Karl Rove Doesn't Get It

Widely acknowledged as a brilliant political strategist—even by those on the left who despise him—Karl Rove in some ways epitomizes the reasons why Americans remain in a state of considerable angst over the direction of their country.

Writing a fairly conventional 'loyal opposition' piece in the Wall Street Journal pointing out the political overreach of the Democrat stimulus plan, Rove contributes what he obviously feels is this ‘shrewd’ observation:

“…if Republicans predict economic doom, they will overplay their hand. The Democratic stimulus will slow recovery, but not stop it. Recessions don't last forever and, if history is a guide, sometime late this year or early next the economy will rebound on its own.”

First, what is at stake in America today is no less than the future of its heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation grounded in the ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God. This is not a game, and the consequence of losing is not the short-term, political equivalent of a lost poker hand. Second, Ronald Reagan reminded us that freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction, and what follows that extinction is not a traditional economic recovery cycle but a thousand years of darkness. We are not living in ordinary times with ordinary political arguments and temporary, cyclical consequences.

The Karl Roves and other seasoned voices of merely political history might respond, “Aw, c’mon, this is just government pork, not the first and not the last. We’ve survived it before; we’ll survive it again. Don’t get hysterical over the latest political overreach.”

With due respect, this isn’t just government pork. This incurs in one bill a staggering, unprecedented level of debt, spent almost entirely on the expansion of government, designed by people enthralled with their own power and taking dead aim at the destruction of free market capitalism. It’s being done with unprecedented secrecy under an utterly contrived sense of urgency, and being sold with out-and-out lies as to its content and its economic effects. It’s being done against a backdrop of almost unheard of levels of grassroots opposition, demonstrating an elected elite wildly out of touch with the heart and soul of America. Public cynicism may well exceed the breaking point, where the social compact between citizen and government ruptures and we all become tax cheats, payola experts, and a deeply bitter and angry people, completely disgusted with the political class. (See this piece for a concurring opinion from Victor Davis Hanson).

We'll take this a little farther and be blunt: Obama is a radical, left-wing ideologue funded and directed by George Soros and his godless agenda to rid the world of Judaism and Christianity. They are following a Saul Alinsky prescription for gradual, calculated overthrow of Judeo-Christian principles, morals and ideals, to be replaced by Orwellian state-control of thought and behavior without regard to any divine sense of good and evil, and right and wrong. This is a prescription for a thousand years of darkness.

How so? You don’t have to be a graduate student in seminary school to understand this at a fundamental level: man (and woman) as the child of God with individual freedom and responsibility under God is dependent on God, derives his standards for behavior from God, and is answerable to God. Man (and woman) as collectivist wards of the state are dependent on the state and answerable to the state. They are defined by the state, and are not allowed to think or aspire to anything higher than that which is approved as properly collectivist by the state. And ‘the state’ is the godless tyranny of arrogant human opinion driven by the lust for power and control without regard to absolute or transcendent standards of morality, of good and evil, and right and wrong.

We’re well aware anyone writing the previous two paragraphs or any variation thereof will be scorned and shouted down as alarmist, out-of-touch, unpatriotic, a ‘hater’, a fearmongerer, a religious fanatic/hick/wacko, one who just doesn’t understand that America has always had periods where things looked bad and has always recovered, etc., etc. So be it. We’re proud to be on record with a clear statement of what is at stake, because doing so can wake people up and prepare them to get serious about reversing the course we are on, NOW.

A good start would be to throw out in the next election cycle every incumbent member of the House of Representatives, and every Senator standing for election. Replace them with candidates courageous enough to be unapologetically grounded in the American ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God. People who intuitively and unequivocally and constantly rebel at the notion of government as god—as the solution to every problem and the decider and provider of all good. People who recognize the potential of taxation to become a proxy for involuntary servitude. People who revere the founding of America and the American Constitution as evidence of the divine blessing the human. People like the readers of Brushfires of Freedom.

Paul Gable

Posted February 12, 2009