Want to see the future? Look at France. And look at Bridget Bardot.

What’s the lesson of Brigitte Bardot? Let’s review a little history. Once one of the most famous stars in the world, Bardot led the charge into the trendy issue of the day – animal rights. With the typical self-righteousness of the Hollywood left, she crusaded against evil seal hunters and evil corporations and evil conservatives in general. The avant garde of the entertainment world rallied to her cause. And she lived happily ever after, right?

Wrong. Apparently Bardot has been outspoken about the invasion of Muslims into France. So outspoken that she has been convicted and fined multiple times for “inciting racial hatred”. And not just for comments about Islam. She’s also been accused of homophobia.

Echoes of Geraldine Ferraro are ringing here. Doesn’t Bardot get a free pass from the new left for her lifelong efforts on behalf animals, the environment, feminism, and all the other causes so dear to the left? No. Once she broke with the current conventional wisdom of the left, they turned on her.

I hope you all enjoy the First Amendment, because it doesn’t exist in Europe. You are not free to speak your mind about what’s happening to your country. And since the Supreme Court keeps looking to “international precedents” to override the constitution, you can look forward to trials, convictions, fines, and maybe imprisonment if you dare speak up against the current mania of the left. Like global warming. Or diversity. Or whatever they come up with next.

 

Charlton Heston was a screen icon, civil rights activist, and chairman of the NRA. He will be missed. His life is an interesting study of the evolution of American politics.

Like many of his generation, Heston served in the military. Like Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Charles Durning, and a host of others, he chose acting as his post military profession. Unlike most other actors, he quickly became a screen icon in films like ‘The Ten Commandments” and “Ben Hur”.

From the end of the war through the 1960s, Heston was a confirmed liberal Democrat. Whether he was marching in civil rights protests or supporting the Great Society agenda, Heston was fully onboard with the liberal agenda of progress and advancement from America’s ignorant past.

And then, Vietnam happened. The Democratic Party was radicalized to hate America. The popular historical interpretation is to say that Heston moved right, ending up supporting the NRA. But the reality is, the Democratic Party and the country moved left. As Heston himself put it, the Democratic Party left him. To his credit, he opposed the forces of radicalization.

But his story should be a cautionary tale to the rest of us in the conservative movement. For example, Heston was in the forefront when breaking the censorship guidelines for television and movies. He recalled the fight he made to say the words “goddam them all to hell” in the Planet of the Apes movie and get it past the censors.

Less than 30 years later, he found himself standing up in a shareholders meeting for Time Warner, reading offensive lyrics being published by Time Warner’s music records label. While crediting him for opposing the filth coming from the music industry, we also need to understand that Heston was fighting forces that he himself helped to unleash.

I’m sure breaking the censorship guidelines of the 50s and 60s seemed like a good idea at the time. But I think we need to understand that the television and film people of that era understood then what we did not – the power of the medium to influence a mass audience. In hindsight, we see the effects of profanity, sex, and violence on the behavior of the young. But the powers that be in the 1950s understood this BEFORE it happened. And for their foresight and attempts to control the medium, they have been labeled as repressed, backwards, religious, and controlling.

What does that mean for us today? Consider carefully the proposals that come for “the good of the country” or to “advance society”. Take Governor Schwarzenegger’s efforts to mandate the gay agenda into the California public school system. Sure, you might feel like you are advancing society. But beware of the long term consequences. Or you, like Heston, may find yourself 30 years from now opposing the forces you helped unleash.

 

The most interesting thing about the Reverend Wright controversy is how people reacted to it. Reporters, professors, lawyers, and more – all successful people leaped to defend both Wright and Obama because their comments were “taken out of context”. Their reaction, however, is completely within context. It didn’t matter how much success or wealth they achieved in their chosen field, all of them identified with Wright and Obama as oppressed minorities. The only difference from the Jim Crow era is, now they are rich oppressed minorities instead of poor oppressed minorities.

You can see the same thing in the feminist movement. As women become CEOs and Senators and Entrepreneurs, they are simply transformed from poor oppressed feminists to rich oppressed feminists. The old grievances are replaced with a new list of injustices that is twice as long.

