Yet another post in the analysis of the “social conservatives take their ball and go home” argument. Yes, this is the “next post” — aren’t you excited?
(And again, I’m not specifically attributing any thoughts to Joe. I’m not a scamp, so I can’t read his heart. But a lot of the ideas that I present here are espoused by those who make similar arguments to his.)
In Joe’s original post, one of his commenters said:
Many on the right . . . seem to suffer from Hillary Derangement Syndrome, the irrational belief that Clinton will somehow end the world hence any price to keep her from being elected is worth paying.
I’ll agree with the first half of his sentence — I’m sure those who like to do that letter/number thing have figured out a way to make the characters in her name add up to 666. (And there is, of course, the other side of that coin — Hillary Ambivalence Syndrome — that many on the left have contracted. Fortunately for them, there’s OxyClinton.)
I don’t have HDS (and I certainly don’t have HAS) — God will end the world in His timing, not Hillary Clinton. Though God does often use humans to bring about His plans, and there are probably few better instruments that He could use than Hillary.
OK, I’m kidding.
I hope.
But, let’s be serious. As has been noted over at Virtual Fret Noise:
. . . there’s a chance Rudy will appoint a bad judge, but there’s no chance Hillary will appoint a good one.
I agree with that statement, but let’s assume that it isn’t true. We’ll say that James Dobson is right, that Rudy Giuliani is a liar (a word that Dobson doesn’t have the cajones to use, even though he seems to think it), and Rudy nominates nothing but knuckleheads to the Supreme Court. So, for Supreme Court nominees, Giuliani and Clinton are a wash and the impact to the pro-life cause is equal regardless of who is president. As I said, I doubt that’ll be the case, but I can give that ground to those that disagree with me, and still make my point.
As I said before, a Clinton presidency would probably bring some serious energy to the “pro-life movement” and would (at least temporarily) vault Dobson and his ilk back into the political spotlight — a spotlight that they never would have left, if they had simply woken up and smelled the elephant dung that the GOP has been dumping on them for years. But if having a reviled Commander in Chief is what it takes to light a fire under social conservatives, then God help us — we really are that stupid. It also illustrates that we aren’t nearly as pro-life as we are anti-Clinton.
I’ve noted before that George W Bush has shown himself to be anything but conservative, especially in his second term. But the alternative in 2000 was to elect Al Gore (a third-party candidate wasn’t viable then, either). Had Gore won the 2000 election, I’m convinced that we’d all be wearing fuel-efficient burqas by now.
And that’s my point. Even if the race comes down to Giuliani and Clinton, and both are equally injurious to the pro-life cause, there are a myriad of other issues that still separate the parties. (Granted, these are diminishing, but they still exist.)
“But, wait,” you say. “You’re wrong. We’re not really that stupid. If Hillary becomes president, conservatives of all kinds will see her shenanigans clearly and rise up to fight them down.”
Oh, really? Let me use a further illustration.
Back in 1998, a documentary was produced called Anatomy of a “Homicide: Life on the Street“. It was an analysis of behind-the-scenes and making-of an episode of the NBC police drama, followed by an airing of that episode. One of the issues that was examined was the back-and-forth between the writers and the network censors. To the writers, this was often a game — “how much can we get away with?” And one of the strategies that they employed in the game was classic mis-direction. They had a particularly violent scene that they wanted in the episode, but they knew that the censors would never allow it. So they went nuts with foul language right before and right after that scene. The foul language jumped out at the censors and they balked at it, making the writers trim it back. They did so “reluctantly” and did the happy dance back in their offices, as the censors totally missed (and therefore allowed) what was really important to the writers.
How is this applicable? Well, if you can remember back that far, when Bill Clinton first took office in January of 1993, he started his presidential career by trying to re-work the entire nation in his own warped image. All the insanity that he tried to bring about so quickly stood out like Al Sharpton at a Klan rally, and the American people reacted with a huge turnover in Congress.
So did that kill off the DNC for good? Let’s see, who controls Congress now? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Part of the DNC resurgence is due to the fact that they have had nearly 13 years to learn mis-direction (and not all of it was as obvious as bombing aspirin factories). And who would’ve learned more from Bill’s mistakes than Hillary? Yeah, she’s making some pretty outrageous proposals during the race. But that’s moreso to tickle the ears of the Daily Kos headcases — she’s not dumb enough to try to implement this stuff too fast. She’ll have 8 whole years to turn America into a socialist nation (assuming she hasn’t turned the keys over to the UN before then).
My point is this: this country is sliding to the left. Yeah, maybe a Clinton presidency will accelerate that slide some, but it still won’t be fast enough for most people to notice. And social conservatives aren’t enough, in and of themselves, to reverse Clinton’s actions. They’re going to have to convince others. And that’s going to require that they speak out. Even if a Clinton presidency does light a fire under them, it’s nothing short of dementia that those who are (rightly) decrying the erosion of free speech rights for Christians believe that somehow those rights are magically going to return when they need them to convince others to join their cause.
I said in my first post on this subject that a Clinton presidency would assure that “the dollars ‘to fight’ her stance [would] come pouring in” to Dobson and Focus on the Family. In retrospect that may be wrong — if your taxes jump so that you can pay for orthodonture for Ricardo, the illegal alien, there’s not going to be anything left to send to Colorado Springs.
I’ll definitely concede — Giuliani is a lousy candidate for the pro-life cause (and possibly some other social conservative issues). But to pretend that any DNC candidate wouldn’t be worse overall is ludicrous. By declaring they won’t vote for Giuliani if he is the RNC nominee, Dobson and his ilk are turning this into a one-issue race, and declaring to the RNC, “Either meet our demands or this country can go engage in self-imposed sexual congress.”
Not only is such a thought process naive and politically inexpedient, I would argue that it’s also unChristian. We won’t have time to love our neighbors — unless, of course, by “neighbor” you mean the guy in the next cell. You were put there for being “intolerant”; he was put there for aggravated sodomy. Whatever you do, don’t drop the soap.
That’s not derangement; that’s just reality.
“Anybody But Rudy? Are You Serial?” SeriesHere are links to all the articles in this series:
- fetuses as political pawns
- pragmatism, not pragmatism
- mickey returns
- realism, not derangement
Tags:
social conservatives,
Hillary Derangement Syndrome,
Hillary Ambivalence Syndrome,
OxyClinton,
Hillary Clinton,
James Dobson,
Rudy Giuliani,
Supreme Court,
pro-life,
pro-life movement,
George W Bush,
Al Gore,
Homicide: Life on the Street,
Bill Clinton,
Daily Kos,
Christian,
Focus on the Family
