Pinning The Tail On The Next Bob Dole

by Thomas A. Droleskey

This article could be entitled in several ways: "Looking For the Next Bob Dole." "The Naturalistic Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight." "Bob Dole, part quartres." "We Learn Nothing At Any Time." "Naturalists in Fantasyland." "Naturalists in Wonderland." "Obama's Best Friends." "Giving Obama A Second Term." Any number of titles would work. The one chosen for this article, "Pinning the Tail on the Next Bob Dole," works just as well as the others.

Professional, careerist Republican are always looking for the next "Bob Dole," the next "electable" candidate who will appeal to "moderate" voters, the next candidate whose views on domestic policy will be shaped according to dictates of polling strategies that target "swing" voters in "battleground" states, a candidate whose loyalty to the State of Israel and to the demands of the War Party (see Banging Those "Tom-Toms" Once Again). Even most of the founders of the United States of America, the men who had a founding hatred for Christ the King, hoped, at least at first, that public officials would be drawn from the ranks of the better-educated citizenry who would serve for a few years in office and then return to their own businesses or farms. The founders did not expect, at least not at first, the forming of national political parties, no less that those parties would be staffed with career politicians who would make their livelihoods from the holding of government positions throughout the course of their careers, thereby becoming permanent drinkers at the public trough.

While it is true that some of the lines of division that went into the creation of the first national political parties were evident during the ratification campaign of the United States Constitution in 1787 and 1788 (as those who supported the Constitution's ratification were called Federalists and those who opposed it were termed, at least by the Federalists, as Anti-Federalists), the first permanently-established national political parties began to arise in the the 1790s during the first administration of President George Washington as supporters of United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton formed the Federalist Party as the means to defend their conceptions of a strong national government, especially as regards banking policies, and a pro-British foreign policy and as supporters of United States Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson formed the Democratic-Republican party as the means to defend states' rights, agrarian individualism (the belief that moral superiority comes from working with one's hands in the soil and that urban areas and bankers were to be distrusted) and a foreign policy that favored the French revolutionaries. Many of the founders, men who had been opposed to permanently-established political parties and to the concept of the career politician, plunged quite merrily into the madness that resulted from the formation of the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party.

The first national political parties were Congressionally-based entities between the 1790s and the election of 1816, at which point The Federalist Party was  more or less defunct, having failed to win the presidency after the election of John Adams in 1796 and after being reduced to a mere thirty-nine seats (out of 185 seas) in the United States House of Representatives for the Fifteenth Congress (1817-1819). Political parties became popularly-based entities at the local level, replete with massive patronage machines, by the time of the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency of the United States of America in 1828 and the formation of the modern Democratic Party, engineered principally by United States Senator (and future Vice President and President) Martin Van Buren of New York.

The formation of the modern Democratic Party, that of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, institutionalized the political party at the local level as the principal means by which various benefits (government jobs, food, clothing, housing, favors with courts) could be dispensed to voters in exchange for their votes and their volunteer activities during campaigns, which were frequently rough and tumble affairs involving intimidation of opposition candidates (including tarring and feathering them), the distribution of handbills filled with slanders about opposition candidates, the tearing down of the posters of opposition candidates, the stuffing of ballot boxes, and the refusal to count the votes of opposition candidates. Sound familiar? Electoral politics became a spectator sport involving contests between competing sets of naturalists who believed that the voters existed to enable them to have careers at the public expense. Public policy was designed to bribe the voters with their own money by the creation of make-work jobs and projects that rewarded campaign contributors and supporters.

Although fallen human nature is prone to seek self interest at the expense of the common good and in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as these have been entrusted to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, it is also true that a system of pure naturalism that leaves no room for the pursuit of the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity, must devolve rather quickly into organized corruption founded in the false belief that to the "victors belong the spoils," meaning that moral right is determined by the outcomes of elections. Those who win elections are thus empowered to steal at will and to govern as they want without regard for the moment of their Particular Judgments, which can come at any time.

Pope Pius XI noted this phenomenon in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922:

To these evils we must add the contests between political parties, many of which struggles do not originate in a real difference of opinion concerning the public good or in a laudable and disinterested search for what would best promote the common welfare, but in the desire for power and for the protection of some private interest which inevitably result in injury to the citizens as a whole. From this course there often arise robberies of what belongs rightly to the people, and even conspiracies against and attacks on the supreme authority of the state, as well as on its representatives. These political struggles also beget threats of popular action and, at times, eventuate in open rebellion and other disorders which are all the more deplorable and harmful since they come from a public to whom it has been given, in our modern democratic states, to participate in very large measure in public life and in the affairs of government. Now, these different forms of government are not of themselves contrary to the principles of the Catholic Faith, which can easily be reconciled with any reasonable and just system of government. Such governments, however, are the most exposed to the danger of being overthrown by one faction or another.