There’s one other transformation to mention – the accumulation of wealth by the legal firms and media conglomerates that foster all of the finger pointing. In this case, poor crusading attorneys are transformed into rich crusading attorneys. Automobile accidents, product safety, medical malpractice, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, the opportunities are endless. There is no limit to the tales of woe a lawyer can spin. Their talents are only exceeded by the media pundits who labeled our current economy as the worst since the great depression.

What’s the solution? One thing is to remove the profit incentive. As long as people can make money pandering to race and gender, they will continue to do so. That means you need to take away the huge jury trial settlements and the billable hours away from the attorneys. And take the advertising income away from the media conglomerates.

Since I’m from California, you might expect this kind of thing from the enviro nut jobs. But I’m not there right now – I’m in Cincinnati on a business trip, driving a rental car. None of which mattered to the mentally challenged individual who decided to brighten my day by blaming me for rising gas prices.

I could have responded in kind by taking a few unwashed babies, thowing them at her, shouting “this is YOUR FAULT for overpopulating the earth!” and driven away in a huff. My charges would be more accurate – females have far more control over children than I have over gas prices. But what would that have accomplished?

As I drove to work, I pondered how pervasive left wing class warfare has become. And despite the death match between Obama and Hillary, the fact remains that both of them are clearly in the blame America first crowd. Don’t like high gas prices? Blame the Republicans, blame your neighbor, blame the oil companies, point the finger wherever you can. Ignore the fact that gas prices are still far cheaper here than they are in Europe. Forget that American oil companies are forbidden to drill for more oil in Anwar or offshore. No, just point the finger at your (supposedly) rich white male neighbor.

Which brings me to Obama and his crazy “uncle” Reverend Wright. Wright’s rantings include blaming the US for Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks, claiming that the government invented the AIDS virus to infect black people, and bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that’s just a short list to start with.

These ideas are not new. I heard some of them when I was in college 20 years ago. And I went to a relatively conservative liberal arts college. These kinds of conspiracy theories are not only prevalent among blacks, but are pervasive throughout academia as well. Think Duke university and the false claims by the black stripper against the white students last year, enabled by Mike Nifong, an over zealous prosecutor. The left wing students and professors jumped onboard the bandwagon, and issued only the most perfunctuary explanations after the charges were proved false. After all, they were on the side of the revolution against the evil white males, doesn’t that excuse them?

That’s why Hillary can’t say too much about Obama and his minister. Because he can expose Hillary and her leftist college friends, who spout the same kind of left wing hate that Wright does. It’s also why Fox news took the lead on this story – the other networks would rather not cover it, because they agree with Wright too. With Dan Rather like logic, they might admit that Wright’s facts are wrong, but his heart is in the right place. But since Fox forced their hand, they’ve jumped into the story now, reasoning that they can at least boost their ratings by doing so.

 The problem is, this kind of leftist hate has been indoctrinated by diversity types, feminists, the media, and black power advocates into college students for decades now. It’s institutionalized. These people could care less how economies flow or how supply and demand works. They don’t even care about the fundamentals of foreign policy. No, it’s all about giving voice to your feelings that the evil white males have silenced within you for centuries. It’s about getting even.

But like most revolutionaries, they can’t hit their target. Rich white males hide their money behind clever attorneys and offshore tax shelters. Like Al Gore, who became a multi-millionaire by accepting sweetheart stock options deals from Google. Or Bill Moyers, who spouts leftist rhetoric on PBS and NPR daily, and then denies health care coverage to his own employees. Shouldn’t he at least follow his own health care dictates before the rest of us have to?

As Geraldine Ferraro found out, it’s fun blaming white males from a feminist point of view, but not so fun when black males turn racist allegations against you. Isn’t it irritating being labeled with group guilt? Not that this setback seems to have gotten through to her – she still sniffs about her decades of service to the feminist movement in a self righteous way.

Speaking of entitlement, how about Michelle Obama? She’s a lawyer who went to both Princeton and Harvard law school, and she’s filled with rage towards whites. Which proves that the leftist vision of America is wrong – more economic opportunities won’t satisfy blacks. If anything, rich blacks are more angry than poor blacks. But the most revealing blacks I saw were the ones interviewed on Fox news. These are media figures, reporters, university professors, all well to do. After the by the numbers assertions that Wright is wrong, they exposed their own rage, insisting that Wright was taken out of context. But it was clear that they themselves are not being taken out of context – they hate America too. Because they’ve been indoctrinated over the decades regardless of the economic success they now enjoy.

