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Townhall
The
GOP's Identity Crisis
By David Limbaugh
Jul 02, 2013
As
one who supports traditional
values and a conservative political agenda, I'm more worried about the
right
wing's erosion of resolve and moral courage than I am about the left's
relentless assault on our values and ideas.
Surely,
no one can dispute that the
political left has been tirelessly chipping away at America's
foundational
values for years and ruthlessly demonizing conservatives. But if
Republicans
truly believed in themselves and fought with the same conviction as
Democrats,
it would be a different story.
One
might attribute the attrition
of America's foundational institutions to the political application of
the laws
of entropy. Things just have a natural tendency to descend into chaos.
Great
empires and great nations can't last forever. But it has to be more
than that.
When those who claim to want to preserve this nation's greatness all
but throw
in the towel, the destructive process can't help but accelerate.
How
can a political party remain
viable when many of its leaders are obviously ashamed of major parts of
its
platform? When its leaders validate negative stereotypes by promising
to
change?
When
he was running for his first
presidential term, George W. Bush said that he was a "compassionate
conservative" and that he wouldn't balance the budget "on the backs
of the poor." As much as I admire President Bush, I regret those
statements, as they communicated the false message that ordinary
conservatives
aren't compassionate and that we don't have a heart for the downtrodden.
Some
of Bush's former advisers are
still wagging their fingers at conservatives today for their alleged
mean-spiritedness on many issues, including immigration, urging them to
be more
winsome or loving -- or something, anything but conservative.
Regrettably,
Republican National
Chairman Reince Priebus told Latinos in Chicago that Republicans have
reshaped
their outreach. "In America, it doesn't matter where you come from; it
matters where you're going," said Priebus.
What?
The Republican Party has
always stood for equal opportunity and articulated a nondiscriminatory,
pro-growth message. Why would the party's leader thus validate
Democratic
slanders portraying the GOP as nativist?
Why
couldn't he have said instead,
"Democrats will tell you that we don't care about Hispanics, but the
truth
is we care about all people, and our policies are geared toward
unleashing
robust opportunities for all…
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall
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