidential candidate Herman Cain.
To survive, Republicans cannot allow the beltway, establishment wing of the party to dictate who will be the next nominee. If so, it guarantees another loss, like Romney and his predecessors.
The next nominee cannot be another moderate flip flopper, but someone who can communicate powerful conservative principles while energizing, not insulting, the base of the party. The next nominee needs to embrace the Tea Party movement and use this enthusiastic group as the foot soldiers for the next campaign.
Over the next four years, the last thing the Republican Party should do is move more to the political left, which is already owned by the Democratic Party. Even though this was another painful defeat, Republicans should not abandon their time-tested principles; instead, they should finally start to proclaim them.
Pro-life Hero Rebukes Pseudo-pro-lifer Ann Coulter!
November 10, 2012 by 11 Comments
I knew this would happen! I predicted that Republican party apologists would blame Richard Mourdoch and Todd Akin’s losses on the fact that they are 100% pro-life, instead of acknowledging that the losses were due to how poorly they expressed their positions. And sure enough, the day after the election, Ann Coulter did just that. In her article entitled, “Don’t Blame Romney,” she spent half of the article blaming these two Senate candidates for daring to defend the life of every pre-born child. Her exact words were, “because these two idiots decided to come out against abortion in the case of rape and incest,” calling them “pro-life badasses,” “purist grandstanders,” with “insane positions,” who were “showing off.” Unfortunately, Coulter has a huge following and will surely influence many uninformed readers with her misstatement of the facts and her flawed reasoning. I have great concern that these Senate losses will have a chilling effect on pro-life legislators and voters. Hence, a swift and thorough response is in order.
Ann Coulter referenced “all the hard work intelligent pro-lifers . . . in the trenches” and what they have accomplished, as if she was one of them. Well, I’ve been in the trenches since 1995, and I must point out that Ann Coulter has been missing in action. I’ve never once seen her in here, so I can’t comprehend how she could possibly include herself in this group. I’m a hard-working intelligent pro-life activist, and I’m 100% pro-life – for good reason. I was not only conceived in rape, but nearly aborted at two back-alley abortionists. The only reason I wasn’t killed through a brutal abortion is because I was legally protected. My heroes are those pro-life legislators and activists who were hard-working and intelligent enough to understand that mine was a life worth saving.
Coulter went on to erroneously write that Mourdoch and Akin lost because they had “abortion positions that less than 1 percent of the nation agrees with.” Her figure is way off, and she has totally ignored the fact that their abortion position adheres to the Republican party platform! All she’s doing is further alienating the base. Mitt Romney alienated the base – not only by making the rape exception, but also by his own gaffes, such as when he said, “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” Pro-life leaders were left to mop up that mess, from which he never recovered. Many pro-lifers who were already skeptical either voted third-party or stayed home. Three million Republicans stayed home, compared to 2008. Making matters worse, Romney ran ads in battleground states suggesting that it’s extreme to be 100% pro-life. How could anyone deny that such ads hurt Senate candidates like Akin in Missouri, Mourdoch in Indiana, and Smith in Pennsylvania (as well as congressional candidates like Koster in Washington and Bachmann in Minnesota?) And let’s not forget how the party leadership threw these candidates under the bus – something Democrats do not do to their own.
Additionally, the 1% figure Coulter threw out there is just not even close to being true. Polls in the last few years have consistently shown that the number is between 20 to 24% of Americans who believe abortion should be illegal in cases of rape. The other 31%+ of Americans who are pro-life with exceptions are 99% of the way there, and only need to be nudged another 1%. My experience shows that this is easy to achieve – if you try, just as how my story changed the heart of Gov. Rick Perry during his presidential campaign. And that’s the key. Who has really tried? I know that the number of 100% pro-life Americans would be much higher if the pro-life movement as a whole actually went after this ground. Instead, Coulter is right in pointing out where the effort has been focused – on things like parental notification laws and efforts to ban partial birth abortion. The lives of children conceived in rape are often minimized with the standard dismissive language of: “Well, it’s only 1%.” Why continue to minimize? Why not stand up and really defend our lives? We need to try to gain ground on this issue by educating the public, by equipping candidates and legislators on how to most effectively respond to the rape question, by making ads with children conceived in rape available for anyone who wishes to utilize them, and by removing rape exceptions from the law, beginning with the Hyde Amendment.
