Thursday, February 18, 2010

We Won


Billy Graham used to tell the story of an old widow who lived in a shack on a hillside. Across the valley was a mountain blocking her view down to the flatlands. She hated that mountain. One day the local preacher came to visit and the widow told him how much she hated that mountain. He told her that faith moves mountains and that if she believed with all her heart that the Lord could move that mountain then that mountain would be gone the next day. After he left the widow emptied her heart of all doubt and got down on her knees and asked God to move that mountain, secure in the faith that in the morning the mountain would be gone. At sunrise the widow's eyes popped open, she sat up in bed and looked out the window. The mountain was still there.
"I knew it!" she sneered.

A year ago we saw the same ugly mountain but this was a mountain of lies, a mountain of tyranny, a mountain of fear for our future and our freedom. The Democrats were in charge. The irrational lies and fulsome idiocies of the eight-year propaganda campaign to smear the hapless Bush, a liberal RINO standard bearer who caused us much more grief than inspiration, were now being voiced as official policy. The gormless nonentity who had gladhanded himself into the White House was being spoken of in the Official Media in terms that would make Kim Jong Il blush. Elementary school children were learning jingles of the 'I Love Chairman Mao More Than My Mother' ilk to praise the Mighty Barak. The market was in a free fall and the Congress was voting themselves and the other dependents of the welfare state a trillion-dollar goodie bag. ACORN had just stolen a Senate seat in Minnesota while that state's slack-jawed RINO governor just sat there and let the electoral cheaters inflict a nauseating creature known as Al Franken on the nation. The real lefties were talking about arresting members of the former administration and shuttering Talk Radio. We looked at a legislative agenda that stood fair to destroy every claim that America had to being considered a free country with a free economy. I saw the reality of the 1970's UK in that legislative agenda and I can tell you that the despair that I saw all around me felt exactly the same as it did then. The Big Lie stalked the land. We were at rock bottom.

I went to the local Tea Party on April 15th, 2009. A stern group. Grim-faced. We had faith, we had hope, but we were a tiny group in a left wing city in a left wing state whose main newspaper was reporting the death of conservatism in every edition. A few TV trucks showed up and did a few pans but no interviews or a stand-up by a reporter. The in-studio newsreader later read a two-sentence explanation as they showed the camera slowing panning across the crowd. If anything it showed how isolated and hopeless the opposition was. The lonely tribe of crackpots. My wife was too embarrassed to tell her friends I had done something so insane and pathetic as attend a Tea Party.

But then things started to happen. The mountain began to move. The Glorious One's resonant voice became flat and divorced from reality. People noticed the teleprompter and Obama's apparent inability to speak without it. Reid and Pelosi's egregious lies, conniving underhanded secrecy, sneering arrogance and arrant stupidity, lovingly transmitted by the clueless media who believed every word of this elitist codswallop, began to be noticed by regular people. The Dems jammed a Stimulus Bill through and then started bragging about how many jobs they saved! The people who were screaming bloody murder at W's 4.5% unemployment rate were bragging with pride at their 10% unemployment rate...a rate that any fool can see is completely bogus; the real rate is much higher. The Flop-Eared Clown flew to Copenhagen in a blizzard of ClimateGate e-mails, landing in a real blizzard of ice-age proportions and had to barge in uninvited for an audience with Chinese Premier Wen Jibao who was leading the drive to cripple western economies with carbon taxes so that China and India could pollute in peace.

Over it all we had The Health Care Crisis! Thousands were going to die unless we nationalized health care immediately. Republicans werent allowed to participate in writing these monstrous health-care bills. In fact no one was allowed to even read these bills. The Dems voted in lock-step for a huge change in our lives and our health without anyone, including most of them, being able to even read it. Did they think that no one noticed? The budget numbers were blatantly dishonest. The 'benefits' start in 2013 but the taxes and penalties start as soon as the bill is passed. The cost savings were predicated on huge cuts to Medicare. As the flaws of this legislation leaked out and people got madder and madder the geniuses Harry Reid and Barak Obama began buying votes in the Senate with giant givaways. The unions were screaming about the tax on their benefits so they amended that too. The whole process was an example of brazen political incompetence and cost the Dems the support of every independent in the country.

