The Budget Fiasco Is Over; Let the Games Begin

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THE COLLAPSE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY'S FISCAL CONSERVATISM. It is dead -- DOA. • Here are the names of the 20, count them, 20 Republican House members how voted against the budget passed early Friday morning -- Justin Amash of Michigan // Ken Buck of Colorado // Dan Donovan of New York // John Duncan of Tennessee // John Faso of New York // Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania // Matt Gaetz of Florida // Lynn Jenkins of Kansas // Walter B. Jones of North Carolina // John Katko of New York // Pete King of New York // Leonard Lance of New Jersey // Frank Lobiondo of New Jersey // Tom MacArthur of New Jersey // Thomas Massie of Kentucky // Mark Sanford of South Carolina // Chris Smith of New Jersey // Elise Stefanik of New York // Claudia Tenney of New York // Lee Zeldin of New York. Add to their names that of the junior Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul. That's it, folks. They are apparently the only real Republicans left in Washington. • • • IF WISHES WERE HORSES. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" is an English proverb and nursery rhyme, first recorded about 1628 in a collection of Scottish proverbs. It is still in current UK English usage, and it means that if wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted, but that to merely wish for things does not yield anything. • That is where we are today in the United States, despite the fact that we conservatives have done la lot more than wish. We have found right-minded candidates, raised money, gone door to door, gotten out the vote, and sent them to Washington to clean out the Swamp. All to no avail, it seems. • The American Thinker put it this way on Friday morning : "If Rand Paul were President, we wouldn't have this Democrat-inspired budget." Ed Straker wrote : "Senator Rand Paul succeeded in briefly shutting down the government last night when he demanded a vote on restoring the budget spending caps before voting on the GOP deficit-busting bill. By the time you read this, however, it is expected that a coalition of Democrats and RINOs will have succeeded in passing a monstrosity of a budget bill that, although it will increase defense spending, will also increase domestic spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years and is estimated to create a 1.2-trillion-dollar deficit in 2019. That's $1,200,000,000,000 added to the debt in one year alone. Unfortunately, as a single Senator, there is little Rand Paul can do. But if he had been elected President, he could have done much more." • Perhaps the most devastating disappointment of this huge joke on America is that President Trump is complicit. He says he is perfectly happy with this budget deal. Sadly, Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi agree on the fiscal ruin of the Republic. The Ryan-McConnell budget, which President Trump is supporting, is called a "good bill" by Nancy Pelosi and a "genuine breakthrough" by Chuck Schumer. President Trump is doing a gargantuan job putting conservative policies and programs in place in the face of unprecedented ProgDem attacks, but he seems to have a blind spot about this destructive Progressive budget because he is determined to rebuild the military. We all agree with him on that, BUT not at the expense of the future of the Republic. There comes a time to say 'this far and no farther.' President Trump is welcome to come with us and lead us. We need him and want him to be with us. But, he must absorb the fact that fiscal responsibility is an integral part of Republican conservatism. • Ed Straker asks : "What could Rand Paul do as President against a Congress set on passing a budget-busting bill? I was reminded of the answer to that by a caller to the Mark Levin show (at the 59-minute mark), who said : 'When Ronald Reagan wanted to get something done, he personally lobbied members of the House, which was controlled by the Democrats...he personally lobbied the [s]enators, and then he went on national television and made the case to the American people for what needed to be done and why....And the next day, the Congress's switchboard was ringing off the hook with people calling in to the representatives. We don't have any leadership from the White House on this.' I am convinced that Rand Paul would veto a budget-busting bill. I am convinced he would take his case to the American people and keep the government shut down until the Congress, if not cutting the budget, at least did not increase it at the monstrous rate it is planning now." • IF RAND PAUL WERE PRESIDENT. For us GOP conservatives, the libertarian views of Senator Paul have sometimes been jolting -- no foreign troop deployment, legal marijuana -- but on Friday, February 9, 2018, Senator Paul is more Republican than anyone in Washington, along with the 20 GOP House members listed above. Senator Paul uttered the only sane thing I heard in all the debate about passing this dangerous budget when he defended his position by saying : “I ran for office because I was very critical of Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits. Now