My response to people like Ann Coulter is – WE ARE NOT CANNON FODDER! You do not get to put us out on the front lines and then take a giant step back. The “burning building” analogy fails because you have no interest in working to save all. You do not get to call yourself pro-life by shutting off the water and sending the fire trucks home, while you stand there watching the building burn down with the 1 inside of it. If you want to see who the real extremist is, Ann Coulter, come on Fox News with me, look me in the eyes, and tell me how you think my birth-mother should have been able to abort me. Tell me that my life was not worthy of protection and that I don’t deserve to be living, and I’ll show you the one who is extreme.
Some strategists will suggest that you have to accept rape exceptions in order to get candidates elected and legislation passed. This is untrue – just look at Right to Life of Michigan as the model. They have been a standard-bearer in this cause and have never accepted the rape exception. You can’t get their PAC endorsement if you make the rape exception, and they will not put their stamp of approval on legislation if it has an exception. When they didn’t have the votes to pass the ban on Medicaid funding of abortion without a rape exception, they worked on the exception-legislators to convince them to change their positions. When they still didn’t have the votes, RLM targeted them in their primaries, got them voted out, and then passed the ban without exceptions. That’s how you get it done!
Now Right to Life of Michigan has mentored many other state NRLC affiliates to go to this model of being a standard-bearer, maintaining the principle that all are worthy of protection. Since the change on their Board of Directors nearly 12 years ago, Georgia Right to Life has passed more pro-life legislation then they’d ever passed before. They were told at the time by the Republican party leaders that they were dead, irrelevant, and extremists. Now, every constitutionally-elected official – Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State -are all 100% pro-life with no exceptions. The lobbyist for Georgia Right to Life, Dan Becker, wrote a book about it, titled “Personhood: A Pragmatic Guide to Prolife Victory in the 21st Century and the Return to First Principles in Politics.” Tennessee Right to Life and Alaska Right to Life are other examples of state affiliates who successfully transitioned from the compromising model of accepting the rape exception to being a standard-bearer with no exceptions.
We must not discriminate! Children conceived in rape are surely the most outcast members of our society, being unfairly demonized and portrayed as a “horrible reminder of the rape,” “the rapist’s baby,” “tainting the gene pool,” and even “demon spawn.” This not only affects the pre-born, but also those born under such circumstances. Can you imagine if a law was introduced with an exception in cases of bi-racial rape? I could hear the rationale, “Well, it’s only 1% of 1%,” and “the child would look more like the rapist and would surely be more of a reminder of the rape” – an argument which I’ve actually heard before. There would be a national outcry for such discrimination! Civil rights leaders would be outraged and demand that the exception not only be removed, but that the legislator who introduced it must immediately step down. And yet, half of pro-lifers think nothing of discriminating against children conceived in rape, and it’s wrong!
If we are going to gain ground in this effort to protect unborn children, we must maintain a standard, and we must make more of an effort to educate. I believe that the best people to do so are those of us who have been on the frontlines as pro-life speakers who were conceived in rape and who have been spending our entire adult lives defending our right to life. We’ve heard every question, every challenge, and every argument. Why not utilize us? Just to name a few, there is Ryan Bomberger, Susan Jaramillo, and Pam Stenzel. On my website, there are dozens of stories of others conceived in rape and who became pregnant by rape. We’ve publicly shared our stories for a reason – please use them! I’m partnering with Personhood Education to form Save The 1 – an organization which will implement the strategies necessary to defend the 1%, as well as the 99%. Here are three of our new ads which will be launched soon.
Back to Ann Coulter’s article – she wrote that “No law is ever going to require a woman to bear the child of her rapist.” I don’t believe that. Laws DID protect children like me, and these protections can and should be restored. She went on to add: “Yes, it’s every bit as much a life as an unborn child that is not the product of rape.” Ann, your words speak volumes as to what you really believe. A preborn child is not an “it.” He or she is a life, a human being, a person, a son or a daughter. They have a gender. This is not a mere philosophical or political exercise, but real people’s lives are at stake. When I represented the mother in Michigan’s “frozen embryo” case, the fertility doctors testified at deposition that from one cell, they are literally male and female, and ascertainably so! Just as it says in Genesis, “male and female, He created them.” Using words of gender serve to demonstrate the humanity of these children.
