'Put up or shut up.'

Below the fold is a lengthy excerpt from an Ace of Spades post from today. Normally it would be considered too long an excerpt, except that when I emailed Ace for clearance to quote a somewhat smaller bit he not only gave me permission; he explicitly told me that I could quote more, if I liked. You see, Ace wants to win… well, so do I. And so should you. Which means that after the fold is the rarest of things: some actual speaking of truth to power. That power being yours; and God help us all if you don’t reach out and use it this election cycle.

It needs hardly be said that I agree with this. And that I think that the excerpt from Ace’s post is probably the most important and useful political commentary that you will read today.

This is no point for complacency or just assuming outside forces are going to make this happen.

There are no outside forces. Every American citizen is a force of one. When Americans decide to skip out on their civic, patriotic duty and leave elections up to other people, or to the impersonal, irresistible outside forces that don’t actually exist, bad things happen.

There is no “wave” here except the wave we make. We are the wave. And if you’re not registered to vote — you’re not the wave. If you’re not planning on voting — you’re not the wave. If you’re not emailing relatives you know lean right and encouraging them to check Obama’s power, to stand up and be counted — you’re not the wave.

There will be no wave at all unless we set our minds on making it happen. Obama’s popularity in polls will not restrain him — we have seen that already. We saw him arrogantly demanding ObamaCare despite 60+% opinion (and strong opinion) against it.

He actually — kind of — doesn’t care about polls. Maybe that is to his credit. Maybe not; I think he takes a perverse delight in thwarting you, defying you. Making your lives worse.

But he doesn’t care much about polls. He doesn’t care about what you believe, what you think, what you want. He only cares about power– and power comes from elections. He cares about what he has the power to do, over your objections.

There is only one way to restrain that power. And just taking pleasure in bad polls isn’t it.

We’re not sending a message here in this election — messages mean nothing.

We are sending an opposition. We are sending a majority hostile to his plans for continued socialization of the United States. We are sending a Congressional investigators armed with the subpoena power and the power to put witnesses under oath — and recommend them for perjury charges, should they lie.

We are not sending a message: it remains in the power of the target of the message as to whether or not he will respond, comply, or defy.

We are sending something he will have little choice but to comply with. That’s not a message he can ignore at his whim. That’s a reality inflicted upon him by voters which he has no choice but to bend to.

We are sending a hard limit to Obama’s power. We are sending America back to Congress.

Don’t forget that. And I know some of you feel so burned by politics or GOP betrayals and all of that. I know that. I know many readers here, despite their apparent interest in politics, actually dropped out of the system years ago and now are entirely spectators.

Obama won on a crushing wave of such similarly-disaffected voters coming back into the system to make their voices heard for once in decades.

You saw the power of that.

Please show Obama the power of that as well, but going the opposite way.

It is the contention of many of those disaffected with the system, of conventional two-party politics, that if conservatives would just show what a potent force they really are, the GOP would stop trying to encourage moderates to vote their way and instead focus on disaffected hard-right conservatives to vote their way.

Well, on that score, it’s put up or shut up time. Because if you’re still sitting out this election, after all you have seen, after the ruin visited upon our country, after socialism has galloped ahead so quickly and so heedlessly — if at this point you still will not undertake your basic American duty to cast a ballot on election day, then it is clear you never will, and it is clear there is no point whatsoever in chasing your vote, for your vote will never be cast.

You will then have decided to simply live as a spectator in your own political life, leaving the decisions most important to you to other people and to chance, and in that case, the GOP is quite right, on a rational, pragmatic, utilitarian level, to simply ignore you forever and chase the independents and moderates who do vote.

The choice is yours, and the choice could determine the path of American progress or ruin for the next forty years.

[Full post here.]

I will add one thing to this: there is a word that has crept into the conservative political lexicon. It is a lazy word; a contemptuous word; and a promiscuous word that will be anything that its user wants. The word is “RiNO,” and it has become a crutch and an excuse. I bring this up because there will inevitably be one or more persons out there who will be offended by the above passage, because it implies that conservatives need to actually help some of those people who have unaccountably somehow managed to get the Republican nomination for a particular district or state. To which I say: yes, that’s exactly what it implies. Because you need to.

STOP! I don’t care about your examples! I don’t care about what other people have said or written, including people who may write for RedState! I don’t care about how you identify yourself in the great American/Conservative/Republican/[insert religious affiliation here] Adjective Pecking Order game! What I care about is replacing Members of Congress who will dutifully do whatever the extremist liberals who run the Democratic party tell them to do with Members of Congress who will not. If you did your job properly already there’s a suitable Republican candidate running for office or the nomination who it won’t pain you to vote for; if you didn’t, do a better job next time. Because as Ace made it clear above – and as I’ve said before – there is no cavalry coming to save us. We’re the cavalry; and we’re perfectly capable of saving ourselves.