Catholic immigrants to the United States of America, first those from Ireland and then, after the War between the States and during the Kulturkampf in Germany and the Risorgimento in Italy, those from eastern and southern Europe, plunged headlong into this spectator sport of electoral politics as it provided them with the fastest means of upward social and economic mobility at a time when there was overt--and sometimes quite violent--discrimination against them on the part of know-nothings and other assorted naturalists associated with Freemasonry. Political bosses and sub-bosses of the Democratic Party in major urban areas opened their doors wide to these Catholic immigrants out of pure political and pecuniary self-interest, not out of an altruistic concern for justice to be done to the persecuted immigrants. And it is out of gratitude to the Democratic Party machinery for its role in the socialization of Catholics into the American "mainstream" that explains the reflexive loyalty of many Catholics to what has become the organized crime family of the naturalistic "left" no matter its institutional support for all manner of moral evils.

Career politicians are concerned only about one thing: securing enough votes to win elections, which are ultimate ends in and of themselves that justify the use of whatever means are considered necessary to accomplish. Nothing other matters to the careerists who populate the infrastructure of local political clubs, which remain the breeding grounds for candidates for local offices such as, to use the example of the County of Nassau in the State of New York, town councilmen, town clerk, town comptroller, town supervisor, county executive, county legislators, county district attorney, county clerk, county assessor, county judgeships, and county comptroller. These political clubs are also the principal, although from from the exclusive, breeding grounds for candidates for state legislative seats (a state senate or a state assembly, as the lower house of the state legislature is called in the State of New York) and for appointed positions in a town or a county.

Most of the those who make up those political clubs have no overriding political philosophy or ideology. Involvement in the political process is a matter of direct personal self-interest (career advancement in elected office, favorable decisions on variations to zoning ordinances, the networking of one's business contacts, contracts to be let out to one's firm for government projects, etc.). With a very few and most rare exceptions, personal self-interest in the engine that drives partisan politics at the state and local level. Although I became a critic of the American founding as I grew in my knowledge of the Faith, I knew as a seventeen year-old volunteer in the local Republican club in Oyster Bay, New York, in the Fall of 1968 that the careerism I observed was not the reason even on the natural level that the founders broke away from the United Kingdom in 1776 (although I did not understand that the careerism I observed forty-one years ago was the natural result of the naturalism of the founders, something that they, the founders did not understand or accept).

There is, after all, no Republican or Democrat way to plough snow or to rebuild sewer lines. Partisan politics at the local level are about winning elections and being able thereafter to solidify one's hold on power by the appointment of one's supporters to various positions so as to make them and their family members dependent upon a particular political party for their very livelihood, which gives them an "incentive" to sell the tickets to the local political club's barbecues and picnics and dances. This is how the political "sausage" is stuffed at the local level in the United States of America, and it is from these local political clubs--and the all important county central political committees to which the more ambitious members of the political clubs aspire to rise with the passage of time--that most future statewide party chairmen and party committee members originate.

Money and jobs, influence and power. These, not ideas, are what matter to most of the apparatchiks who attend the local political club meetings, sell the barbecue and fifty-fifty drawing tickets, and live for the results of the next election so that they can be assured of their jobs and money and influence and power for at least another two or four years. Everything revolves around the party and its survival. The survival of the party is the ultimate purpose for which the civil government at the local level exists, which is why it is so difficult for minor parties in most states to gain ballot access. State legislatures, composed of men and women who have "risen through the ranks" at the local and county levels, have institutionalized the two major organized crime families, the Republicans and the Democrats, in power and place great obstacles in the path of minor parties to gain ballot access, especially for statewide and national office.

One of the means by which political power at the state level is secured over the course of time is by means of public works projects. Although it is possible to build highways, for example, in such a way that could endure the weight of heavy trucks and other vehicles without having their roadbeds crushed, there is an implicit understanding on the part of office-holders and the contractors whose companies are chosen to rebuild highways so that they will be crushed within a short period of time so that new contracts can be let out and yet more workers employed to undertake yet again the perpetual rebuilding process of highways every two years.

Apart from being a very wasteful use of taxpayer dollars so as, in effect, to bribe contractors and their employees to cast votes for the incumbent political party, the desire to build substandard infrastructure projects is offensive to God Himself as everything we do should be for His greater honor and glory and designed, as far as is possible, to stand the test of time by means of the excellence of the effort and the quality of the work performed. Go tell that to a local committeeman of either organized crime family of naturalism and he will look at you as though you have nine heads and twelve pairs of legs.

It is from from the very pragmatic world of personal self-interest and craven careerism that most of the political consultants who help political parties to choose their candidates--and to shape those candidates' messages and their means of "delivery" to the voters--arise and do their dirty work of perpetuating delusional concepts about voting trends that justify their disdain for the "social issues" that they consider to be "divisive" and electorally disadvantageous. What is lost on these political consultants and career politicians who disdain "social issues" is that they are, on the level of pure naturalism, terrible analysts of election results, eager to learn the wrong lessons and to choose candidates who believe in absolutely nothing other than that which they are told believe by their consultants, who base their recommendations on the results of focus-group market polling and research.