Lastly, Ann Coulter goes on to suggest that being 100% pro-life is not wise because too much of a good thing can harm you – like too much iron, or too much sugar in your coffee. I couldn’t help but think of the words of Mother Teresa: “How can you say there are too many children? That’s like saying there are too many flowers.” No offense, Ann, but I’d rather heed the words of a godly woman like Mother Teresa than you.
To learn more about Rebecca Kiessling, visit her website.
A Fork In The Road, Part I
November 10, 2012 by 3 Comments
Note—This is the first in a two-part series on where things stand following the 2012 election cycle. Part 2 will focus on where we stand spiritually. Part 1 is about where we stand politically.
New York Yankees great Yogi Berra once famously observed, “When you come to a fork in the road—take it.”
And that is exactly what the conservative movement, as well as the Republican Party, is now forced to do. The only question following yet another election loss to Barack Obama is which one?
The very same people that have shoved Mitt McDoles down our throats for decades now will re-emerge from the ruling class to tell us that Mitt Romney was too conservative (I know, I laughed out loud, too), so we have to abandon whatever shred of conservatism actually still exists within the Republican Party leadership to win.
Yet we now know that is a pernicious lie.
Romney did everything the cynical Karl Rove wing of the party says Republicans have to do to win. He abandoned his base when he said the grassroots uprising standing up for Chick-fil-a was “not a part of my campaign,” and he joined the liberal dog pile on Todd Akin. He played it safe and didn’t offer any major tax or entitlement reform ideas to avoid the fiscal cliff out of fear being demagogued. He ran on platitudes and talked more about how bad Obama is rather than what plans for the future he had. He even became the first Republican presidential nominee to run pro-choice television ads, which aired in battleground states like Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa. Romney won independents in key battleground states as well.
And he still lost.
What we need to do is make a list of everyone in the alleged “conservative media” that peddles this tripe, or went on Fox News guaranteeing a Romney victory and told us how skewed all the mainstream media polls were (when in the last three presidential elections they’ve been exactly right), and resolve never to trust these people again.
Frankly, we should’ve known better than to trust them in the first place. During the past two primary cycles, didn’t we watch many of these same people tell us Mike Huckabee was a Christian socialist, Ron Paul was a nut-case, Rick Santorum was a pro-life statist, and Newt Gingrich opposed the very Reagan Revolution he was a foot soldier in?
You can agree or disagree with any of the men I just mentioned, and I certainly have disagreements with all of them. But that’s not the point. The point is that the very same people trashing and slandering non-establishment candidates in primaries are the very same people that tell conservatives we have to be team players (see that as “stand for nothing”). And yet they attack us like they would never attack liberals. Perhaps if Romney had gone after the president in the final two debates on Benghazi the way he went after Gingrich and Santorum in the primary, he wouldn’t have lost the election.
But now it’s time to move forward.
I recently spoke to a group of grassroots conservative activists at the Institute on the Constitution in Baltimore and shared with them that I believe we are a movement in a generational transition. On one hand there is the Reagan generation, and my generation on the other.
The Reagan generation sees how much freedom and liberty has been lost since Reagan and are trying to do whatever they can to hold on to whatever is left before it’s completely lost. The hope is that if we hold on long enough and defeat Democrats with any Republican, we can create another perfect storm that gave rise to Reagan in the first place, and it will be “morning in America” again.
My generation doesn’t have that nostalgia for the Reagan era because we were growing up and not really paying attention or weren’t even born at all. Now that we are paying attention, we don’t see the country in the context of what has been lost but rather how much ground needs to be gained. We are not seeing this purely in the context of the next election cycle. We’re seeing this in a generational cycle, which is why we oppose compromises on important issues like life and the debt ceiling. We don’t really care what the ruling class and its brigade of hand-wringers masquerading as pundits and pollsters think because we’re the ones who will pick up the long-term tab for the financial, moral, and spiritual brokenness of the country.
We’re looking at the next 40 years, not just the next four.
Ironically, though we may not be a part of the Reagan generation, we have the same perspective Reagan had in 1976 when he said the Republican Party ought to stand for something other than becoming more like Democrats, and there should be no more “pale pastels” but “bold colors” instead.