And don’t think that electing Obama will fix any of this. No, as Henry Kissinger found out, once you give in to the left, they just want more. Because this is primarily a leftist driven issue, with race as the excuse up front. Claims of racial inequality or feminist glass ceilings inevitably lead to socialist solutions to fix the problem. That’s the real goal.

 This election year, some of the talk is about turnout – how Democratic turnout is higher than Republican turnout in the primaries. Which got me thinking – why not force people to vote? After all, you’re not telling them who to vote for. They can do write in candidates, cross parties, do what they want. But if you threaten people with fines and imprisonment for not showing up to jury duty, isn’t it just as important for them to vote?

Right now, some areas can force you to do jury duty for 2 weeks. Voting takes part of a day. Even allocating for travel time and time away from work, at most you allocate ½ a day for voting. So why not require voting just like you do jury duty?

The objection might be “the system is fixed, it doesn’t matter who I vote for, I won’t play the pawn in someone else’s game”. Really? Consider the legal system, where the number one priority for both sides is the fight over evidence – what can be included and what can be excluded. The winner of that battle can shape the jury’s decision by limiting what evidence they see – and goes a long way to producing a “predictable” verdict, regardless of who the 12 jurors are.

Having said that, criminal defendants don’t want to face a judge alone, and since imprisonment, life, and death are on the line, you can make a good argument for jurors to be compelled to serve. But how about civil cases?

In civil cases, there is pressure to settle out of court. Why waste everyone’s time and money? The problem is that plaintiffs like to go for the big money. So even if they have a weak case, they can always try to sway the jury. If relevant evidence can be excluded, so much the better. The one civil case I was on was a definite waste of time that should have been settled out of court. But that’s the problem, you cannot force a plaintiff to settle. They can force us to be pawns in their greedy game by pushing frivolous cases through the system, consuming everyone’s time and money, while they roll the dice hoping for a jackpot settlement.

How to deal with this?  What if there was no jury in civil cases and both sides just presented their case to a judge? The case would go much quicker, with no jury selection haggling to go through. And think of the court costs we would save.

So I’m for some consistency in public service – either force people to vote just like you force them to serve on juries, or  remove jurors from the civil courts and give the people their freedom back.

 

As people debate whether John McCain is a true conservative or not, I’m thinking back to one of Winston Churchill’s comments – when you are 20 years old you should be a liberal, and when you are 40 years old you should be a conservative. And it’s very revealing in how conservatives and liberals relate to each other.

If you think about it, this makes conservatives more tolerant. After all, they were once liberals themselves. They understand what it was like to be young and idealistic. But they have become conservatives because of accumulated life experience, lessons learned, etc.

Now contrast this to liberals. They are filled with energy, passion, and excitement for the liberal cause. And they are confounded by conservatives who keep getting in their way, blunting the liberal agenda, and pursuing policies that liberals don’t understand. And why would they understand conservatives? They’ve never been conservatives themselves, so they have no framework for understanding the conservative point of view.

The result? Since liberals don’t understand conservatives, they equate them with some evil, unknown force. They call them fascists. They label conservatives as racists. And a great favorite of liberals is the construction of the evil advisor to the President. Under Ronald Reagan, it was Bill Casey. Under George H.W. Bush, it was Lee Atwater. Under George W. Bush, the evil genius was Karl Rove. Not contenting themselves with one evil advisor, the liberals added Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to help Rove with his secret planning.

You see, liberals can’t admit that conservatives have a point. To admit that would be a rejection of the liberal ideals – the growth of government, the nanny state, helping “the children” and so on. Newt Gingrich laid this out in detail when discussing the Republican victories in 1994. His thought was that Democrats, after losing the House for the first time in decades, would realize that their ideas were flawed and modify/fix them. But liberals cannot admit that their ideas are bankrupt. So they went the evil advisor route instead, claiming that the Republicans tricked their way into power. They started smear campaigns against Gingrich and Dole. And it worked – both Dole and Gingrich were marginalized and driven from power.