To wit, Republican politicians in the State of New York were eager to distance themselves from a very nominal Reagan-era commitment in the party's state platform to the restoration of legal protection for the preborn. These politicians were so eager to distance themselves from the language of the party platform during the Reagan-era that a then little-known state senator from Peekskill, New York, George Elmer Pataki, engineered the removal of the pro-life plank from the party platform at the party's 1990 state convention. And it was at that convention that then United States Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato told New York University professor Herbert London, an Orthodox Jew who is partly pro-life and partly pro-abortion (making the immoral "life of the mother" "exception), that he, London, could be the Republican nominee for Governor of the State of New York that year if he became "pro-choice." (This is what Dr. London told me in 1998 when I was challenging Senator D'Amato for the United States senatorial nomination of the Right to Life Party, adding, of course, that the former senator has claimed that he has no recollection of saying any such thing.)  London ran on the Conservative Party line and came within several thousand votes of beating the pro-abort who got the Republican gubernatorial nomination that year, a man named Pierre Rinfret, for second place in the election against the Democratic Party incumbent, the Catholic pro-abort named Mario Matthew Cuomo.

An entire generation of pro-abortion Republicans, many of them Catholics, emerged in the 1990s and thereafter. Rudolph William Giuliani, Mayor of the City of New York from 1993 to 2001. Richard Riordan, Mayor of the City of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001. Christine Todd Whitman, a Presbyterian, Governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001. Thomas Ridge, Governor of Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2001. Enrico Anthony Lazio, a member of the United States House of Representatives from Long Island from 1993 to 2001. Susan Molinari, a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1990 to 1997. Susan Collins, United States Senator from Maine, from 1997 to the present. Olympia Snowe, Greek Orthodox, United States Senator from Maine from 1995 to the present. George Elmer Pataki, Governor of New York from 1995 to 2007. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California from 2003 to the present. There are, of course, many others. And former Senator D'Amato, as head of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign  Committee (NRSCC) in 1996, tried to muscle senatorial candidates Al Salvi (Illinois), a Catholic, and Ronna Romney, a Mormon, into being silent about the issue of abortion in exchange for NRSCC campaign cash. Salvi agreed to the conditions. Romney didn't. Her NRSCC funds were cut off as a result.

The overwhelmingly high percentage of baptized Catholics in the list provided in the previous paragraph is no accident. Careerists within the Republican Party made a calculated decision, based on focus group polling and market research, that it was politically advantageous for candidates in certain districts and states with ethnically Catholic populations to say that there were "pro-choice." These career politicians and their political consultants, including Arthur Finkelstein, who was very much in favor with the New York State Republican Party apparatus in the 1990s, wanted "winners. They were not in the least concerned about moral truth even on the natural level. Some of them actually supported baby-killing under cover of the civil law as a matter of principle. And these career politicians and consultants who counseled Catholics in "swing" states and "swing" districts to be pro-death knew that the conciliar "bishops," men who had done nothing to discipline the pro-aborts in the Democratic Party, would do nothing to Catholics in the Republican Party who chose to support baby-killing under cover of the civil law. Yes, indeed, apostasy has consequences.

The antipathy of many professional Republicans to the issue of abortion in electoral politics was expressed by the then outgoing Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1992 following the defeat of  President George Herbert Walker Bush by then Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Blythe Clinton on November 4, 1992:

Richard Bond did not go gently into retirement. His swan song as chairman of the Republican National Committee criticized his party's rightward drift in general and its opposition to abortion in particular. His words, while true, would have carried a lot more credibility had he not waited until he was going out the door to utter them.

Where was Mr. Bond at the Republican Convention last August, when he might have used his influence to mute the demagoguery that wrong-footed George Bush's campaign from the start? Mr. Bond now says he tried to deny Patrick Buchanan his disastrous half-hour of prime time. Yet Mr. Bond also spent his time in Houston justifying the proceedings. "We are America," he told one reporter. "These other people are not America."

Still, his eleventh-hour conversion is welcome. His attack on "zealotry masquerading as principle" makes sound moral sense. His observation that the party must recognize that "America is getting more diverse, not more alike" makes sound political sense. So, too, does his observation that the social issues cherished by the evangelical right, chiefly abortion, are almost certain to confine the G.O.P. to a shrinking tent.

Mr. Bond thus joins prominent Republican moderates like Gov. William Weld of Massachusetts and Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas. Both oppose exclusionary politics. Both believe that President Bush's intrusive efforts to regulate a woman's right to choose stood historical Republican principles -- limited government and individual responsibility -- on their heads.

The question is whether there are enough Kassebaums and Welds (and, belatedly, Bonds) around to reverse the party's course. The center-right split in the Republican Party is a durable fact of politics; after the 1988 convention Lee Atwater saw that, absent Ronald Reagan's special magic, future Republican leaders must broaden their base in terms of race and gender.

Mr. Bush did not do so. One distressing result is that the party machinery is now increasingly vulnerable to the religious and cultural right. Pat Robertson, for one, trots out exit polls showing that white evangelicals were Mr. Bush's most loyal constituency. He does not advertise the polls showing ruinous defections among women, younger voters and independents.

A chastened Rich Bond has absorbed that message -- a message surely worth adopting by principled conservatives not now retired from battle. And George Bush, now in retirement, might be forgiven for asking where Mr. Bond's wisdom was when he needed it. (Rich Bond -- Right, but Late.)

 

This editorial, of course, gave credence to the absurd charge among some "moderate" Republicans in 1992 and 1993 that Pat Buchanan's "culture wars" speech at the Republican National Convention at the Astrodome (Harris County Domed Stadium) in Houston, Texas, on August 17, 1992, "cost" President George Herbert Walker Bush the election against Governor Bill Clinton. Never mind the fact that Bush the elder ran a terrible campaign that included a moment where he looked at his watch during the middle of a "town hall" debate with Clinton and his fellow Texan, the eccentric billionaire Henry Ross Perot.