Eventually, my generation is going to get its chance to lead because we have time on our side. Nobody lives forever. When we do get our chance to lead, and it may be sooner rather than later, we need to learn the lessons of recent failures lest we fail our children and grandchildren.
This election provided plenty of hard lessons, but also a useful road map of how to win the future:
1. The truth still sets us free.
Yes, the mainstream media favors liberals, but just giving our yin to their yang doesn’t produce truth—it just produces another echo chamber. I couldn’t believe how many conservatives I know and trust who really thought Romney was going to win, and win convincingly, despite the fact several polling models with a 96% accuracy rate in the past two presidential elections said otherwise. Our version of propaganda is no more true than their version of propaganda. We are dangerously close to becoming the magically thinking, virtual reality-living creatures we accuse the Democrat base of being. If we want to advance truth, we need to believe the truth ourselves—even when it’s inconvenient. And the truth is we are no longer the dominant view in the culture, and we have some work to do to change that.
2. Hypocrisy doesn’t sell.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen says the single most unpopular piece of legislation in recent American history was the TARP bailout of 2008. Yet we nominated a candidate who was for it. Good luck going to Toledo and telling Ohioans making $15/hour and think their job was saved by the auto industry bailout that they didn’t deserve a government handout, but Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs did.
3. Cast a vision.
After the Democrats lost an election in 2004 they probably shouldn’t have lost, the more principled-progressive wing of the party took over. The result was an anti-Bush liberal uprising in 2006 similar to the anti-Obama Tea Party uprising of 2010. Next, the new progressives defeated the more pragmatic Clintons head-to-head in a presidential primary. Obama ran for president promising his base he would move the ball down the field for them with their crown jewel legislation—Obamacare. He then went right back to that base in 2012 and worked the exact same get-out-the-vote model that worked in 2008.
He embraced his base, even on social issues, both in the White House and at his convention. While we were scoffing at him for never moderating, Obama was energizing his base all along in preparation for a tough re-election. The progressives cast a vision that took more than one election cycle, followed it through, and won. They never detoured no matter what the facts were on the ground because they have a courage of their conviction that their vision is what’s best for the country. They wanted to win to govern. The Republican ruling class wants to govern to win. The Democrats want to run a country. The Republican ruling class wants to run a party.
4. Stop demonizing our neighbors.
We called Bill Clinton every name in the book and even impeached him, and that didn’t work. We called Obama every name in the book, and all we did was help him to portray his failures as Bush’s fault and energize his base all the more. We called Sandra Fluke a “slut”, and all we did was scare even more skittish advertisers away from conservative talk radio.
Yes, there is a double standard here. You should see some of the Tweets I receive after appearing on MSNBC, like when someone tweeted after I defended Richard Mourdock he hoped my daughters would get raped. We watch homosexual activists glitter-bomb conservatives and can only imagine what would happen if we returned such fire. It’s not fair, but it is what it is.
I am as fiery as the next guy and at times have not been able to hold my tongue, especially when it’s fun not to. But I’ve learned that while we don’t need to moderate our principles, we do need to temper our approach. Ann Coulter’s shrillness may sell books to the already-converted, but it’s losing the culture at-large. We no longer have a country that accepts many of our premises, so we have to go into evangelism mode. That requires a relationship and trust, and it’s hard to build that rapport with people while demonizing them. Pardon the cliché, but we need happy warriors. As the late D.L. Moody once said, “When you’re winsome you win some.”
Most of our neighbors we are angry with for voting the way they did don’t go to church and were taught things about this country in public schools that are contrary to this nation’s actual history. How should we expect them to vote given those circumstances? We’re not a silent majority anymore. We’re a plurality in danger of becoming a minority. If you want our neighbors to vote differently, then we have to change their worldview.
5. We need solutions – not just values.
Obama won young voters again despite the fact they’re the group hardest hit by his policies. They will be saddled with all the debt we’re tacking on and live in a more dangerous world in the long run with the emergence of the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and a nuclear Iran.
We are losing them by trying to win them over to values that make freedom possible – Judeo-Christian morality, personal responsibility, limited government, etc. – yet they have been educated in an environment that makes these values foreign to them. It will only get harder to win them over as they get older.