This idea that Republicans cheat is a constant theme – from conspiracy theories about Reagan and the Iran Hostages to the Willie Horton campaign ads under George H.W. Bush to the Supreme Court fixing the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Can’t liberals ever admit that they lost an election fair and square?

The whole idea of Reagan as a “Great Communicator” is a liberal attempt to marginalize the ideals he ran on. The people couldn’t have really voted for strong defense and smaller government, could they? No, it must be Reagan’s superior communication skills. Or his “Teflon” armor. Or Bill Casey’s tricks during the election campaign.

All of these symptoms – conservatives are evil, conservatives win by trickery, conservatives are empty suits controlled by evil advisors – mask the real problem. Liberals don’t understand conservatives or the ideas they believe in. And since many liberals start out in life that way and never change, the chances that they will eve see another point of view are exceedingly slim. So the smear campaigns continue. John McCain, the New York Times article is just the beginning. Win or lose, it’s your time in the barrel.

 

Newt Gingrich gave a speech at CPAC – the conservative group for young conservatives that meets once a year in Washington DC. In his speech, he outlined where George W. Bush went wrong – too much compassionate me too conservatism, too many big government programs, etc. But on close examination his alternatives are no better.

On the one hand, Gingrich laid out how he and his fellow 94 republicans took control of the House of Representatives and kept control for the first time since 1928. How they energized the conservative base of the party. How things went wrong in 2006. But what is his solution to conservative problems?

His analysis of the situation is that while Republicans are very good at winning elections, they are lousy at governing. Gingrich admitted that he underestimated the entrenched position of liberals and their skill at defending their policies from a minority position. His solution is that conservatives need training in how to govern. This is where I disagree with him.

After all, what good is it to have conservatives run liberal bureaucracies? The core tenant of conservatism is that centralized government robs the individual of freedom, while failing to deliver its utopian promises (eliminating poverty, racial harmony, etc). So putting conservatives in charge of these programs is surrender to the forces of big government, just as George W. Bush’s creation of prescription drug entitlements and the no child left behind federal education program was a surrender to the left. So Gingrich, for all his tactical skill and intelligence, is strategically bankrupt of conservative ideas. And he says the Reagan revolution is dead? If so, he had a big hand in killing it.

 

Today, I was given a book called the nine, about the Supreme Court. It’s basically a left wing partisan attack on recent Supreme Court decisions (Bush vs Gore) and the appointment of Justices Roberts and Alito. The Roe vs Wade defenders, so sure of their victory for over 30 years, are getting very nervous.

The curious thing is, why are the pro-choice people so scared? Let’s suppose the unlikely happens and Roe vs Wade is overturned. How long do you think it will take liberal states like California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and a host of others to pass state laws legalizing abortion? About 30 days. So what’s the big deal?

Well, you can’t have 30 states approving abortion and 20 states outlawing it. I mean, it’s not like you have some states legalizing gambling and some outlawing it. Oh, wait a minute – you do. In fact, we have varying positions from state to state on marriage, divorce, business regulations, environmental regulations, and almost any other public policy item you can think of. So why not let the state legislatures decide on abortion?

Because it’s about centralized control. The leftist elites are intolerant to the extreme. No other position is allowed, it must be dictated centrally from Washington. And the Republicans are not immune to this either. Whether it’s educational standards or diversity guidelines or affirmative action quotas, our lives are increasingly dictated from Washington. It’s getting to the point where you can abolish the local and state governments and we can all live under a monolithic blob.

Getting back to the book, their take on the Bush vs Gore election controversy was laughable. Here you have an activist Supreme Court that has stuck its nose into every issue in American life for the last 50 years. But on this one issue, where the entire country is uncertain about the process, the court is supposed to stay silent. Right!

The rest of the book is fear-mongering about the activist conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Well, if you don’t like activist conservative judges, you shouldn’t have cheered so much when activist liberal judges rammed their opinions over the voters(for example, overturning California referendums as unconstitutional when they had over 80% voter approval). Isn’t it irritating when your opponents turn your own tactics against you?

Ron Paul is an isolationist – there’s no doubt about that. And he’s the only Republican who opposes the war in Iraq. Now, if he wants to oppose the war, I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with are his reasons.

