progressives

The news that Arlen Specter is switching parties has sparked a lot of attention to the predictable Republican reaction, which ranges from disappointment to blame-storming to "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out".

But that's not the most interesting story here.

Once everybody gets the Republican reaction story out of their system, we'll turn to a much, much more interesting chapter in this story: How will Democrats react to Democratic Senate candidate Arlen Specter?

Early reaction (Daily Kos, Glenn Greenwald, The New Republic, MyDD, Open Left) suggests Senator Arlen Specter has somehow managed to join a political Party that dislikes him even more than Republicans did. 

So, by promising to give Specter the institutional support of the Democratic Party, it looks like the Democratic establishment has engineered a switch that advances their political control at the expense of the ideological agenda and ideals of the progressive movement.

This will be a crucial test of who holds the power on the Left. Who controls the Democratic Party: the Party establishment or the progressive movement?

By John Barnhart, Executive Editor, American Daily Review

All one need do is watch the news regarding politics and religion during the holidays to discover that there is indeed a culture war going on in America.

The reason the war exists at all is because secular progressives cannot stand practicing Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelical Christians or Christianity, they do not want to answer to God for their behavior, and the concept of a natural connection between Jews and Christians as it relates to the birth of our nation, the U.S. Constitution and service to Jehovah is even more repugnant to them.

In addition, secular progressives are on a mission to confuse others who are stuck in the middle, lost, unsure what they believe, or are atheist republicans and pull them over to “the dark side” if they can.

To find evidence of the hatred secular progressives have for organized, reverent religion and our Lord who inspires it, just study Supreme Court and other case law.

Secular progressives support the sadistic slaughter of innocent babies, they hate any allowance of prayer in school, they force people to consider and discuss homosexuality, bestiality and other sexual deviancy like the pedophilia that the North American Man Boy Love Association promotes as “normal.”

The Ten Commandments, The Holy Bible, the Crucifix, the Cross, the Star of David, “In God We Trust”, “One Nation Under God” and many other religious icons, traditions, phrases, publications, are under constant attack from secular progressives depending on where and how they are discussed or displayed.

Ruthless, Godless, secular progressives constantly shove their empty, selfish, deviant lifestyles in the face of God fearing believers while trashing us and God in the process. They use the media, science, education and the judicial system to help them in their quest to rid our nation of any reference to God, and they make huge efforts to pit Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelical Christians against one another.

The way that they twist our faith and portray us angers me greatly, especially when I see their pundits on CNN and other media outlets discussing us as in a negative way as if having a deep seeded faith is a bad thing or just a stupid superstition.

Then they push the envelope and try to split us by saying thing like these…

“Hey you there…yes you… you Jew, you Christian, you Catholic, do you realize how many times that Israel has stolen intelligence material from the United States… the country that “props them up,” or “hey have you forgotten how many Jews and Protestants were killed by Catholics”, and oh yes then there is this old method… “Do you not remember that each of your faith’s have different beliefs in regards to if there is a Heaven, a Hell, a Messiah and if it was or was not Jesus?” And of course it eventually comes down to “where is and who is this God you speak of and why would he allow people to live in horrible poverty and die horrible deaths?” OR “anyone who believes that there is a God is stupid, and uneducated.”

They demonize us by bringing up the worst elements of our histories or the most “unbelievable” stories, “myths” and “legends” of our common Biblical heritage in hopes we will feed on one another instead of closing ranks.

They cite The Crusades, The Inquisition, The Slaughter of the Innocents by Herod the Great, Noah’s Flood, Adam and Eve, Joshua’s bloody battles in Canaan where “God told him to do it”, the mere belief in God, the very concept of or belief in a Messiah, they even use Abraham’s potential sacrifice of his own son to cast shadows on us when some nutty mother or father does something evil like kill their own kids and it makes huge headlines.

What they don’t realize is that for me, and many like me, whether I was a Catholic, a Protestant or an Evangelical Christian, my beliefs will never waver. I will always believe that God gave Israel to the Jews, and that he gave “the free world” especially America, to the Jew and to the Christian so we may live free and enjoy liberty without fear of religious persecution.

To me, secular progressives have chosen to not just oppose our common beliefs but to trample on them, twist them, spit on them, etc. and as such they might as well have declared war on Jehovah God himself and then tied a mill stone around their necks and launched themselves into the deepest ocean.

I have little to no sympathy for them!

The people I care about are those who are “lost.” They “recognize there might be a God” but they don’t have a relationship with him, or they recognize Israel’s right to The Holy Land but don’t understand why, they just think it’s because of the holocaust and they have no clue to the deeper meaning.