For example, they don’t see the Second Amendment as a requirement to keep freedom secure from government tyranny, but rather gun control as a means of stopping little children from being killed by gang violence or gun accidents. See, they’re not looking for values; they’re looking for solutions.
For better or for worse, there is one Republican who has been attracting younger voters in the past two presidential primaries, and that’s Ron Paul. Granted, some are those whose only goal is to legalize marijuana, but that’s also a lazy stereotype. Many of them are young people who don’t understand why it’s their responsibility to pay for the lack of fiscal discipline of their forefathers and why they have to die in foreign lands nation-building when our nation is declining here. Paul is offering them solutions to these problems and not just values. I don’t agree with all of Paul’s solutions, but I do think we could learn from this approach.
Do we have a solution for these young voters to their problems? Furthermore, do we have solutions to the problems with healthcare and job creation that middle class voters think much more about than they do the deeper moral crisis in the country? Changing worldviews is a long-term goal; but in the short-term, we can still win elections by coming up with real conservative solutions to people’s problems as opposed to a general discussion of values.
Working class whites in Ohio who typically vote Republican and voted for Obama don’t see him as a Marxist putting us on the road to Greece. They see Obama as the guy that saved daddy’s job at the Chrysler plant and thus kept food on the family’s table.
Solutions trump values every time because people always vote out of vested interest.
6. We’re too white.
African-Americans routinely vote with us on issues like marriage; yet there is almost never any Republican Party follow-up with them after they do. Latinos are one of the more socially conservative subcultures in America, and Romney did worse with them in 2012 than John McCain did in 2008. The reality is that the country is becoming less white, so we’re going to have to come up with ways to apply our principles to the needs of non-whites like never before.
It doesn’t mean we have to pander to them or try to out-amnesty the Democrats, but it may mean we may need to take a more incremental approach on some hot-button issues.
How can we demand that minorities stop seeing government as the primary vehicle to access the American dream when Republicans in the corporate class do it all the time? To ask African-Americans to totally abandon programs like affirmative-action and to ask Latinos to look the other way while we mass-deport some of their family members and friends is unrealistic when at the same time we allow Republicrats to get away with using government for their purposes all the time. Sometimes it’s like we’re writing the Democrats’ campaign commercials for them.
Look at Texas, one of the most Republican and conservative states in the country. About 38% of the state’s population is Latino, so how are conservatives making gains in a state with such a huge Latino population (and can it be modeled nationally?) No one would accuse Texas of being a moderate state—far from it. Most of us consider it conservative Valhalla, so why not follow its lead?
7. Pro-lifers are losing.
Please stop quoting polls telling me the country is more pro-life than ever before. When Richard Mourdock loses a U.S. Senate seat in a very Republican state for saying that all life, regardless of how it’s conceived, is a gift from God and deserves to be protected, then that means again we need to be honest with ourselves and stop believing our own fundraising propaganda.
Pro-lifers are the largest and most loyal voting bloc the GOP has; yet we have almost nothing to show for it except the carcass of Todd Akin abandoned on the side of the road by the GOP establishment. Akin is not a victim for his own mangled remarks, but we were victimized by a party establishment who decided three months ago they’d rather have Harry Reid as Majority Leader than a good man with a 96% American Conservative Union rating in the U.S. Senate. There was plenty of time to rehabilitate Akin in a very Republican state, but the ruling class piled on him instead.
If 40 years after Roe v. Wade the culture doesn’t believe my own family line conceived in horrific and traumatic circumstances has the right to live, then we have lost the most crucial moral debate of this age and need to completely re-evaluate what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
I remain optimistic. God is still on the throne. My Savior lives. More and more patriots are waking up. This is still the greatest nation on earth. Providence has allowed us to live in a nation where we can control our own destiny, and we can do so again if we have the same courage of conviction demonstrated by past generations that gave us the freedom and liberty we currently enjoy.
They that have ears to hear, let them hear.
You can friend “Steve Deace” on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow.
President Obama’s Faith And Fruit: Do Christians Know The Truth?
November 6, 2012 by 9 Comments
When asked about President Obama’s faith on an MSNBC interview, Franklin Graham responded, “You have to look at what a person does with his life. Anybody can say they’re a Christian.” According to Pew Research, only about one-third of adults (34%) think Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. About 20% believe he’s Muslim. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is.