No, Pat Buchanan and the issue of abortion had to be blamed for Bush the elder's defeat in 1992.

The Republican establishment of careerists has long sought to distance itself from "social issues," and its effort to do so in last year's presidential campaign quite predictable even though the now-defeated 2008 Republican nominee for the office of President of the United States of America, John Sidney McCain III, never raised the issue himself in his campaign and gave a most incoherent set of answers on the subject during his final debate with now President-elect Barack Hussein Obama at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 (see Fallacies Galore). And Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin's discussions of the issue were even more incoherent and laced with her proud and unqualified support for the abject moral evil of contraception (see It's Still Absolute Insanity). The careerists want the "social issues" go to away, and to this end they must invent mythologies to reaffirm them in their conviction that they must not raise issues about which the "people" are not "obsessed."

Indeed, Dr. William Bennett, former Secretary of the Department of Education in the administration of the late President Ronald Wilson Reagan, was championing in the Fall of 1995 the cause of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, a pro-abort, as a possible candidate for the Republican Party's 1996 presidential nomination"We may have to sacrifice abortion for the triple crown," Bennett said, meaning that to win the presidency and to control a majority of seats in both Houses of the Congress of the United States of America it might be necessary to downplay the issue of baby-killing under cover of law. "My phone's not ringing off the hook on this issue," Bennett went on to say. Win, baby, win. That's all that matters. Who cares about truth? Who cares about Truth Incarnate, Truth Crucified and Resurrection?

This is the sort of "thinking" that gave us Robert Joseph Dole, Jr., a thirty-third degree Mason, as the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. "Realists' such as Dr. John Wilkie, the founder of the National Right to Life Committee (which is not so "right to life" as it takes no position against contraception and supports, as a matter of principle, the execution of innocent children in their mothers' wombs in cases where it is alleged that a mother's life is endangered), Ralph Reed, then the executive director the Christian Coalition, "Father" Frank Pavone, the founder of Priests for Life, and many others supported the incompetent, inarticulate, "split-the-difference-down-the-middle" deal-maker Dole, who told his campaign workers prior to the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, February 20, 1996, to "win it ugly." He lost that primary. With the help of Reed's not-so-subtle anti-Catholicism in the South Carolina primary and with the help of Catholic enablers, Dole went on to defeat Buchanan, running an absolutely inept campaign against then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton (see Bob Dole, part trois).

Republican careerists pinned the tail on the next "Bob Dole," then Texas Governor George Walker Bush, in 1999.

Bush was only mildly more articulate than Dole, winding up winning the presidency despite losing the national popular vote total to then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., on November 7, 2000, because over 97,421 committed leftists, recognizing that there was no essential difference between Bush and Gore, voted for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader rather than Gore, thus giving Bush a popular vote victory in Florida of 517 votes, good enough to win all of Florida's twenty-five electoral votes after a bit of controversy and the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Bush v. Gore, December 12, 2000. "Bob Dole, part deux," George W. Bush, won only because of those 97,42l leftists according to the dictates of their consciences for a candidate, Nader, they knew could not win the general election, not because of the grand electoral strategy of Republican career politicians and consultants, and he, Bush, won re-election over the inept, colorless Catholic pro-abort John F. Kerry in 2004 by a slender margin of 2.5% of the popular vote, presaging the victory of United States Senator Barack Hussein Obama over "Bob Dole, part trois," United States Senator John Sidney McCain III, on November 4, 2008.

Undaunted by the ineptitude he exhibited last year as a "moderate," losing by close to nine and one-half million votes to the Marxist-trained statist Obama, John Sidney McCain III is trying to play a major role in "moderating" the image of a political party that has been run by country-club "moderates" for over a century--and which was founded by large numbers of Catholic-hating nativists and Freemasons in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. McCain believes that the Republican Party needs more of what caused him to lose to Obama: naturalists of the "moderate" stripe. Here is an excerpt of an article that provides evidence to the effect that naturalists such as John McCain can't even learn their lessons of naturalistic electoral politics very well at all:

Fresh from a humbling loss in last year’s presidential election, Sen. John McCain is working behind-the-scenes to reshape the Republican Party in his own center-right image.

McCain is recruiting candidates, raising money for them and hitting the campaign trail on their behalf. He’s taken sides in competitive House, Senate and gubernatorial primaries and introduced his preferred candidates to his top donors.

When the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy created a vacant Senate seat in Massachusetts, McCain went so far as to solicit former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling to run for the seat. 

It’s all part of an approach that is at odds with most other recent failed presidential nominees, whose immediate response to defeat was to retreat from the electoral arena. But those familiar with McCain’s thinking say he has expressed serious concern about the direction of the party and is actively seeking out and supporting candidates who can broaden the party’s reach. 

In McCain’s case, that means backing conservative pragmatists and moderates. 

“I think he’s endorsed people with center-right politics because he has an understanding that the party is in trouble with certain demographics and wants to have a tone that would allow us to grow,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is McCain’s closest friend and ally in the Senate.

“At a time when our party is struggling and has a lot of shrill voices and aggressive voices, he’s one that can expand our party,” said John Weaver, a longtime McCain friend and strategist.