 

Paul is on record saying that the US presence in the Middle East provoked the 9/11 attacks. He weaves that into a broader isolationist message that wants to call troops home from Europe, Japan, South Korea, and everywhere else they are stationed in the world.

 

This bothers me on two levels. First, I remember someone else blaming the United States for the Cold War and wanting to call troops home from South Korea. Someone in the 1970s. Someone named Jimmy Carter. Remember him? His foreign policy centered around blaming the United States for the Cold War and for human rights violations around the world. Carter’s answer? If we left them alone they would leave us alone. Accommodate and apologize to our enemies, cut off support to US allies, and reduce America’s overseas commitments to apply resources to pressing domestic problems.

 

Second, this kind of political naivete has surfaced before. Remember the aftermath of WW1? Politicians and historians in the US were full of conspiracy theories blaming US arms dealers for the slaughter in the trenches. The argument went that the US manipulated the European nations into war for the profit motive. This led to neutrality agreements and absurd international agreements in Locarno that purportedly would outlaw war.

 

Looking back, this was pure nonsense. No one forced the Kaiser’s belligerent attitude or France’s desire for revenge after the war of 1870 or the Serbians to provoke the Austro-Hungarian empire. Historical events are not clearly cause and effect. To offer other examples, Japan was not forced to attack Pearl Harbor, Italy was not forced to bomb Ethiopia, and the US merchant navy didn’t cause the war of 1812. But there are always conspiracy theorists ready to make hay out of world crises by offering simplistic cause and effect solutions, which invariably point the finger of blame at the favorite target of jealousy and envy of the day. And there was a large and loud isolationist wing of the Republican party that sponsored a great deal of the post WW1 angst. The result of these naive arguments was the appeasement of Hitler and a larger world war within a generation of WW1.

 

What was the result of Carter’s schoolboy naive foreign policy? The Soviets sensed US weakness of character and resolve and poured it on, taking over countries in Africa, South America, and Asia. US arms control talks and cuts in military spending were answered with an increased Soviet arms buildup. Through it all, Carter continued the self righteous rhetoric and continued to blame the US for what other countries did, offering the usual simplistic cause and effect arguments.

 

And then, the final straw came. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And for once, reality intruded on the grade school foreign policy of the liberals. They had no choice but to admit the threat the Soviets presented to both the US and the free world. Carter’s feeble efforts to change course – boycotting the Olympics, instituting grain embargoes, an increased military budget – were too little, too late. Americans understood that all the self righteous rhetoric was meaningless and opted for a real leader in Ronald Reagan.

 

Now you see Carter style arguments reborn in Ron Paul. If only we left them alone they would leave us alone. Our presence forces others to do things. As if disaffected countries had no other option but to crash planes into skyscrapers. Aren’t they supposed to try sanctions and UN resolutions first?

 

Which brings up another point. According to liberal dogma, you are supposed to go through all these hoops before going to war – going to the UN for sanctions, performing weapons inspections, putting forth UN resolutions with deadlines, getting Congressional approval, and so on. But they forget the price for all of their bureaucratic requirements. If you put out a list of procedures that must be followed, and they are followed to the letter, then everyone is required to support the war, because all the proper UN sanctions and UN resolutions and Congressional declarations were obtained. But that’s not what happened in 1990 and the gulf war. George H.W. Bush followed all the liberal instructions, had the UN resolutions and multi national force ready – and the Left still opposed the war.

 

All these procedures and safeguards don’t mean a damn thing – they are just obstacles and Trojan horses thrown up by liberals. When the chips are down, they will ignore their own sacred procedures and do what they want.

 

Which explains George W. Bush’s actions leading up to the Iraq War. If liberals are going to ignore their own procedural rules, why bother? Skip the meaningless resolutions and go do what needs to be done. Which infuriated the liberals to no end. Don’t conservatives know that they’re the only ones required to play by liberal rules?

 

You can see this happening with global warming and the Kyoto accords. Everyone wants the US to sign on. Lost in all the hubbub is that the Europeans who signed on are blissfully violating Kyoto – and no one cares that they break their own rules. No one cares that the Chinese are putting up coal plants without scrubbers. Their sole focus is on the United States – the rest of the world can put up all the offshore oil platforms they want.

