Conservatives may not realize just how difficult it might be to
recover from this week’s elections.
The day after the big defeat, the conservative chatter everywhere
was about how the “movement” and the Republican Party (two
different things) could finally unshackle themselves from the bad
old habits that brought them down, and about how the ability to
draw a sharp contrast with the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate
would allow us to focus attention, rally the faithful, and
re-storm the castle in 2010 and 2012.
Fat chance.
Too many conservatives think we’ve seen all this before — in
1964 and 1974 and 1992 — and that we know how to handle it. Fly,
meet ointment: We’re not dealing with the same sorts of
opponents. These New Alinskyites who are taking over the White
House, combined with the most leftist congressional leadership in
memory, will not let us play by the same rules under which
conservatives recovered from those earlier debacles. They will
try to drastically tilt the playing field, seed our side of the
field with land mines and, in short, rig the process to make it
next to impossible for the political right, or Republicans, to
recover. And they are likely to succeed in at least some of these
designs.
It will begin with their efforts to secure a filibuster-proof
majority of 60 senators (including the two independents). Right
now the libs (and yes, all the Democratic senators, with
the possible exception of Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, are libs) have
56, with three Republican moderates and one conservative leading
their races but awaiting recounts or runoffs. Watch for the
Alinskyites to try stealing all four, and to succeed in at least
two. We’ve seen this game before. They did it in Indiana’s
“Bloody Eighth” congressional district in 1984. They almost
succeeded in 2000 in Florida. They did succeed, outrageously so,
in the Washington State governor’s race in 2004. Those are just
the most obvious of many similar
examples. And now they are even more ruthless, more
lawyered-up, and in a more powerful position to pull it off than
they were in any of those instances.
Next, watch what happens if they regularly can’t peel off enough
Republicans (or hold their own semi-fairminded people like Nelson
and Joe Lieberman) to overcome whatever filibuster attempts
Republicans do mount. Watch for an assault on the filibuster
itself. Watch how they use as precedent the GOP
“nuclear/constitutional option” on judges in 2005 — except
instead of just using it for judges, watch them use it against
all filibusters. It’s easy: Make the ruling from the chair that
the filibuster is out of order for some reason. Instruct the
parliamentarian to rule in their favor. Win the appeal of the
parliamentarian’s ruling by simple majority vote. And watch the
courts pronounce it an internal matter of the legislative branch
and thus outside of courtroom purview.
Watch a cheerleading establishment media — the Fourth Estate as
a veritable Fifth Column — actually back these lefty maneuvers.
It’s all in the name of one-man/one-vote democracy, dontcha know?
The filibuster once served its purpose, they’ll say, but as a
vestige of Southern “massive resistance” to integration it is now
being used for massive resistance to the first black president,
which invalidates it (suddenly) as a legitimate tool.
Watch the left use these tactics and others to pass even more
liberalized voting laws — an open invitation to even more fraud
that is more creative, easier to hide, and less challengeable in
court.
Watch what Michael Barone called the Obama “thugocracy” use the
Justice Department to stifle dissent. Anybody who complains about
vote fraud will be charged with “vote suppression.” Anybody who
complains about DoJ’s actions will be charged with interfering
with an investigation. Anybody who denies having interfered will
be charged with perjury. Likewise, anybody who peacefully
protests abortion clinics or the use of state-sponsored racial
quotas will be charged with a civil rights violation. And the
accused won’t be able to look to the Supreme Court for help:
Anthony Kennedy’s “evolving standards” of justice will evolve to
match the new zeitgeist, providing a 5-4 majority for the
administration. Meanwhile, of course, Obama’s other appointments
will be filling up the rest of the judiciary at a rapid clip,
with nobody able to stop them.
Other ways the Obama axis will tilt the playing field: “card
check” legislation to eliminate secret ballots in unionizing and
to force union victories in contract negotiations.
Provision after provision giving favors
to the trial bar so it can sue enemies into submission. Copious
new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively
to ensnare other conservative malcontents. Invasive IRS audits of
conservative think tanks, other conservative 501 organizations,
and PACs.
What Ohio officials did in rifling through so many of Joe
Wurzelbacher’s files will serve as ample precedent. (Just watch,
by the way: Nobody ever will be effectively disciplined for the
violation of Wurzelbacher’s rights.)
And, only when the time is right and the ground (or air) has been
well prepared, will come the grand-daddy of all fights, the
re-enactment of the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine.”
Oh, they’ll be clever. They’ll pick their spot. They’ll wait
until Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Mark Levin says something
innocent they can twist out of context and call “hate speech” —
and then they’ll highlight some schoolyard fight where a member
of a “victim group” gets the worst of it as if the “attack” were
caused by talk-rad…no, make that “hate radio,” which will be the
new moniker the Fifth Column/Fourth Estate hangs on the
talkmeisters.
(Even before imposing the Fairness Doctrine, they’ll use
the Federal Communications Commission in other ways to put a
muffler on their opponents.)
And, always, a few carefully calibrated street demonstrations,
splashed with just the right headlines across the East Coast
newspapers and captured by just the right camera angle on CBS
News, will be used any time, on any issue, to make the point that
civil unrest would be the price of resistance to the benevolent
desires of the Obama regime.
The erosions of conservative rights will be incremental. Each one
will have its own justification. Each one will be supported by
the establishment media. Each one will be timed so as to allow
the general public to become accustomed to it, to accept it as
unremarkable, or even to come to regard it as a public good for
the sake of keeping conservative “troublemakers” from fomenting
disorder.
And the Obamessiah, still speaking frequently to stadia full of
admirers, will provide a tone of reasoned moderation, combined
with further appeals to hope, in order to justify it all.
These are the sorts of things Alinskyites do. These are the sorts
of tactics used by ACORN, at whose conferences Obama himself
regularly taught seminars on “power.” These are the sorts of
policies favored by the academic left, Obama’s old milieu — the
policies that favor speech codes and stolen campus newspapers and
the firing of faculty for “offensive” remarks.
Conservatives have fought things like this for years already, of
course. But they’ve never fought it while the left controlled so
many of the levers of power, and certainly not when the left was
led by such a charismatic and near cult-inspiring leader who was
so smart, so well steeped in these stratagems, and so fully
supported by a Fourth Estate up whose legs warm feelings run
every time he waxes eloquent.
It will take very focused, very intelligent, very skillful action
by conservatives to stop this creeping subversion of a free
society. This is a whole different political battlefield than any
on which we’ve fought before. And we haven’t yet found our Omar
Bradley.