Moderate, Atheist or agnostic “conservatives” are you listening? There is more to this conservatism we hold dear than just simple economic politics. REAL conservatism truly comes down to faith in God and his promise to watch over us, if we only do the few simple things he asks and move our nation in his direction.

REAL conservatives recognize the right way to live because of our faith not because of our wallets.

Anyway, with all that said, I will leave readers with this…

Despite secular progressive’s attacks and attempts to divide politically conservative Jews and Christians in the culture war, I will NEVER feel guilty for being a Judeo-Christian, I will NEVER renounce or relinquish my faith in God or deny God’s promises to his chosen people regarding The Holy Land.

I will NEVER stop offering conservative commentary without compromise, and neither should anyone else.

http://www.americandailyreview.com

So, inspired as I was by some of the talk around here about RedRoots and organizing a new path for conservatism, I wandered on down to my local big bookstore, plopped in a chair, and started reading through some netroots stuff. Namely, I spent the majority of my time on The Practical Progressive, a directory of progressive groups and think tanks, and DailyKos's book.

Why? Not out of admiration nor out of any wish to simply mimic the Left, but rather to see if the reasons for their grassroots success could point us in the right direction. Here's a few quick observations.

1. Not surprisingly, there is a near-unanimous belief that the issue holding back the Left in the 90's and 00's was a lack of organization rather than a deficiency of quality candidates. I dunno how much I buy it, but many many lefties think that 2002 was a turning point, that the internet-boom of left-sites and re-formation of more established progressive groups (like NOW or Planned Parenthood) are primarily responsible for recent electoral success. I strongly disagree with this analysis, as I think the ineptitude of the GOP is much more responsible for the rise of the Left than DailyKos and MyDD.

2. Here's a highlight list of moments that progressives are taking credit for: exposing a culture of corruption (think Delay, Abramoff, Mark Foley; unearthing the issue of underprepared body armor for soldiers; reporting on Blackwater's "unfettered behavior" in Iraq; exposing GOP plants in the White House press corps; and  ousting John Bolton. What I took away from these claims was that:

a) a lot of the Left's victories in the past few years have been GOP-specific mistakes. If we took better care of our own house, many Left attacks would fall by the wayside. So, whatever shape our next step as conservatives takes, it should be essential that we rigorously inspect our own side for foibles. For example, right now Sen. McConnell, one of our own "conservative" leaders, is campaigning around Kentucky crowing about how much money he's directed his constituents' way. This is no different than Congressman Murtha. We don't need "right-wing" versions of the same statism, we need to rebuild our brand as fighters for freedom.

b.) Progressives, I think, are overstating their case if they believe any specific incident in the abovementioned laundry list is responsible for any specific electoral gain. I think they are correct, however, if they say that, as a whole, these stories created a mosaic of unresponsive, inept, and tainted-with-the-Beltway-stench politicians. What does that mean for the future? There needs to be a greater emphasis on constantly replenishing the well of conservative politicians in D.C.

Let the Left have Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and John Conyers. Let the Left have the "lifetime" politicians who sit in their offices doling out government money to buy votes. We need to drop the Ted Stevens from our side. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of our best spokespeople have self-imposed term limits (Think Tom Coburn). Additionally, when we have men and women in D.C. who are there for a shorter period of time, it won't be as easy to sink into a bureaucratic lethargy. When you are in office for a defined period of time, it's easier to remind yourself why you were sent to D.C.: to return power, money, and responsibility to your consitituents, to effectively put yourself out of a job.

I'll put more in later posts, but I'd love to see some of y'all's thoughts, not just on my points but also your own ideas.

Open Left's Chris Bowers provides some insight into the progressive's perception of the likely Democratic agenda for 2009...

In our attempts to build a large Democratic trifecta in Washington, D.C., what, exactly, are we fighting for? To answer that question, here is a comprehensive list of legislation that is certain to pass if Obama wins the White House, we pick up 20 more seats in the House, and 8 more seats in the Senate...

You can find the full list at his post.  Suffice it to say, from legislation that puts a thumb on the scale for Labor Unions to government price controls for health care to massive regulatory expansion, there's something there to worry everybody.....including elements of the Democratic coalition. 

But this point from Bowers should raise the most concern.

The most exciting bits are the positive, progressive feedback loops around increasing unionization (the employee free choice act) and election reform (D.C. voting rights, verified paper trails). These are laws that will make the country itself more progressive, thus building a progressive majority down the road. If we can get more of these, including sweeping media reform (about which we should be optimistic), real immigration reform, (about which I am not optimistic) and the progressive budget (which might just happen by 2011, if all goes well), then we will be on our way to a progressive majority in America that will last for an entire generation.

Policies that redistribute the media to liberal interests, make the public more dependent on liberal institutions and give the government more largesse to distribute to the public.  Policies that entrench Democratic power.

That's the agenda.