Meanwhile the Dems lost the Governor's race in Virginia. OK, thats a purple state so, like, so what? They also lost the state house in New Jersey. That was more serious. Corzine was one of the boys in an indigo blue state and Chris Christie was no Christie Todd Whitman. He would be welcome at any Tea Party in the country. But Nutsy Pelosi was able to stretch her botoxed mug into what some experts would characterize as a 'smile' and announced, "We won!" because they managed to hold a congressional seat in New York with 45% of the vote.
A million people turned out for a march on Washington. Maybe we didnt get to see it on TV but the people who live and work in Washington could compare the size of it to other marches and they became scared. The pathetic little groups had grown and come together. The Agenda stalled. What was going on? The wave of anger was evident as the phones rang off the hooks in Congressional offices.

People are desperate. People are scared. People are mad. They're really mad. I was in the violent rump of the anti-war movement in the sixties and the hate of the people for the Establishment burns hotter today than it did then. Who are the Establishment now? Ivy-League, overeducated, elitist bureaucrats, thats who. Liberals to a man or woman. Their complete lack of common sense is at last obvious to anyone who has ever worked in the non-government part of the economy. Their greed for ever increasing taxes is ravenous. People who have lost their jobs in their fifties, when getting another job is turning one's back on a career that one built with pride over a lifetime and embarking on a humiliating journey back to the lowest rungs on the economic ladder are looking at their neighbor, who worked for the government and retired with 90% of his salary at the age of 50, with rage. That fat, happy neighbor is part of The Establishment. So is the banker collecting a multi-million dollar bonus fattened by zero interest rate Fed loans and bailout money. Were the hell is that Green Job anyway? Why doesnt my college grad kid, $100,000 in student loan debt, have one?

Then came Scott Brown. The voters of Massachusetts abandoned their Democratic overlords of almost a century and voted for a Neanderthal who ran loudly and specifically against the leftist agenda. The Tea Party lead the fight to beat Martha Coakley in the most left-wing state in the union. The Big Lie is dead. No one believes the lie that there are 'moderate' Democrats who are slightly less left-wing then the rest of them. The ability of liberals to protect themselves by becoming Republicans is also dead. Ask Charlie Crist, Kaye Bailey Hutchinson or John McCain if you dont believe me.

The mountain has moved. It was faith and commitment to telling the truth that did it. The Democrat lie has melted in the flames of reality. They are as pathetic in power as they were mighty in opposition. It is because the things that they believe with all their heart are wrong. Raising taxes will not fix an economy, they will cripple it. Truckling to hostile dictators and insulting one's friends is not an effective foreign policy. Global Warming is not only not settled science but every single assertion made in Algore's Oscar-winning movie can be proven to be wrong just five years later. The myth spun by the libs in the schools and in the media is now seen as the song of poverty and oppression. People have awakened in a way that wouldnt have seemed possible.

Instead of a black night of tyranny we are looking at a new dawn for our nation. A dawn in which the cancer of bureaucracy is brought to heel and cut down to the bone. A dawn in which the public employee unions have to address their unreasonable pension plans. A dawn where an incompetent teacher can be fired. A dawn where someone can start a new business and not be crippled with taxes and regulations. A dawn where someone can invest their hard-earned money and not have the government confiscate his profits or dividends. A dawn of lower subsidies and transfer payments. The journey that began with Woodrow Wilson and FDR has now reached its burnout point. The parasite is killing the host with spreading unemployment and soon rising inflation. The electorate's eyes are open. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda lays in smoking ruins. The mountain no longer blocks the view and now, to paraphrase one of the lib's most revered icons, we can look down into the promised land where all the people who work hard and build and invest can join hands and turn to the double dippers, the incompetent cronies, the union-protected losers, featherbedders, lifers and useless bureaucrats and their tax collecting thugs and sing the song of the old Negro spiritual, "free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I'm free at last!"