The president claims the Christian faith, and this confuses some folks, particularly the less informed. For this reason and because we have a pivotal Presidential Election today, it is vital we address the issue and measure his actions against the Bible. If just five percent more Christian conservatives vote in this election instead of staying home, it’s over for Mr. Obama.
Some believe Obamacare is the most important 2012 election issue; and according to polls, the majority of Americans oppose it. Catholic hospitals, universities, and churches are being ordered to provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs violating their religious beliefs. As Ann Coulter stated, “The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It’s because the Democrats had 60 senators.”
America has never been as divided and polarized as it is today under a president who promised to reach across the aisle, unite people, and heal the world.
In 2008, American citizens, many Christians included, refused to use common sense and wisdom and judge Barack Obama by his own words; his anti-biblical stances; and his questionable Chicago associations, history, and liberal activism. Why do people of faith continue blindly supporting him and the current Democratic Party platform?
Jesus Christ taught believers to analyze and evaluate a person’s life by looking at what they do and how they live. You will know them by their fruit. If we listen to what President Obama says regarding Christianity and then observe what he does, it can be confusing; things don’t add up.
For example, most Americans – I’m not even talking about just Christians here – believe abortion is wrong and a sin. The president holds the most extreme views on abortion, including refusing to give aid to a baby born alive during a failed abortion procedure. Many consider this infanticide. Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act as an Illinois Senator.
It’s no surprise that in the 2012 campaign and election cycle, Planned Parenthood (who receives federal funding) has spent $13 million in attack ads against Mitt Romney in efforts to re-elect Obama. Some may argue Planned Parenthood provides counseling services. It’s true. They are an abortion business that counsels women to have abortions. The ratio of abortions to adoption referrals is a shocking 340 to 1. But I digress.
Let’s look at just a few of the Obama administration’s actions and policies in the last four years. President Obama was the first president in America’s history to mention non-believers in an inaugural address when he said “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” In his first year in office, Obama ended National Prayer Day services at the White House. President Truman signed the first National Prayer Day proclamation, and President Reagan made it permanent. For years, it was a staple on the White House calendar.
The Obama administration required the rewriting of government documents and a change in administration vocabulary to remove terms deemed offensive to Muslims, including jihad, jihadists, terrorists, radical Islamic, etc. With the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Obama allowed homosexuals to serve openly in the military, reversing a policy originally instituted by George Washington in 1778.
Before he was president, in an interview with Cathleen Falsani for the Chicago Sun Times, Obama was asked about his faith. Falsani asked “Who was Jesus to you?” He responded that “Jesus was an historical figure for me.” Obama continued, “I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics… I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.”
When asked simply “What is sin?” Obama replied, “Being out of alignment with my values.” Also from the interview, Barack Obama stated, “I lived in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, between the ages of six and ten. My father was from Kenya, and although he was probably most accurately labeled an agnostic, his father was Muslim…I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place…”
It’s important to note that in the city of corruption, somehow Obama ended up following the Christian tradition under controversial, anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and Black Liberation Theology for twenty years.
Obama said there are many paths to the same place. The Bible clearly establishes there is one narrow path to eternal life through faith in Christ. Jesus was not vague when in John 14:6 He said He alone is the way, the truth, and the life. The Apostle Paul wrote there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).
Barack Obama said Jesus was an “historical figure.” (Not Savior, Messiah, or the Son of God.) Also in the interview, Obama emphasized living his life the best he can (salvation by works) to maybe get rewarded someday, and he seemed to think our government was inefficient for atheists and agnostics. He does not respect our Judeo-Christian roots. Finally, to Obama, sin means being out of alignment with his own values – not the values of Jesus Christ or the Bible.
The question we have leading up to today’s election is this: how will Christians and other people of faith vote their values? Sadly, some may not vote at all. If you are a Christian and refuse to vote, you are endorsing Obama and another four years of damaging consequences and policies; and you’re implying you are satisfied with the direction America is headed.
In 2008, American citizens were warned (just not by the elite media) time and time again that if elected, Obama would push the most leftist, radical policies in American history. But millions voted for charisma and eloquence in order to make history, rather than voting for character and experience; and sadly, many citizens didn’t pay attention to the issues.
