What Republicans Need to Do Now
What does this election mean for the Republicans? Should we have just expected to lose power in the house in Senate since historically that’s what happens in a mid-term election, especially during the 6th year of an incumbent president? Or do we have a lot of work to do in the next two years before the next general election?
Conservative Republicans are definitely struggling. Many blame the media. This is justifiable. It has been proven beyond any doubt that the mainstream media is incredibly biased. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is still mainstream. It’s where most people get their news. I believe it has moved far to the left, partly in response to the rise of conservative media sources and party due to the ever increasing liberal culture at media outlets. While at the same time, unfortunately, I don’t believe the new conservative media has much of an effect on politics and voting. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are very powerful voices with their audiences, but their audiences already vote conservatively. They’re just preaching to the choir. Meanwhile, a huge chunk of independent-minded, undecided, and uneducated voters get their liberally-slanted, sometimes completely deceptive sound bites from the mainstream media and vote accordingly.
What do conservatives need to do in the next two years? I believe we need to become more pragmatic, more educated, and more realistic about how to govern and what to fight for. We need to stick to the issues where we are strong. We need to be fiscally conservative. We need to lead by example and choose wise, principled leaders, not just those that take hard stances on a few hot-button issues. And obviously we need to solve the Iraq problem. Democrats promise a “new direction.” Of course, they have no idea what direction that might be. There is no easy solution in Iraq. Iraq is a nation with more than their share of evil people who are raised within a religion that teaches hatred – of those outside the religion, and even those inside the religion that may have slightly different beliefs. It’s hard to give such a backward society the gifts of freedom and democracy, but this is exactly what they need in the country and the region. After doing so much good there – removing a brutal dictator who was proven to have supported terrorism and threatened to build and use weapons of mass destruction – we can’t just leave the power vacuum that would exist. We must continue to fight. Maybe the new direction is to double the number of troops there for a year or two until the situation gets better.
But for Republicans, part of the solution in Iraq is communication. We need to help the uneducated see through the liberal lies about Iraq. The standard lines on Iraq are insidiously false and easily proven so. Many people actually believe that we went to war to avenge Bush’s dad, to get control of oil, and to increase profits for Halliburton. Even though these three ridiculous statements are so easily proven false. I don’t need to go through them in detail because the truth has been outlined so well in so many places, including this web site. The international community condemned Saddam. He was a proven terrorist supporter in a time, after 9/11, that even liberals still agreed we needed to fight terrorism. The UN voted to use force against him. The Democrat-controlled Senate agreed to use force against him. The intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was not completely accurate, but not because of deception. The head of the CIA at the time was appointed by Democrats. And it has been proven true that Hussein did have WMDs and planned to build more when he could. The US hasn’t benefited from any Iraqi oil. Halliburton hasn’t made huge profits from the reconstruction. In fact, they tried to sell the division with the Iraq contracts because it doesn’t make money! But the liberal lies, repeated often enough by the liberal media, sink in to the uneducated minds of America. We need to find a way to change that. People need to understand that invading Iraq was justified. Our mission of removing a tyrant and setting up a democracy was successful. Now we need to stabilize a country in turmoil. This is a new, but important step we need to follow through on.