 

We live in an era of government regulation, mandatory diversity classes, and endless policies and procedures to go through. These are structured to create the maximum amount of litigation possible, because no matter how well you follow the rules, you can still be dragged into court by money hungry lawyers looking for an easy settlement. Which makes all the procedures and policies useless, now doesn’t it? And I have no interest playing the pawn in someone else's game.

It’s almost official – John McCain will be the Republican nominee for President. On the surface, things look good. While Obama and Hillary face off in a death match to the finish, McCain can tidy things up and get his strategy ready for the national campaign.

 

However, there are a few flies in the ointment. Look at the turnout for super Tuesday. The Democrat primaries drew around 14 million voters, while the Republicans only drew about 8 million. That spells trouble for the GOP – lots of people are disenchanted and staying home. Will they even vote in November?

 

The other thing is, McCain seems to anticipate that his opponent will be Hillary. If that’s true, voters will turn out just to say no to her. But what if Obama wins the Democratic nomination? People don’t know enough about him to dislike him yet. And that’s the formula that recent Democratic winners have used – Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were unknown outsiders when they won the Presidency.

 

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk about how McCain is the only Republican who can win. Maybe he is, but I can’t help but remember Bob Dole – the 1996 candidate who was another war hero, greatly respected, but lost badly in the general election. Now having said that, McCain has something Dole did not – the war on terror. But if he wants to win he needs to run exclusively on that issue.

Bush’s last proposed budget is 3 trillion. With 515 billion for defense spending, or about 17 %. Which means the other 83% is consumed by pork barrel domestic spending.

 

So what’s the deficit? About 400 million. Which means that the government is raking in 2.6 trillion in revenue. That’s the part you won’t hear about.

 

The scare mongers are out, talking about trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities and so forth. What they never say is that with over 2 trillion in tax revenue coming in every year, trillion dollar deficits don’t mean that much anymore.

 

There’s still time to be fiscally responsible. Still time to get spending under control. But it won’t happen. Because we’re not a crisis stations yet. And everybody except the talk show hosts knows it.

 

We’re on the brink of the Democrats taking the White House and spending more of our money on their Santa Claus programs. Global Warming. Green technology. Aids money. Money for the children. All the programs democrats love to pander to.

 

Take California. The big name propositions are the Indian gaming ones that promise billions of revenue in the future. The focus is still on the seemingly endless sources of revenue, both for Federal and State governments. No one is ready to cut spending in either party. That’s how you know there’s no crisis brewing.

 

So when President Hillary proposes her first 3 trillion dollar budget, you’ll know that there’s no monetary crisis, we’re not on the brink of a global money meltdown, and that there’s still plenty of money to spread around for all the pork barrel spending the Democrats could want.

All season you heard about it. Undefeated. Best prepared. Hardest working. Most talented. And on and on.

 

I just didn’t buy it. This Patriot team was impressive and could score and all that. But they never scared teams like the 85 bears. They didn’t overwhelm teams like the 80s 49ers or 90s Cowboys or 70s Steelers.

 

And not only that. The Patriot Super Bowl winning teams scraped by with 3 point wins over the likes of Carolina and the Eagles – whom no one will consider great teams or even nearly great teams. And this years team, although it looked impressive beating up on weaklings like the Dolphins, Bills, and Jets, never faced a great defensive team. Until now.

 

I can’t say enough about the Giants. Their defense was dominant. Yes, they wore down in the second half. But so did the Patriots. And when it came down to it, Eli Manning came up big. And Tom Brady did not.

 

And let’s not forget the girlfriend factor. After all, if the media is gonna make a big deal out of Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson, they can now make hay out of Tom Brady and Giselle Bundchen.

 

The other thing is, the Giants had seen the Patriots before. And like other underdog teams of Super Bowl past – the 83 Raiders against the Redskins, for example – the Giants learned a great deal from that first meeting. They knew they could pressure Brady and they did. They knew that they could score against the Patriot defense and they did. And they knew that despite all the media hype, that the Patriots were in no way the best NFL team ever, and they did us all a favor by proving it.

