I don’t ask this lightly. I honestly want to know what happened to it. Sometime post World War II it seem to take a serious hit but it survived. During Vietnam, it took a beating that nearly killed it. During the Gulf War it was resurrected and pride was again the order of the day. After we were bloodied on September 11, 2001, nearly all of us were united in that same American Spirit. How dare they come here and attack us!
I was watching Turner Classic Movies all night because I’m a classic movie fanatic and an insomniac. Yankee Doodle Dandy came on and I watched. In the end, George M. Cohan receives an award from President FDR for his contributions to America. He leaves the White House as a troop parade marches down Pennsylvania Avenue. World War II had just begun and the troops were being deployed. They were marching and singing Cohan’s song “Over There”. The chorus goes,
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming
The drum’s rum-tumming everywhere
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there
What happened to that. What happened to the spirit that could lead us to believe that we wouldn’t quit a fight until it was over? Conservatives and most Republicans still have it. But not the others.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both promising to bring our troops home before it is over. That’s not the spirit that Cohan wrote about. He didn’t say, “And we won’t come back until it is inconvenient to stay.”
But that is what they will do. Democrats have misinterpreted what the change in Congressional leadership in the 2006 mid-terms meant. They interpreted it as a mandate against the war. But what really handed them the victory? Could it be the number of Conservatives who decided that the nation needed a lesson? Could it be that that lesson still needs to be learned?
The boycott of the 2006 mid-terms by roughly half of those of us who consider ourselves Conservative led to the non-governing 110th “Do Nothing” Congress. Democrats have demonstrated that they are incapable of governing but yet our Party is on the verge of nominating someone who is just as bad as they are.
2006 had nothing to do with the war. It had to do with out of control spending. Democrats took over and nothing changed. They erroneously hoodwinked the apathetic American lemmings* into believing that they could bring the troops home, which they can’t. The spun the meaning of the results to reflect that notion. Had Conservatives shown up in 2006, we would be in the exact same place we are now only Republicans in Congress would have missed the lesson. John Boehner would not be trying to reign in earmarks and fiscal responsibility wouldn’t be a campaign issue. Even Hillary is attempting to sell herself as fiscally conservative.
The only difference between our eventual nominee and the other side is the war. There are Republicans who will hold their noses on election day and vote for Juan MexiCain because of the war. There are still others because the next President will likely have to appoint 2 new Supreme Court Justices and MexiCain’s picks would be much better than Obama or Clinton’s. I’m saying that this next President will be a 4 year failure and I don’t want him to be a Republican.
So what happened to the American spirit? The Democrats and Juan MexiCain are killing it. It is up to the Conservatives in this country to keep it alive on life support until this next Presidential term is over. I’ve been advocating that we allow the Democrats to have 2008 so that we can come back in 2012 with a re-newed sense of the American Spirit. We can then pick the pieces of this shattered nation and rebuild what we had during the Reagan years. Pride and strength. Because under this next President, there will be no pride and we will become weaker.
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As Mark Steyn pointed out in his CPAC address. You could argue that conservatism breeds greed, but no where near the greed liberalism breeds as soon as someone sees somebody get something for nothing.
As soon as we allowed our government to take the first dollar from one person to give to another it set off a chain reaction where everybody’s waiting for “theirs”.
To hell with conservatism and the American ideal. I just want to sit in my lazy boy, watch the Brittaney soap opera and let other people feed me and the candidate that will promise me that gets my vote.