By Kurt Schlichter
Sunday, May 20, 2013
Some establishment types are shaking their heads as they
warn conservatives that we must not politicize the Administration’s Benghazi
bungling, its Obamacare shakedowns, its AP records grab or its IRS abuses.
Like hell we mustn’t. We must. Big time.
The last couple weeks’ revelations of fresh and
compelling examples of the kind of duplicity and petty tyranny we conservatives
have been screaming about for five years have presented us with what military
folks call a “seam.” A “seam” is the border where two different units meet, and
it is generally the kind of weak point you want to drive your forces into in
order to split your opponent’s front and rout him. These latest scandals have
revealed a seam between two elements of the liberal coalition, the liberals who
actually believe some of what they say and the cynical leftists who merely
crave power.
Let’s split that seam.
But to do so, conservatives must ignore the voices of the
fussy and the fainthearted and ruthlessly exploit it. We can and should – and
must – politicize the hell out of these shameful imbroglios.
There’s nothing wrong with politicizing politics. In
fact, it’s kind of difficult to imagine why politics shouldn’t be politicized –
politics is, after all, by definition political. In fact, it’s only this week,
after it became inconvenient, that the liberal establishment changed its
collective mind and determined that politicization was once again a bad thing.
It was a good thing when liberals were slobbering at the chance to use the
massacre of innocents by a lunatic to deprive law-abiding citizens of their
sacred fundamental right to keep and bear effective arms. Back then,
politicizing misfortune was not only A-OK but a moral imperative.
This week, not so much.
The hypocrisy surrounding the concept of politicization
illustrates the opportunity conservatives have had fall into their collective
lap as a result of this tsunami of scandals. Today’s liberalism is a festival
of hypocrisy, of purported values solemnly praised and heartily defended right
up until the second it stops being in the interest of liberalism to do so. At
that point, these sacred values get discarded like so many whiskey bottles in
the Kennedy compound’s recycling bin.
Of course, no discussion of liberal hypocrisy could begin
without a reference to Teddy Kennedy, who did his part in the War on Women by
personally running up the casualty rate. Bill Clinton was another friend of
women, at least until they complained about him and were insulated by his
liberal guardians.
Liberal champions of minorities didn’t hesitate to make
an icon of Robert Byrd, who was either a Grand Imperial Cyclops or an Exalted
Kleagle in the Democrat-founded KKK. And the liberal champions of the innocent
and the helpless won’t help you if you are too innocent or helpless – if you
are, say, a fetus you are out of luck.
The current administration’s love of civil rights and
liberties came to an end about the time the President removed his hand from the
Bible in January 2009. Free speech was an awesome concept when liberals were
using it against their opponents. But once liberals took power, free speech
became an appalling obstacle to true progress. Freedom of religion stopped
being important when some religious people abused that right by opposing
liberal initiatives on religious grounds. And as for the Second Amendment,
well, don’t let the text fool you into thinking it gives you any rights.
If it was to the Administration’s short term political
advantage to quarter soldiers in private houses without the consent of the
owner they would be showing the Third Amendment the door.
We now have an Administration that lied about what
happened in Benghazi, and is now lying about its lies. We have a cabinet
secretary shaking down healthcare companies for “donations” to a propaganda
fund for Obamacare. We have the government grabbing up reporters’ cellphone
records, and we have the IRS randomly selecting for persecution people and
entities who just happen to oppose the regime’s goals.
For some liberals, this is just too much to swallow, and
we should focus on splitting them out of the liberal coalition. This is the
seam.
We spend so much time seeing and reading the ravings of
the zombie liberals of the media and the blogs that we forget there is another
group of liberals who are liberal because – for whatever misguided reason –
they think liberalism is the right way to be. In other words, there are
liberals who actually believe what liberalism used to purport to support –
including civil rights, civil liberties and the rights of traditionally
disadvantaged people.
It is interesting that from those ranks come some of the
most dedicated and effective conservative activists – people who became
conservative not because they changed their views but because they didn’t.
Liberalism left them. They believe in individual rights and in equality before
the law. They hate prejudice and bigotry in all their ugly forms. They embrace
every individual’s value, and want to see every individual have a chance to
live and to succeed.
They are people like Andrew Breitbart. Andrew was not
born a conservative. He wasn’t raised a right-winger. He started out a liberal,
but he actually took seriously what liberals said. His great sin – and why he
was and is so hated by liberals – is that he refused to stop believing in those
values when those values stopped being useful. His outrage was not that
liberals were liberal; it was that establishment liberals were liars, that they
struck poses as defenders of what was true and good and then abandoned them
without a second thought if another pose better served their purpose.
This is the seam, the liberals who have a sense of right
and wrong, who truly believe in the values the liberal establishment merely
pays lip service too. You can see them tentatively raising their heads in
response to the avalanche of scandals, noting that maybe the Administration
could be a bit more forthcoming on Benghazi, that perhaps siccing government
enforcers on political opponents is a bad thing to do.
They sense the truth, and they need time to get their
head around it. Liberalism has left them too.
This is why it is no time to go all wobbly. This is why
it is no time to ease up on the accelerator. The unvarnished truth, presented
clearly, forthrightly and undeniably, will be a wedge that drives them out of
the liberal coalition.
Now that the mainstream media has itself felt the clammy
grasp of government oppression, for the first time since the inauguration the
White House has reason to fear the headlines in the morning papers. The press
senses blood in the water, and some elements of it seem to be stirring out of
their lethargy and spinning up into a well-deserved feeding frenzy.
As conservatives, we should not overplay our hand. We
should not babble about impeachment or oversell the revelations. We should let
the media be the delivery system for the bad news – it’s a lot harder to shoot
the messenger when the messenger is the undeniably liberal Washington Post.
But politicize it we must – in hearings, on talk shows,
to reporters. We have found the seam. Our wedge is truth. And we need to drive
it in with a sledgehammer.
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