 

Sometimes, there’s justice in the world. A good but not great team was exposed tonight, and we were all saved from years of Deion Sanders telling us about the “great” Patriots dynasty. And we were also spared from seeing Randy Moss get a super bowl ring. After dogging it in Raiderland for 2 years, dropping easy passes and displaying his sulky attitude, it would have been criminal for him to score the winning touchdown. No Randy, karma’s gonna make you pay back some more before you get a ring. If ever.

After Florida, it's a two horse race between McCain and Romney. McCain has the clear advantage. And it's interesting to see why.

Start with Michigan. Michigan was portrayed as a "must win" for Romney. Fine, he won, but no matter how many times he finished in second place, the media was ready for him to drop out.

Now take South Carolina. This was a must win for Fred Thompson. The press was ready to push him out, and out he went.

And then you have Florida. This was Guiliani's must win state. The anti-Guiliani media bias was palpable, they just couldn't hide their open disdain for him. Sure enough, he lost and he's out.

Ok, think. What name is missing? Mike Huckabee. What does Huckabee have to show for his campaign? A win in Iowa and a bunch of lackluster performances since. He couldn't even beat Guiliani in Florida. So where's the media pressure for Huckabee to quit?

The media has not and will not put any pressure on Huckabee. Why? Because the media is for McCain, and they clearly understand that Huckabee takes conservative votes away from Romney. By the same token, they knew that the major threat to take moderates and independents from McCain was Guiliani, which explains their zeal to get rid of him.

It's a perfect setup - cooked up by moderates in the Bush wing of the party and the establishment wing of the media. Remember, McCain has not received 40% of the vote in any primary, yet he is still portrayed by the media as a front running juggernaut who has the nomination all but locked up. On a level playing field, Romney might have had a chance. Playing against this stacked deck, he has none.

The Reagan nostalgia in the Republican party refuses to die. And now the moderates and independents are joining the fray, tripping all over themselves to say that “Reagan compromised too!!!”

 

True, Reagan was a pragmatist. And he was willing to strike deals with Congress to get 80% of what he wanted. But there’s more to this story.

 

Take TEFRA. TEFRA was the only tax increase that Reagan agreed to in his 8 years in office. He did so under pressure from Congress and moderates in his own party to deal with rising deficits and the recession of 1981.

 

But there’s a catch. Reagan’s compromise with Congress on TEFRA was supposed to contain spending cuts along with the tax increase. And guess what? Tip O’Neil and Bob Dole and their boys in Congress reneged on their part of the deal, so the tax increases were enacted immediately, but the promised spending cuts never materialized.

 

Reagan understood that he had been tricked. He regretted it and made sure that he did not raise taxes again during his tenure in office.

 

Contrast this with George H.W. Bush. Sure, Bush made a no new taxes pledge. But you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. After all, this is the man who labeled Reagan’s economic plan as “voodoo economics”. And the man who rushed to enact a flurry of Clean Air and environmental legislation as soon as he got into office. So much for the Reagan motto of deregulation and getting government out of people’s way. So his tax increase was no surprise. And unlike Reagan, Bush did not regret his tax increase. To this day, he still doesn’t seem to understand why so many people rejected him and voted for Perot in 1992. Why do you think Reagan passed the conservative mantle to Rush Limbaugh in 1994? Reagan understood then, as he had not in 1988, that Bush was no conservative.

 

Now let’s take the 1986 amnesty bill. As with TEFRA, the compromise bill contained promises by Congress which they did not fulfill. Of course, the amnesty for illegals was immediate and irreversible. Once again Reagan had been tricked. And once again he regretted it.

 

Contrast this with John McCain. Unlike Reagan, McCain actively promoted the amnesty bill along with Ted Kennedy. And he has sided with the Democrats on campaign finance reform, waterboarding, and a host of other issues. You see, there’s a difference between being tricked by Democrats and actively conspiring with them to promote big government and socialist programs. George W. Bush deserves his share of blame too, for doubling the size of the Department of Education and instituting a huge homeland security bureaucracy.

 

That’s why conservatives want another Reagan, and no one wants another Bush. Because the compromises that McCain, Huckabee, and Bush have made are willing compromises, not reluctant ones. And we don’t need willing Republican servants to implement the Democrat agenda. Because if they do, I’ll vote against their candidate just like I did in 1992, and for the same reason.