{Yeah, it’s kinda silly but I just wanted to write that.)

But the thing is, we, the conservative “rank-and-file,” must confront conservatives in leadership when they stray from conservative principles. Or problem, both as conseravtives and as a nation, is that for at least the last eight years, we have not confronted them when they have strayed.

We need to first infuse the Party with a backbone and new conservative blood. Then we need to work through the system on the local levels and through the Convention process to put conservatives in positions of power and leadership. Then we need Conservatives in leadership who are more interested in achieving conservative goals that reaching across the isle and appeasing the Democrats to enforce Party discipline .

Let’s not avoid the real issue like we did for the past 8 years and esp the past 2. Hillary is vile. Bill is vile and the dem party is vile. Let’s say so and produce the evidence and quit pussy footing around.

The real problem is that we conservative “rank-and-file” do not hold the so-called conservative politicians’ feet to the proverbial fire when start behaving, acting and liberally. And until we do, until the conservative “rank-and-file” gets the backbone to punish so-called conservative politicians who act, speak, vote, and govern like liberals (most often, all the while calling the liberalism “(compassionate) conservative”), then we will get spineless so-called conservatives leaders who constantly cave in to liberalism.

Giving honorable friends passes and playing the game lib dems define is why we are now a minority.

Take on Hillary.

As someone whose first posts on RedState all seemed to say, “I do not like John McCain …” I am still amazed that we all want to blame him for everything while exonerating and even praising other Republicans who are even worse. Truth be known, if President Bush and the Republicans in Congress (especially when under Bill Frist and Tom Delay) had governed like conservatives, our country and our party would have been VASTLY better off. But the sad fact of the matter is, even now few of us seem t o have the guts to say that.

still stands, I think.

Democrats enforce party line votes…Republicans do not and our moderates revel in rubbing our noses in the crap they dish here the Dems don’t dare stray let alone stray while ridiculing the Party!

We should expect some modicum of Republican Principle from these guys!

I’m still waiting to hear someone tell us what we do if we give the Lugars and the Voiniviches everything they want and allow them to believe they can do anything they please to us and still command our loyalty.

I understand your argument and I’m persuaded to a certain extend…I’ll admit I’m pulled both directions on this issue and I’m sure somewhere along you will come to that line you will not cross…the only difference between us is that I used to think as you do but I’ve reached my line…how long will it be before you reach yours?

Reagan said:

If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace–and you can have it in the next second–surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face–that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand–the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin–just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

I know this part of “A Time for Choosing” is addressing the cold war and the Democrats wish to appease or surrender to the Soviet Union…but to my mind this speaks as equally to the problem Conservatives have with appeasing the establishment in the Republican Party and the Surrender that they always demand and have always gotten just like they did this year with McCain. This is why we’re dealing with our own leadership appeasing the Democrats and going along with the wholesale socialization of our country. 2008 has brought me to that “price the we won’t pay” and line “beyond which they must not advance”

Finally, I really don’t see how you figure this establishment as any less liberal today as they were back when Reagan was president and had to fight them tooth and nail because of the same people like Lugar and Voinovich! Look at how they are selling us doewn the river by appeasing the Democrats and buying into the wholesale rush to socialize the economy in the midst of the bailout feaver that has them in a trance!

The lobbying/employment ban is tougher. Our Ethics Act prohibits you working with anything about which you have knowledge gained from your position but which is not public knowledge. Frankly, the best advantage I have from having had positions in both the Legislative and Executive Branch is the fact that I know people and they know me; my email or call will get answered by somebody who can actually do something, not a kid whose job it is to write stuff that makes it look like somebody cares.

So, I think a prohibition like ours but maybe a Presidential or gubernatorial term in duration. After a couple of House races go by, you’re barely a memory in a legislative body.