If there was one lesson for the Republican Party in last week’s election, it was this: Figure out who you are and quit trying to be like the other guys.
Riding a wave of anti-Bush sentiment and general distaste with the way things have been for the past several years (or more, depending on who’s talking), the majority of Americans made it clear they want change.
We’re going to get change, all right. The question is, what are we sacrificing to get that change?
Answer: We don’t know yet.
It’s a historic and, in many ways, glorious moment for the United States in that we have an African-American president-elect. Unfortunately, it’s not someone like J.C. Watts, Thomas Sowell or Alan Keyes, someone who respects our Constitution and the principles that contributed to the establishment of our country as one nation under God.
We say this because Barack Obama, a product of the Ivy League liberal elitist universities and the corrupt Chicago political machine, has given us little reason to be confident that he has any respect for either of those. And with a Democratic Congress that will be inclined toward increased socialism – more taxes, more services (such as universal health care) – we can expect more Big Brother and less freedom to live our lives the way we think we ought.
We can expect massive increases in the death tax, the capital gains tax, income taxes and corporate taxes, and more.
The results of such increases will be diminished economic growth, rising inflation as goods and services become more expensive, a lower standard of living for Americans and decreased initiative. If you’re going to lose most of what you gain, why work hard?
An obvious priority of the newly elected government is national healthcare. To the many of us who struggle with medical and dental costs, that has a certain attractiveness.
But when we consider how well Social Security is working and why Canadian doctors are fleeing that country’s healthcare system to practice medicine in the United States, why people who live in Britain say you never want to get truly sick there, our enthusiasm over universal healthcare dwindles.
Another obvious priority for our incoming president will be to replace as many as three or four U.S. Supreme Court justices who are likely to retire during the next presidential term.
Those potential vacancies, as well as many in the lower courts, will likely be filled by judges who view the Constitution as a fluid document, one that is subject to new interpretations and new rights dictated by societal pressures.
Among the first casualties will likely be the First Amendment – freedom of expression, as liberals try to crack down on conservative talk radio by reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which requires equal time for opposing views on the public airwaves. It should not be shocking to find ourselves with more stringent laws governing what we can say – politically correct restrictions on speech such as Canada and certain European countries have.
A second casualty will likely be the Second Amendment, as the Supreme Court justices who recently upheld the rights of Americans to own handguns will likely be among those who will be replaced on the Court. Use your imagination to determine what will likely happen to our historical and hitherto constitutional right to arm ourselves.
A Big Brother government that loves control does not want its citizens with firearms.
There are many other areas where we may find things vastly different four years from now – whatever international reputation we have left, our military capabilities, secret ballots, our ability to use our domestic natural resources, our border security, our foreign aid.
What we here in Linn County must do is clamor to our representatives in Washington – Congressman Peter DeFazio and Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, to remember our needs in rural Oregon.
Steep death and capital gains tax increases, for instance, will make it difficult, if not impossible, for rural landowners – particularly owners of farms or timber acreage – to pass their holdings to their children. Family farms will disappear, to the detriment of our county, our state and our nation.
Firearms may be considered an unnecessary danger in the city but they are a necessity in many rural homes, particularly when it sometimes takes a law enforcement officer half an hour to respond to a call in the middle of the night.
The national forest will continue to become overgrown unless the liberal braintrust wakes up to the fact that you have to either let the forest burn once in a while, as the Indians did, or you have to keep it thinned. When you do neither, as has been the case for too many years now, it’s a firebomb in the making.
But Barack Obama and many others in Washington have never lived in the country. They have no idea how different life here is from what they are accustomed to.
Yes, Republicans have lost the election, partly because they lost their backbone on the issues that distinguished them from the folks on the other side of the table.
Obama and his associates are not stupid. They are very intelligent people who, unfortunately, have bought into wrong presuppositions in many areas and are prepared to carry those through to impose them on the rest of us.
It’s imperative that not just conservatives, but moderate Democrats and Republicans mount resistance to the changes that are looming. If they don’t, if we don’t, life in the U.S.A. will be much different in four years from what it is now. And it won’t be better.