Really Right

Not to be out done by President Obama’s claim that “you didn’t build that”, elected Republicans in California have made their own entry into the 2012 lexicon of stupid political statements.

Assembly Minority Leader Connie Conway sent out a letter last week to people that had donated to the campaign of Andy Pugno. As a contributor to the Pugno campaign, I was a recipient of the letter. I almost didn’t open it but I did. Wow!

July 30, 2012
Dear William,

As a donor to one of the candidates running in California’s 6th Assembly district, I wanted to make sure you were updated with all the latest information from that campaign.

You may know that conservative Republican Assemblywoman Beth Gaines is running for reelection in the 6th district and she was challenged in the Primary by a Democrat and by another Republican, Andy Pugno.

The Republican Party officially endorsed incumbent Beth Gaines, as did our Republican Caucus. Beth is a valuable and effective member of our team, fighting for lower taxes, spending reductions and
upholding policies that promote strong families. For instance, Beth cast two key votes against SB 48, (the bill requiring the teaching of gay history in our public schools).
During the course of the Primary, Pugno made a written pledge to voters that he would not continue his campaign unless he was the top Republican vote-getter. As it turns out, he barely made it
into second place, far behind incumbent Assemblywoman Gaines.

Now, unfortunately, local newspapers report that Pugno is considering breaking his pledge and launching an expensive and counter-productive campaign against a fellow conservative. I and other
Republican Party leaders have asked him to keep his pledge, but so far he will not commit, and he continues to raise money for a campaign. He may have even asked you for money again.

As the Assembly Republican leader, I hope you will join me in urging Andy Pugno to keep his pledge and suspend his campaign, so we can all come together and concentrate on restoring
conservative leadership to the state.

Thanks for your support.

Sincerely,

Connie Conway
Assembly Republican Leader

Several thoughts ran through my head.
• First, days before this letter was received, the media had widely reported that the California Republican Party was over $800,000 in debt. How could they be in debt? Conway and her crew never campaigned against a single Democrat during the June election. She only spent money protecting incumbent Republicans from more conservative Republican challengers.
• Second, much of that expense was borne by billionaire Charles Munger. What part of Conway’s soul that she had left to sell will never be publically known? It is safe to speculate that the price paid included a provision that CRP will not oppose Molly Munger’s tax hike proposal on the November ballot.
• Third, the whole premise that Beth Gaines was properly endorsed by the CRP is a sham. Gaines did not meet the requirements to receive the CRP endorsement and any claim to the contrary is a bald-faced lie. On this abuse of power alone, the state chair should be forced to resign.
• Fourth, Gaines rejected to offer that whoever came in second should endorse the top Republican and not campaign.
• Fifth, this was the stupidest thing that I have ever seen in politics. Trying to get Pugno’s donors to pressure him into doing anything is illustrative of Conway’s lack of principle and ignorance of people that are governed by principle. Andy Pugno is not another business as usual person. He is a man of great principle and cannot be bought. Politics is not his life. Andy cares about the future that his children will inherit. He wants California to be a petty place for the next generation. This makes him a statesman not a politician.

My first action after reading the letter was to scan it and send it to Andy and a few others that folks. I was mad and insulted. I thought I was done contributing this year but now I would gladly write another check to Pugno. Beth is clearly wounded and weak or Conway wouldn’t need to initiate this stupid pre-emptive strike.

Later, Andy passed my name to a reporter at the Sacramento Bee. I went thru the above reactions with the reporter but all he could do was try to relate this letter to the Boston mayor that slammed Chick-fil-A. (He interviewed me the afternoon of August first.) Personally, I didn’t see the connection. He pressed me on this point which was really peculiar. The only thing I could come up with was that in both cases the people in power thought they knew better. I told him all we need is leaders that follow the rules and treat everyone the same.  I said that the market (or voters as the case might be) should be trusted with the decision.