“John remains the titular head of the Republican Party and he will be until there’s a new nominee,” he said. “Most of the people that ran and lost you never heard from again,” he said. “He’s not going to be like Ed Muskie or Hubert Humphrey.”

For moderate Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, the Arizona senator has been a trusted source of counsel, and a generous benefactor.

Before Kirk announced he would seek the Illinois Senate seat formerly held by President Barack Obama, McCain frequently encouraged him to run.

“The key quote was, ‘Service in the House in the minority is worth a warm bucket of…’” Kirk told POLITICO, smiling as he recalled his conversations with McCain about a prospective Senate campaign.

“I actually love service in the House, whether it’s in the minority or not,” Kirk said. “So I disagreed with him on that. But his strong encouragement and backing—and he’s a personal hero of mine—did have an impact on my thinking.”

Yet McCain has offered much more than just inspiration. He has endorsed Kirk in the GOP primary, released his entire donor list to him and made Kirk the beneficiary of a $500,000 McCain-sponsored fundraiser earlier this year. And Kirk now counts Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s top staffers on the 2008 campaign, as an informal advisor.

“[McCain] has told us that, with regard to my campaign for the Senate, what you need from us you will get,” said Kirk.

McCain, it turns out, has emerged as a political godfather of sorts to a number of other candidates aside from Kirk, providing them with unfiltered access to a national fundraising network he has cultivated over a span of two decades.

In mid-September, McCain invited his favored candidates to the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan to rub shoulders with 40 of the senator’s top donors at a reception for the Arizona Republican. 

Last week, McCain formally endorsed GOP Rep. Jerry Moran in the Kansas Senate primary campaign against his more outspoken conservative opponent, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, and hosted a Capitol Hill fundraiser for Moran.

“He…tells me that he has been very circumspect in what races to get involved in. From my vantage point, it’s not a broad scale ‘I’m for everybody,’” said Moran. “It’s ‘I’m picking candidates that I feel very comfortable with,’ candidates that I think share some of his beliefs and philosophies of governing, and the largest part of that, I think, was fiscal responsibility.”  (McCain's mission: A GOP makeover)

 

Yes, it's always "pin the tail on the next Bob Dole" time in the Republican Party, whose lords are ever eager to learn all of the wrong lessons from their electoral defeats. Here we have John McCain working against candidates such as Todd Tiahrt, who is partly pro-life and partly pro-abortion, making the "life of the mother" exception (newsflash, Representative Tiahrt: there are no exceptions to the Fifth Commandment), because he, McCain, considers the pro-life label to be a losing one in some states at some times.

Senator McCain's naturalistic strategy of appealing to "moderate" voters with "moderate" naturalists as candidates (there's nothing "moderate" about supporting the killing of even one innocent preborn baby!) is playing itself out once again with New York Republicans, the very same group of people who gave voters in my home state Pierre Rinfret nineteen years ago, thereby handing a third term to Mario Cuomo (one wonders if the Democrats don't pay Republicans to do these kinds of things). Here is an story of how "conservatives" in upstate New York are aghast at the nomination of a pro-abortion, pro-perversity candidate to run in a special election for a seat in the United States House of Representatives:

The nominee in a looming House special election is at the heart of an angry dispute between conservatives and Republican House leadership, a rift so serious that it threatens the party’s chances of keeping control of the upstate New York seat.

At issue is the National Republican Congressional Committee’s support for Dede Scozzafava, a New York assemblywoman who conservatives assert is so liberal that they absolutely cannot support her candidacy. Instead, many conservative groups are rallying behind Doug Hoffman, a third-party candidate running on the Conservative Party line, even though their support for him might pave the way for a Democratic takeover of the seat recently vacated by GOP Rep. John McHugh.

At a private Washington luncheon attended by activists last week, frustrations spilled over, and several attendees demanded to know why NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions of Texas, who was the featured speaker, was supporting Scozzafava over the more conservative Hoffman.

After Sessions conceded that Scozzafava’s record on gay marriage and abortion fell short of where those at the lunch wanted it to be, he sought to defend her record on taxes. At that point, according to two sources who were present, the Texas congressman came under forceful pushback from several conservative leaders who insisted Scozzafava fell far short in that area as well.

“I was flabbergasted that he could come into a meeting of conservatives and be as defiant as he was,” said one person who was at the Free Congress Foundation’s Paul Weyrich lunch meeting, adding that the Texas congressman “stuck a finger in our eye.”

“It was heated,” remarked another person present at the lunch. “There were some raised voices.”

As one of three nationally watched contests taking place on Election Day, the highly competitive New York special election race is being closely monitored for clues about the design of the 2010 midterm election landscape.

But unlike the two other key contests taking place in November — the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, where Republicans have rallied behind their nominees — the New York contest has revealed deep unrest in the GOP ranks over what many view as a decision by state and national party leaders to put politics ahead of conservative principles.

“She’s not even a moderate. She is a radical, ultraleftist who has an ‘R’ next to her name,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, chairwoman of Susan B. Anthony List, an organization that backs female candidates who oppose abortion and has endorsed Hoffman. “If we elect this woman, we’re going to be stuck with her for a very long time.”