President John Quincy Adams once said, “The hope of a Christian is inseparable from his faith. Whoever believes in the Divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures must hope that the religion of Jesus shall prevail throughout the earth. Never since the foundation of the world have the prospects of mankind been more encouraging to that hope than they appear to be at the present time. And may the associated distribution of the Bible proceed and prosper…”
Let’s not be afraid to acknowledge that President Obama may accept parts of the Word of God, but his policies reveal a different worldview of Jesus and Christianity than many of us understand. By his own admission, he does not believe the Bible is inerrant and God-breathed. Barack Obama seems to have built his own brand of faith on a foundation of liberalism, Marxism, social justice, and post-modernism.
He needs God’s forgiveness just like you and I do; and if he is a back-slidden Christian, he needs to return to the Lord and humbly repent. If, however, he is sincerely living out a different gospel than what the Bible teaches, then he’s turned his back on the truth and is leading many naïve Americans astray. God is not fooled.
Our faith and Christian worldview should influence our politics, but our politics should never influence our faith. This is our wake-up call! For those of us who claim to be Christ followers and do our best to sincerely live our faith in public, we cannot leave Jesus outside the voting booth on Election Day. Actions speak louder than words.
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New Song, New Singers
I love talk radio; I love Fox News.
If it weren’t for the arrival of their strong conservative voices, Americans would still have nothing to listen to but the one-sided news and opinions of the left-liberals who run the mainstream New York-D.C. media.
But I’m frustrated.
Talk radio and Fox are getting so boring, so predictable, so shrill, I can barely tune in anymore.
Night after night on Fox, it’s the same issues, the same arguments, the same lame liberal guests showing up to be browbeaten by Hannity and O’Reilly.
How many Juan Williamses does Fox have on its staff anyway? Five? Is my friend Alan Colmes the only liberal in North America who’ll come on and debate Hannity?
Seriously. Is there anything Williams and Colmes — or for that matter, pie-thrower Ann Coulter — will say about Obamacare or the Obama Economy they haven’t said 100 times on TV in the last year?
“The Five” is another example. It gets great ratings, but it’s so stale and predictable.
Can’t Fox find anyone better than Big, Bad Bob Beckel to go 1-on-4 with that show’s conservatives, who, except for funnyman Greg Gutfeld, are like watching Hannity II, III, and IV?
And is there some new FCC law against having two liberals on a Fox show once in a while? (Not Juan Williams, thanks.)
Fox needs to get fresh faces and new voices into its regular lineup. Instead of arguing with Williams night after night, what’s wrong with Hannity or O’Reilly talking to ordinary Americans — people who’ve lost their homes or can’t find a job?
I think even loyal viewers are starting to notice that Fox’s slogan should be changed from “Fair and Balanced” to “Stale and Predictable.”
The other day, after seeing conservative guest Dennis Prager waste most of his air-time watching Hannity tangle his liberal guest, I sent out a Tweet saying, “I think sometimes Hannity invites guests on to watch him argue with another guest just to get their approval. It’s frustrating.”
The response from my conservative Republican followers was quick and one-sided; a bunch of Tweeters agreed with me that Fox was losing its steam.
A guy named Tom said nothing interesting ever happens on Hannity’s show. Another guy said he loved Hannity but said he “needs to find new people to interview, too many repeats.” Sharron tweeted she’s stopped watching him altogether.
This is a serious problem for conservatives and Republicans — and the United States of America.
We’re in a serious fight with Obama and his gang, who seem hell-bent on turning us into a socialist country with enough government spending and debt to qualify for membership in the European Union.
For good and bad, talk radio and Fox have become the national voices of conservatism, the places where conservative ideas and arguments can be publicized and debated.
The Republican Party has made the mistake of allowing Fox and talk radio to become its spokesman, in large part because it has no national spokesman of its own. But Fox and talk radio are letting the GOP and the rest of the country down.
People outside the Beltway are desperate for solutions to our economic and social problems, but Fox and talk radio seem more interested in giving them arguments — tired arguments.
People — our people in the conservative choir — are starting to tune out Fox and talk radio. And it’s because their song — our song — is getting stale and predictable.
We need to start hearing a new tune from the conservative media — and new singers.
Photo Credit: ario_ Creative Commons