we have Republicans hand-in-hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits.” Paul said during a floor speech, as he predicted that “a day of reckoning” is coming : “I can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits.” • Straker says : "Rand Paul would not be perfect on all the issues. He probably would not increase the defense budget as much as some would like. But what use is a Defense Department when our country is facing economic destruction from more than 20 trillion dollars in debt and hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities? What happens when massive inflation wipes out our savings? What happens when our currency becomes worthless?" • Those are the real issues facing the Republic, and they will now be answered with a "who cares" in Washington. These dangers, says Straker, : "seem a lot more important than the skirmishes in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, which never end because the local population loves Islamists, no matter how many billions of dollars we give them. And Paul's views on immigration, while not entirely clear, could not be worse than offering to legalize at least 1.8 million illegal aliens (plus close relatives)." • • • ARE WE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS AT THE TIPPING POINT? Rand Paul isn't President. Therefore, the danger of economic and fiscal collapse is being ignored -- the #1 threat to our national security is being shunted aside for more of the same-old-same-old, and no one in the Congress or the White House is doing anything about it. • Is it time to admit publicly what we have known but worked mightily to undo since we lost Reagan's Washington in 1988 -- the Grand Old Republican Party is dead. We can stick around and be part of its gradual sneaking into the Progressive Globalist tent, or we can get out now while we still have the local power, money, voters, and help from a few real Republican conservatives in Washington to stop the stealth shift of the GOP into an arm of the ProgDem-MSM horde that is destroying America bit by bit. I have resisted arriving at this juncture for years, telling my friends and colleagues in the conservative fight to be patient, hang in there, and, when the chance came, to elect Donald Trump. • BUT, as I watched the entire Senate turn on Senator Paul on Thursday evening simply because he wanted what any reasonable American wants, a cap -- not even an end, only a cap -- on deficit spending, I realized that the time has come to really clean house. • We have two choices. First, we go all-in this November to defeat every Republican and every Democrat who voted for this budget. That will start with a second Tea Party that finds like-minded candidates, raises money, goes door to door, gets out the vote, sends them to Washington to clean out the Swamp. I know we have already done that -- but nobody said saving the Republic would be easy, remember the winter at Valley Forge. And, then, we do that again in 2020 and 2022, and we keep doing it until we have cleaned out the Swamp. • What has changed in my mind as I watched this monstrous budget glide through both the Senate and the House was that we need to stop calling ourselves "Republicans." What do we call ourselves? The Grand Old Party? Lincoln Republicans? Republican-Libertarians? Constitutionalists? The goal is not to kill the Republican Party. The goal is to take it back from the Swamp elitist RINOs who have stolen it from us and find a name that separates us from the RINOs. • And, key in all this is President Trump. I have no idea what he is thinking on February 9, 2018. Is he lurking and waiting to pounce on the Swamp and the #NeverTrump RINOs? Or is he lost in the fiscal morass in the Swamp? Has it swallowed up his greatly good intentions with lies, character assassination, stonewalling of his legislative programs, and attacks on his allies? Has Washington won once more? If that is the case, then we need to be hyperactive in talking to the President ---telling him every day when we agree and when we disagree with his actions, encouraging him to stand tall against the Swamp Creatures, forcing him to represent us even when it would be easy for him to bend a little in order to get something in exchange down the road. Because it is clear now that "down the road" simply means business as usual, while the constitutional Republic and Americans loyal to it and its Founders are kicked aside for Progressive socalism. • • • FISH OR CUT BAIT. I, for one, have had it. If Rand Paul is the only GOP Senator who understands all this, then, second on our list of choices, let us also talk to him every day, tell him when we agree and disagree, ask him to carry our banner, make it clear through supporting him that we are supporting the constitutional Republic. • Even the Washington Post understood Rand Paul's act : "As he forced a brief government shutdown overnight to draw attention to his party’s hypocrisy on deficit spending, Kentucky’s junior Senator was the personification of William F. Buckley’s definition of conservatism : standing athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." Perhaps the WP was being somewhat cynical, but it went on : "But making his fellow Republicans uncomfortable was the whole point of the exercise. Some will say, ‘You’re responsible for this, it’s all your fault.’ Well, if I’m responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it,' Paul said. 'Somebody had to do it. I didn’t come here to be a part of someone’s club. I didn’t come up here to be liked. I didn’t come here to just say, ‘Hey guys, I’m going to be part of the club, so I’m going to do what you tell me to do.’ ” • The WP even outlined those who stand with Paul and real conservatives : "To be sure, Paul is not the only Republican lawmaker worried about the debt. Bob Corker, the retiring Senator from Tennessee, accused his party of 'doubling down on the irresponsible mentality in Congress of spend now, pay later.' The House Freedom Caucus, which has about three dozen members, came out strongly against the measure. The Koch political network, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth tried unsuccessfully to mobilize their supporters against the deal." • We are not alone, but our allies are wobbling. We still have power. We must use it, channel it, make it felt as the force behind the first words of the Constitution, "We the People." • That red line of patriots' blood is right in front of us. Please God, do not let us casually step over it into the Progressive abyss. • • • AND, DEAR READERS, while I am in this feisty mood, let's say a word or two about the Olympic Games that began in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on Friday with the opening ceremonies for the 2018 Winter Olympics. There were the usual gaudy fireworks exploding above a cheering assembly of winter sports enthusiasts, and government and NGO officials determined to make the Olympic movement another paeon for Globalism. To the tune of John Lennon's insipid "Imagine," we were entertained by South Koreans skating and singing and showing off their voluminous white costumes. I have nothing against that. The show was pretty enough and its sentiments were undoubtedly honest. • But, the politics of this 2018 Winter Olympics has been stolen by North Korea. Its sudden "conversion" -- one seen by everyone in the world but not as yet acknowledged by the Kim-Jong-un terrorist regime -- is the latest symptom of the crazily naive notion that any of the world's problems will be solved by talented -- although sometimes doped -- athletes getting together for the single most nationalistic meeting on the planet. • Al McGuire, the long dead but never forgotten basketball coach of the Marquette basketball team when Marquette meant something in the NCAA, once said : "If winning doesn't matter, why do they keep score?" I would ask the same question of the Olympics -- if coming together as a worldwide family without borders matters, why are national flags everywhere, and why are gold and silver and bronze medals tallied by country? • If we learned anything about the evil that haunts the modern Olympic world, it was back in 1972 in Munich when a gang of Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympic team athletes and a German police officer. It took the operation "Wrath of God" directed by Israel's Mossad to covertly assassinate individuals involved in the Munich massacre. The targets were members of the Palestinian armed militant group Black September and operatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the autumn of 1972 -- after terrorists were released by Germany in exchange for the hostages onboard hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615 -- the operation is believed to have continued for over twenty years. It was depicted in the television film Sword of Gideon (1986) and Steven Spielberg's film Munich (2005). • Now, on Friday in the opening ceremony, North Korea gave a martial arts presentation that was received with almost no applause. That is the 2018 version of the evil that haunts the Olympic world. • So, watch the alpine skiing, bobsleds, ice hockey, figure skating, and all the rest of the winter sports during the next two weeks at Pyeongchang. But, don't expect any cosmic shift in the world we live in. When the Olympic Flame goes out in Pyeongchang, the Olympic Committee will still be telling us how much good the Games do -- and the terrorists will still be trying to massacre our athletes and us. May the gods of sport bring the athletes, all of them, safely back to their countries and families. • If the Olympic movement feels the need to sing about peace, I would suggest "We Are the World," the song and charity single originally recorded by the supergroup United Support of Artists (USA) for Africa in 1985. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones for the album We Are the World. Promotion and merchandise sales aided the success of "We Are the World" and raised over $63 million for humanitarian aid in Africa and the US. Ninety percent of the money was pledged to African relief, both long and short term. At least Michael Jackson and the dozens of stars who joined him in singing his song did some good for the world -- a lot better than John Lennon lounging around in bed with Yoko Ono. But, hey, that's just my opinion. Let the Games begin.