“The conservative coalition is deeply demoralized by this move,” said Dannenfelser. “Why shouldn’t we be working against [the NRCC] when they are working to undermine us on the issues?”

Club for Growth Executive Director David Keating, whose deep-pocketed organization is already flooding New York’s North Country with ads targeting Scozzafava, slammed her as a “flaming liberal” whose politics are to the left of many House Democrats.

“The Republican Party bosses in New York state are not in touch with the Republican primary voting electorate,” said Keating. “She would never win a primary there, if there was one.”

As referenced by Keating, part of the frustration over Scozzafava is the way she claimed the GOP nomination in July — not through the standard primary election process but, rather, on the third vote taken by the 11 Republican county chairmen within the 23rd Congressional District.

Local Republicans tapped Scozzafava as the nominee in July because they believed her centrist views would appeal to a coalition of centrist Republicans, independents and Democrats in a moderate-minded district that Barack Obama won with 52 percent of the vote in 2008. The national party supports her for the same reason: her perceived electability.

“It is definitely frustrating,” said one well-connected Washington-based conservative activist. “It is frustrating for them to be putting so much money into the race when she is so bad.”

“They have said, ‘This is the situation we have.’ But on the other hand, their support is more enthusiastic than you would want it to be,” the source added.

While the National Rifle Association is backing Scozzafava, many other conservative-oriented groups have enthusiastically thrown their backing to Hoffman, an accounting executive who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in July.

Aside from the Club for Growth and the SBA List, Hoffman has won endorsements from the Eagle Forum, Campaign for Working Families and the American Conservative Union, which the conservative publication Human Events reported this week had told its supporters to withhold their donations from the NRCC.

On Tuesday, Hoffman won the endorsement of New York State Right to Life’s political action committee, which said it was “shocked and dismayed when the Republican Party chose a rabidly pro-abortion candidate to represent the congressional district formerly held by Rep. John McHugh.”

Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long distributed a memo Wednesday calling for a moratorium on donations to the NRCC “until that organization ceases support for Assemblywoman Scozzafava and clarifies its plans for candidate recruitment and support going forward.”

“The NRCC’s support for liberal Assemblywoman Scozzafava is a disturbing indication that the NRCC is test-marketing a campaign message blurring the differences between the parties instead of principled opposition to the liberal Democrats’ agenda,” read the memo, which circulated among conservative activists in Washington. “The “me-too” approach is both sure to fail politically and deeply dishonest to the NRCC’s core financial supporters. The donors who sacrifice to write checks to the NRCC don’t expect their efforts to be diverted to liberals like Assemblywoman Scozzafava.”

Publicly, Republican leaders don’t express concern about the conservative backlash over Scozzafava.

“She’d fit in just fine,” House Minority Leader John Boehner told reporters Wednesday when asked where Scozzafava would fit in ideologically in his conference. “I’ve contributed to her election, and we’re urging all of our members to help bring this race home.” (GOP pick sparks revolt on right.)

 

Naturalists of the "rightist" bent are nothing if not inconsistent and illogical. Many of these same people who are understandably and rightly upset about the pro-abort, pro-perversity Dede Scozzafava, a Methodist, voted quite happily--and repeatedly--for the pro-abortion, pro-perversity, big-government, big-spending Catholic George Elmer Pataki, doing so the first time, in 1994, to "get rid" of the pro-abortion, pro-perversity, big-government, big-spending Catholic Mario Matthew Cuomo. Weren't "conservative" and "pro-life" voters in New York in 1994 told to vote for Pataki despite his supporting baby-killing and perversity and big-government spending programs that benefited his cronies? Well, what's wrong with voting for the pro-abortion, pro-perversity, big-government, big-spending Dede Scozzafava?

This inconsistency is exhibited in a special way by Conservative Party chairman Michael Long, who supported Dr. Herb London's campaign against Cuomo and Rinfret in 1990 and whose party ran Ronald Lauder against Rudolph William Giuliani and David Dinkins in the 1989 election for the Mayoralty of the State of New York and run George Marlin against Giuliani and Dinkins in their 1993 re-match that was won by Giuliani. The argument was made by political "pragmatists" that the Conservative Party was helping to re-elect Cuomo in 1990 and Dinkins in 1993 after having helped to elect Dinkins to begin with in 1989 by running its own candidates rather than endorsing the Republican nominees. Conservative Party adherents justified the respective campaigns of London, Lauder, and Marlin by saying that there were no essential differences between the nominees of the two major political parties, which was very true.

Ah, the plot thickens. Even though George Pataki was every bit as liberal and every bit as much of a pro-abort as Mario Cuomo, Michael Long and George Marlin enthusiastically endorsed Pataki to "get rid" of Cuomo in 1994. What had been the point of George Marlin's 1993 candidacy against Giuliani and Dinkins. Many made the point that Marlin could have helped to re-elect Dinkins. What was the difference between 1993 and 1994? Why was the Right to Life Party candidate for governor in 1994, Robert Walsh, castigated for serving as a possible means by which Cuomo could get re-elected to a fourth term? Not only that, why did the Conservative Party of the State of New York keep endorsing Pataki despite the fact that he used his governorship as a means to promote abortion within the Republican Party, serving as one of the chief critics of Patrick Joseph Buchanan during the latter's presidential bid in 1996? Why is Michael Long upset with Dede Scozzafava when he was so pliant during the Pataki years. Could it have had anything to do with the patronage that Pataki doled out to Conservative Party supporters, including Marlin himself, who was appointed by Pataki as Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1995? Dede Scozzafava is little worse than George Pataki. Why the outrage?

