An excellent column, well worth the read. The overarching message is that conservatives tend to play very very nice -- they know the rules and like them, they assume they will always be in the minority, they have lots of other things they would rather do than play political games.
If brow-furrowing were thinking, the Republican establishment would be geniuses. If hand-wringing were prudence, GOP politicians would be exemplars of Aristotelian virtue. If tongue-clucking were eloquence, conservative elites would be orators for the ages.
But of course Trey Gowdy, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tom Cotton have done more for conservative principles and Republican prospects in the last few weeks than the brow-furrowers, hand-wringers, and tongue-cluckers have done in years.Conservatives DON'T always lose -- Burke beat back the sentiments of the French Revolution that threatened to catch fire in England. The US Revolution was essentially a conservative revolution. The Victorian Era in England was a return to conservative values. Reagan won, the USSR fell -- conservatives can and do win, though usually quite nicely and by the rules.
The left on the other hand has a long history of "off with their heads" in the French Revolution, lots of blood as the Bolsheviks and Maoists rose to power, buildings blowing up burning as riots consumed the streets here in the late '60s here. The left doesn't much like rules and they are not concerned about "breaking a few eggs" (or skulls) to achieve what they see as their morally superior vision.
As a great American writer put it, “Politics ain’t bean-bag.” Republicans and conservatives spend an awful lot of time playing endless variations and ingenious permutations of bean-bag. But it’s baseball, not bean-bag, that is the American game. It should of course be played cleanly and forthrightly, and according to the rules. But baseball is hardball. So is politics. Maybe it’s time to stop fussing and fretting long enough to learn how to play it.'via Blog this'
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