Did I Abandon the Republican Party?

I was born in the “Show Me” state on the day and nearly the exact hour Calvin Coolidge dedicated Mt. Rushmore. I grew up watching former corporate executives selling apples on the streets of St. Louis. I saw unemployed laborers sculpting effigies of Jesus in the piles of wet sand of their stalled construction sites in hopes of a few coins from passers by. I listened as my parents ranted against the socialist programs instituted by F.D.R. None of which halted the Great Depression. Everyone was confident America would never be affected by the antics of the eggheads and crackpot professors infiltrating our colleges and universities. Earl Browder and Norman Thomas were scorned and denigrated as fringe lunatics. It took World War II and the firing up of America’s industrial might to bring any noticeable economic improvement.
Discharged from the service following WWII, I moved to Chicago. During the 1948 election I acted as a poll watcher in a neighborhood where the Democratic Precinct Captain took voters into the booth and instructed them in Italian while the police officer assigned to the polling place slept. While living a block south of Wrigley Field; Democratic Precinct workers hounded incessantly with offers to fix traffic tickets or sundry other similar personal services to garner one’s vote. After moving to a predominately Republican suburb outside of Cook County; I noted no one came to the door seeking my vote at election time. As a result I sought out and joined the Young Republicans. I was soon made President of the group and eventually was elected YR District Governor for the Illinois 14th Congressional District. This was during the same period another YR a few years younger than I, Donald Rumsfeld, was seeking to become state YR president. Too old to continue as a Young Republican I was elected a Republican Precinct Committeeman serving until I moved to a different area.
Since then I have painfully watched as the actions of both Republicans and Democrats have involved us in protracted wars; giveaways, in the vain hope of gaining their love, to countries which enviously despise our success; tax practices which sent our once great industrial base overseas; and socialist practices and entitlement programs which have rotted our lower and middle classes at their core.
Did I give up on the Republican Party; or did the Republican Party abandon me? Me and all the other Americans who believed all the “tell ’em what they want to hear” buncombe. Who believed that when their representatives got to Washington they would not succumb to the wiles of the myriad lobbyists and activists pushing for phony civil rights and special interest groups of all manner.  I am sick to death of the constant mailings seeking money thinly disguised as an asinine poll or survey: “Do you approve of America’s slide down the toilet?; Yes, No, No opinion.” I don’t want another phony plastic membership card nor certificate telling me I’m an honored member along with a lengthy letter telling me all the nasty stuff the Democrats, socialists, communists, and progressives are doing to destroy America. We know all that. I don’t want to hear how hard you are going to work to turn the country around and how much you believe in all the wonderful principles of God and country. We have the right to assume all of that.
I want you to “show me!” Show me what specific actions the party will take to rectify the damage done over the past four decades. How will the Republican Party fix a Legislature that insists on “earmark” projects and wasteful spending on unfunded entitlement programs? A legislature that feels comfortable voting themselves pay increases, perks, and benefits whenever the mood strikes. How will the Republican Party bring a halt to the Judiciary’s practice of creating laws by edict. What is the method by which the Republican Party will stop the Executive Branch from “ruling” through unelected czars and controlling our lives and freedoms through regulatory procedures. All of which most thinking people would call a dictatorship
Show me the leader with a strategy to fight our way out of the morass of the collectivist ideology which has been growing quietly in the obscurity of our educational system for the past 100 years and now infects our body politic. It is a sure path to slavery and threatens our very existence as a free nation.
Show me the leader with the wisdom to stop the insanity of spending our way to prosperity. Who will cease giving away the prosperity we have developed over the years to the professional beggar nations of the world under the guise of compassion for which we only incur their wrath and disdain in return. A leader who will step to a high place and shout these realities to a waiting nation.
Show me the leader who will call a halt to an overextended military presence battling under the constraints of political correctness in the hope of protecting the sanctity and freedom of nearly every country in the world. And all while the barbarians are flooding across our borders changing our language and culture while taking advantage of our educational and welfare systems. A leader who realizes if we are to be engaged in two wars we must do so to win. To win means the enemy is defeated and subdued into surrender. It is called victory. We seem to have completely lost sight of the fact that war is about killing people and breaking things. It is not a training mission with the idea we can get someone else to do the job. It requires a leader who understands the lunacy of equipping our military with the finest weapons the 21st century can produce, then preventing them from using them to the fullest. Worse yet to put any of our servicemen on trial for allegedly giving a captured combatant a fat lip or a punch in the gut. Our brave warriors are being maimed or killed by 10th century cretins creeping around at night in bathrobes and turbans planting bombs by the roadside. In the last war America actually fought to complete victory, the two worst aggressors since Genghis Khan were brought to their knees in four years. The leader we need will understand that wars end, not with an exit strategy, but with victory. If this is not our objective then our military should be brought home to protect our own borders.
Show me the leader willing to call to account the career politicians, opportunistic lawyers, and big business brigands for their corruption and decadence. The same miscreants who have created a nightmare for medical practitioners attempting to avoid specious lawsuits while others in the field are busy defrauding the already over burdened system. The same culprits who now purport to solve the problem with a massive takeover of the health care industry. A leader who will cease allowing the alleged poor to continue sucking the life blood out of our middle class.
Show me the leader with the voice to put an end to the nonsense of multiculturalism and political correctness and the courage to confront the growing problems precipitated by the Muslim World as it attempts to crawl out of the tenth century. There is nothing multicultural about Islam. America, the melting pot; that is our culture. Regardless of from whence we came; we became Americans. Not British, German, French, Italian, or Polish-Americans. Americans—period. Those who are so enamored of another culture should go where that culture is practiced. Political correctness has done naught but stifle our right to freely express our thoughts on the pretext of sensitivity while the thin-skinned multiculturalists denigrate and ridicule without a second thought the beliefs and principles upon which America was built and flourished. The same beliefs and principles which gives them the right to spew their venom.
Show me the leader who recognizes the wealth of this nation was built on the wise usage of our natural resources; our forests, our oil, our coal, our ores and precious metals. It was not built on a gross national product of legal fees, interest on loans, insurance premiums and the like. God—or nature if preferable—has blessed us with rich natural resources.
Show me the leader who will not permit the utilization of this great asset to be abrogated by a cult of foolhardy ecologists in their misguided and narrow minded attempts to save an insignificant fish, owl, or polar bear. The arrogance of their mission confounds understanding. A leader who will husband the environment in a rational manner without the draconian measures currently obstructing the use of our natural capital while pretending to move us to energy independence.
Show me the leader who will bring honesty and common sense to the specious science of “climate change” perpetrated by a world-wide effort to relieve us of yet more of our tax dollars in pursuit of allegedly saving the planet while they build their own society on the pretext of reparations for our supposed misdeeds. A leader who will put a stop to the kind of foolishness that suggests humans exhaling CO2 is a contributing factor in the earth’s destruction. What’s next? Shall we prepare the Kool-Aid?
Show me the leader who will inspire the “silent majority” now awakened to the dangers threatening the very existence of our country and who have found their voice through the “tea parties”, “town halls,” and marches on Washington. A leader with the will and the capacity to inspire these formerly “silent” who now stand ready to storm the bastions of the growing collectivist oppression that threatens our free society. Empty rhetoric has blinded and deceived the electorate. This battle cannot be fought with training seminars, advertising, phony polls and surveys, nor plastic membership cards. This battle requires the inspired rhetoric and powerful strategy of a leader with the testicular fortitude to speak out loud and clear—to take the fight to the adversary.
Show me that leader in the Republican Party and all who believe in preserving the greatness of America will follow. They will once again take pride in financial, ideological, and spiritual support.