There is also, of course, the inconsistency of the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, John Boehner, who, having addressed a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party gathering last month, says that Dede Scozzafava would "fit in just fine" with the House Republican Conference. Of course she would. She's a naturalist. So's John Boehner. Winning is what matters, and if takes support a pro-abort to win, well, that's just fine. It might be fine with John Boehner, a "pro-life" Catholic, of course, but it is not "fine" with God:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930.)

Yes, those who refuse to see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith will hold firm on some matters on some occasions and will fold like cheap cameras on others. Winning matters all of the time to careerists in the two major organized crime families of naturalism in the United States of America, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Winning matters much of the time to those in some minor parties if the "price" in terms of patronage is right. Such must be the fate of those who do not understand the simple truth that no one who supports a single, solitary abortion under cover of the civil law is fit to hold any public office--whether elected or appointed--as it is impossible, yes, absolutely impossible, to pursue the common temporal good when one supports and promotes the commission of sin under cover of the civil law:

The more closely the temporal power of a nation aligns itself with the spiritual, and the more it fosters and promotes the latter, by so much the more it contributes to the conservation of the commonwealth. For it is the aim of the ecclesiastical authority by the use of spiritual means, to form good Christians in accordance with its own particular end and object; and in doing this it helps at the same time to form good citizens, and prepares them to meet their obligations as members of a civil society. This follows of necessity because in the City of God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a good citizen and an upright man are absolutely one and the same thing. How grave therefore is the error of those who separate things so closely united, and who think that they can produce good citizens by ways and methods other than those which make for the formation of good Christians. For, let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity. (Silvio Cardinal Antoniano, quoted by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri, December 31, 1929.)

 

As I keep trying to reiterate to the very few people who actually bother to read these articles, the more we accept the "lesser of two evils" will be the greater the dose of the so-called "lesser evil" that we are willing to accept, which is why whoever the Republicans nominate for President of the United States of America in 2012 will be "Obama Lite," a candidate who will refuse to turn back any statist or pro-abortion program of Obama's that has popular support according to the results of public opinion polls and focus group market research of voters' attitudes in the "swing" states. This is all madness. Utter and complete madness, the logical, inexorable result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century and institutionalized thereafter by the welter of naturalistic philosophies and ideologies that share one thing in common despite whatever differences may exist among them on various matters: the Masonic belief that it is neither prudent or necessary for the civil state to recognize the true religion and that it is possible for men to pursue civic virtue without having belief in, access to or cooperation with Sanctifying Grace.

No, for those who put their naturalistic "hopes" in the "next" presidential election, the year 2012 will not bring the nomination of the personable Baptist, Mike Huckabee, or the completely unprepared Catholic apostate who endorses contraception, Sarah Heath Palin, or the leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, Dr. Ron Paul, who will be eighty years old in the year 2012. "Mainstream" Republicans will be trying to spend the next eighteen months or so trying to settle on who will be the "moderate" candidate (the Mormon Mitt Romney or another Catholic apostate, one who, unlike Palin, was taken out the Church by her father, left the Church on his own accord as a adult, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty) able to appeal to voters without threatening the hard-core "conservative" electoral base of the party.

What Republican careerists and political consultants will give the electorate, of course, is as mentioned briefly above, "Obama Lite," just as Dole was "Clinton Lite" thirteen years ago. That is, Republicans will settle on someone whose "message" will be as tightly controlled as was Dole's or Bush the younger's or McCain's, a candidate who is the creature of political consultants and focus group market research. The candidate will be "Obama Lite" in that he will not threaten any program of the current occupant of the White House that is supported by the electorate as evidenced in public opinion polls. Remember, the "pro-life" President George Walker Bush did nothing to reverse the United States Food and Drug Administration's marketing of the human pesticide, RU-486, and just as he did nothing to reverse the "Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act" (FACE) and just as increased the size and the power and the scope of the Federal government in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks and just as he increased funding annually for the chemical assassination of children in their mothers' wombs by means of domestic and international family planning programs, going so far as to have the Food and Drug Administration under his watch agree to permit the over-the-counter sale of the baby-killing potion called the "Plan B Emergency Contraceptive" to women over eighteen years of age.

The evils of the Clinton administration were perpetuated and augmented by the George Walker Bush administration. Even if Obama is defeated in the year 2012, many of the evils he, Caesar Obamus, will have institutionalized will be beyond repeal. It won't be "good politics" for a Republican successor to tamper with that which has public support. The next "Bob Dole" will force us to take the swine flu vaccine with just as much enthusiasm as Caesar Obamus.  The differences will be ones of degrees, not kinds. And on and on and on it must go in a land of naturalism and religious indifferentism and semi-Pelagianism and materialism and legal positivism and moral relativism.

There is one answer to this madness: it is called Catholicism. Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Pope Saint Pius X made this clear in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

Once again, you see, we are face to face with where the twin insanities, Modernity and Modernism, blind non-Catholics and Catholics alike and force them into a strait-jacket of naturalism.

