Sheila Kihne at The Activist Next Door is tired of seeing conservatives doing the media’s work for them.
She assails Chris Christie for throwing Sarah Palin under the bus on the Sunday Methane Circuit over the weekend:
Here’s what [Governor Christie’s] answer should have been to any questions about Sarah Palin:
“There is nobody more hated by the media than Governor Palin. How exactly is she supposed to act when the media tried to lay the blame for a mass-murder on her? Look, you’re trying to get me to distance myself from a fellow conservative and I won’t do it. People are mad at you– they’re more mad at you than they are President Obama or Governor Palin. They’re mad at you because you’re incapable of doing your job as the free press and reporting the news to the American people without your constant spin. Perhaps you guys should buy some steno pads with the words ‘Who, what, when, where, how, how much?’ imprinted at the top of the page.’ Maybe that would help.”
That’s the “Palin answer” men of the GOP. Why is it that the ONLY Republicans with high name-recognition who demonstrate valor, strength, and courage are women? Sarah Palin is more of a man than any of these guys.
Well, to be fair, Palin’s never had to face down the Jersey unions.
And isn’t it sad that we now have to look to the wilds of Alaska for some ruggedness and true grit? To quote a great 80’s tune: “Where have all the good men gone?”
They’re all over the place – but Sheila makes a great point – and you need to read her entire piece for it, but I’ll synopsize it here: conservatives need to quit playing along with the Democrat and Media (pardon the redundancy) effort to turn the vocabulary of our language itself into a liberal tool to be used against us.
We conservatives (as opposed to Republicans) are going to little in the way of dispassionate balance, to say nothing of help, from the media; we have to do it for ourselves.
Sheila does “the Palin Answer” pretty well. I’m going to suggest a few more areas where conservatives, locally and nationally, need to stick together in the face of the left and media’s (ptr) chanting points:
- We Have A $6.2 Billion Deficit: Correct response: “No, we don’t. We have a forecast that is $6.2B larger than the last revenue projections. It is not a budget. It can – and must – be trimmed, and the “autopilot” assumptions that keep leading to these absurd numbers need to be abolished”.
- The GOP Budget Attacks Education: Correct response: “There is precisely zero link between education spending and achievement. Minnesota, North Dakota, the District of Columbia and South Carolina spent, respectively, $10.1K, 9.3K, 16K and 9K per student in 2008; while picking “objective” measures of achievement are difficult, by most standards (SAT scores, to pick an arbitrary one) North Dakota and Minnesota are statisatically identically high in achievement; the D of C and South Carolina are both at the bottom of the heap. No, indeed, since 80% of what we spend on education goes into faculty and staff salaries and pensions (!), all “education spending” really measures is the excellence…of the Teachers’ Union’s clout.”
- “We Can’t Balance The Budget On The Backs Of The Poor!”: Correct response: “The GOP proposals would make harder to expand the pool of people who can get entitlements from the state. The “forecast” proposal would increase Health and Human Services spending by 37% – that’s thirty seven freaking percent – in the coming budget. That’s not just ridiculous, not just absurd; it’s obscene. The DFL goal of expanding the subsidies of poverty (and, especially, of the HHS bureaucracy) beyond what’s needed to prevent hunger and other abject poverty must not be done on the backs of the taxpayers!”
Sheila’s on to something.
More?
“Cutting Local Government Aid is just another way to balance the state budget by driving up local property taxes”. Baloney. Pure and simple baloney. LGA was primarily designed to help communities with limited comcercial/industrial tax bases. Over the decades, it has devolved into a welfare sop for DFL strongholds. When over 1/3 of the total city-level LGA goes to Duluth/Mpls/St. Paul (see: DFL strongholds) which have HUGE commercial/industrial bases, the LGA system has been perverted into a City Funding Welfare System. Do some cities need the help? Sure. But the system needs to be reformed to serve those that NEED the aid, not the leeches that WANT the aid.
Oh, and one more thing, until the Big Three stop wasting tax dollars on $50,000 water fountains and assorted other unneccessary slop, don’t come crying to me about not having money to pay for cops and firemen.
When I see/hear our side piling on Sarah Palin I cringe. If she is nothing, she is honest. When the Left demonizes this woman I can’t help but wonder why they despise her so and it becomes apparent – they fear her. When the Right piles on I wonder where our collective soul is. She’s taking a lot of arrows for the cause. I have no problem standing up for what she says or does. The Left will never say anything good about the woman. They seek to make a cartoon caricature out of her and I think, ultimately, her stock will rise because there is a time limit on how long a person can be demonized before they want to see the demon.
MyGov, to be fair Mpls. cut the number of $50,000 drinking fountains from 10. I suspect they will redirect the funds to $50,000 art urinals.
Pawlenty isn’t much better, he “distanced” himself from her, too. He’d better knock it off if he wants to move to Washington.
The most popular Conservatives in the country are Palin and Limbaugh. If you’re positioning yourself for the GOP Presidential nomination, you need to play to the hard-core base of party activists who actually go to the caucuses and vote in primary elections. Those people aren’t just Conservatives, they’re also Tea Partiers and some residual Randites, none of whom have any time for mushy-middle RINOs.
Run to the right for the nomination, run to the middle to get elected, sounds cynical. But it works.
Kerm: What an appropriate metaphor. Pissing tax dollars down the drain. Reality bites, don’t it DFL?
Going from $50,000 drinking fountains to $50,000 art urinals.
Pissing tax dollars down the drain.
That’s rich, I love it!!
Thanks, I’ll be here all week.
…try the veal!
Don’t forget to tip your blogger.
The national media gerbils are already at work repeating the chanting points. The other night on CBS I saw a story about an east coast city where police and firefighters were being laid off. After much boo-hooing, the reporter mentioned the inconvenient truth: the public employee unions had been invited to accept pay cuts, declined to participate in the solution, thus forcing layoffs. I recall hearing a lot of similar BS last year about the city of Colorado Springs cutting back on services because of budget shortfalls. As far as I know, it hasn’t yet been taken over by roving bands of thugs. I wish I could say the same about a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, LA and places even closer.