Almost none of what I said made it into the article that he wrote. Frankly, it was a poorly crafted hit on social conservatives and supporters of traditional marriage. He just wanted to spank Pugno for his support of Prop 8. “But if Pugno were to win the Assembly seat, Democrats would make regular use of him to remind voters that the Republican Party is exclusionary, which would push the once-Grand Old Party further into irrelevancy in this state.”
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/05/4691334/bullying-by-pols-creates-a-backlash.html#storylink=cpy

I disagree. The California Republican Party is finding irrelevancy due to leaders like Gaines and Conway.

Writer and theologian Francis A Schaeffer (30 January 1912 – 15 May 1984) declared that we are living in the Post-Christian West. This was the impetus for his book How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976). The Court ruling today has pushed us further down the road of Western decline to the era of Post Constitutional America. The phrase was popularized in the book Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America (2012) by Mark Levin. The premise of Ameritopia is that people will trade constitutionalism for utopianism. While I haven’t read the book, the contrast would seem to explain the environmental movement and parts of the welfare state. This would dovetail nicely with the Obama agenda.

Scoffers think that conservatives like me are way off base about the ramifications of today’s Supreme Court decision on Obama Care. I would like to use a few illustrations to express my view of what happened today. All analogies breakdown at some point but here are a few good ones to try to share my point of view.

I spent over two decades in various parts of the Episcopal Church. The last two years was with outcasts from ECUSA (Protestant Episcopal Church). In the 1979 Prayer Book, much of the theological heritage that would get in the way of theological liberalism was relegated to the section in the back of the book for historical documents. These documents contained ideas contrary or embarrassing to the atheists in robes that pretend to be representatives of Jesus Christ. In the same way, the Supreme Court has relegated the last shreds of the Constitution to the index in the back of the history books on the American experiment.

Another way to explain this decision is from the book that I just finished called Ben Hur. Written in 1880 by Civil War General Lew Wallace, the book bears little resemblance to any of the subsequent movies. Towards the end of the book, Judah—the character played by Charlton Heston—enters Jerusalem to find that Jesus had been tried and convicted in the dead of night and that the injustice of his arrest was upheld and compounded by both Pontius Pilot and Herod. Judah tries to rally his troops to stop the proceedings only to find his men were active participants in the crowd yelling “Crucify him”. In much the same way, the injustice of Obama Care was upheld by those sitting in judgment of the law when they clearly knew that they were partaking of a grievous evil for the sake of political expediency. Judge Roberts played both Judas and Herod in this tragedy.

Another illustration is the conflict between Jesus and the religious rulers of his day. The leader in the time of Christ had so distorted the Law that it no longer bore any resemblance to the writings of Moses. Jesus was the one that spoke with Moses in the burning bush but when he tried to explain the Law to the rulers of his day they tried to stone him for blasphemy. They had so distorted and perverted justice that they could no longer recognize it. They called evil “good” and good “evil”.

My last illustration to explain today’s ruling is lethal exposure to radiation. You can’t see it, smell it or taste it but by the time you know it happened you are already dead. Yes you may walk around for a few minutes, hours or days but the effects are irreversible because by the time you exhibit symptoms the damage has been done. The ruling today forever laid to rest the concept that the national government has any limits. The government now has license to tell us what to buy, what to eat, where to live, what to drive and to literally determine how long we should live. Today the State declared itself as our “god”. It will take a while for this new found power to manifest itself to much of the populous but the nanny government of Michael Bloomberg has been pumped full of steroids and granted a nationwide franchise. The ruling elites now have the tools to bring us the dystopian worlds of 1984, Brave New World and Atlas Shrugged. The Republic is dead and it will take a period of time before the mind of the populous notices the death of the body politic. (If they have their “bread” will they even care?)

We often have used the analogy of the frog in the boiling pot dying as the heat has been turned up ever so gradually over time. The frog is dead before it realizes that it is boiling. Well today the water evaporated out of the pot and much of our populous yawned.

The words of Deuteronomy 28 verses 15 thru 68 echoed in my head all day today. Verse 15 reads,

But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

Today’s decision may be an historic day but it is not one to be celebrated. The Rule of Law and the Constitution received an ignoble end.