Modernity (the Protestant Revolt, the so-called "Enlightenment," the religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian modern state) has convinced almost all but a relatively small handful of Catholics that it is possible for there to be personal and social order absent a due submission to the Deposit of Faith as It has been entrusted to the Catholic Church and absent a reliance upon Sanctifying Grace to overcome and to make reparation for our own sins, which are the proximate causes of all personal and social problems. Thus arises the welter of naturalistic "philosophies" and "ideologies" that are proposed to "reform" societies as "true believers" seek to discern what the guiding lights of their particular naturalistic systems would do today in our own circumstances were they alive to provide this "guidance."

We must remember what Pope Gregory XVI wrote in Mirari Vos, August 15, 1832, when he condemned the fundamental presuppositions of Modernity:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. "But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error," as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly "the bottomless pit" is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Modernism, enshrined in the very ethos of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, has convinced Catholics that it is neither wise nor even desirable to seek to plant seeds for the restoration of Christendom. That era has "passed," never to be recaptured again. It is possible, therefore, to base personal and social order on something short of Catholicism. This is a lie, a lie that is enshrined in the abomination of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service that offends God so much each time it is simulated as act of "worship" in the name of the Catholic Church.

It is no wonder, therefore, that so many craven career politicians of both major political parties and so many "philosophes" of the current of naturalism known as the "right" can live so very comfortably with the daily slaughter of the preborn by chemical and surgical means. Those who do not view the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and who are not committed to restore Christendom by praying as many Rosaries each day as the totally consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary are part of the problem, not any part of a "solution" for social problems, no less a "solution" founded solely on naturalistic grounds that denies the Sovereign Rights of Christ the King and the Queenly Rights of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

It is only when citizens live and work in light of their Last End as members of the Catholic Church that the family, the basic unit of society in which most human problems are to be addressed, takes its rightful place. And it is only when citizens live and work in light of their Last End as members of the Catholic Church that the civil state will be limited in its size, scope and power as its officials, both elected and appointed, seek to promote the common temporal good in light of man's Last End, being willing to submit at all times to the authority of the Catholic Church on all that pertains to the good of souls.

Remember once again these words of Pope Saint Pius X, contained in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

. . . .for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact.

 

Care to disagree? This statement is either true or it is false. A Catholic should understand and accept that it is true and stop wasting his time worrying about which naturalist or which naturalistic "philosophy" is going to "improve" society. Only Catholicism can improve society as it penetrates into the souls of men. It is really that simple.

We give all to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Each Rosary we pray helps us to give honor and glory to the Most Blessed Trinity and to make reparation for our many sins and those of the whole world. We must never look for results. We must only strive to be faithful and to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states in life permit, being ready at all times to make an accounting for our lives before Christ the King, pleading earnestly that Our Mother and Queen of Mercy, Mary Immaculate, will plead for us then, at the hour of our deaths, as she does with every beat of our hearts that should and must beat in unison with her Immaculate Heart and her Divine Son's Most Sacred Heart.

Every Hail Mary we pray helps to plant the seeds for the restoration of Christendom. Saint Louis de Montfort taught us the following about the power of just one Hail Mary prayed with confident faith:

Are you in the miserable state of sin? Then call on the divine Mary and say to her: Ave, which means "I salute thee with the most profound respect, thou who art without sin" and she will deliver you from the evil of your sins.

Are you grouping in the darkness of ignorance and error? Go to Mary and say to her: Hail Mary; which means "Hail thou who art bathed in the light of the Sun of Justice"- and she will give you some of her light.

Have you strayed from the path leading to heaven? Then call on Mary, for her name means "Star of the Sea, the North Star which guides the ships of our souls during the voyage of this life," and she will guide you to the harbor of eternal salvation.

Are you in sorrow? Turn to Mary, for her name means also "Sea of Bitterness which has been filled with sharp pain in this world but which is now turned into a Sea of the Purest Joy in heaven," and she will turn your sorrow to joy and your afflictions into consolation.

Have you lost the state of grace? Praise and honor the numberless graces with which God has filled with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and she will give you some of these graces.

Are you all alone, having lost God's protection? Pray to Mary, and say: "The Lord is with thee - and this union is far nobler and more intimate than that which He has with saints and the just - because thou art one with Him. He is thy Son and His Flesh is thy flesh; thou art united to the Lord because of thy perfect likeness to Him and by your mutual love - for thou art His Mother." And then say to her: "The Three Persons of the Godhead are with thee because thou art the Temple of the most Blessed Trinity," and she will place you once more under the protection and care of Almighty God.

Have you become an outcast and have you been accursed by God? Then say to Our Lady: "Blessed art thou above all women and above all nations, by thy purity and fertility; thou hast turned God's maledictions into blessings for us," and she will bless you.

Do you hunger for the bread of grace and the bread of life? Draw near to her who bore the Living Bread Which came down from heaven, and say to her: Blessed be the Fruit of thy womb Whom thou hast conceived without the slightest loss of thy virginity, Whom thou didst carry without discomfort and to Whom thou didst give birth without pain. Blessed be Jesus Who has redeemed our suffering world when we were in the bondage of sin, Who has healed the world of its sickness, Who has raised the dead to life, brought home the banished, restored sinners to a life of grace and Who has saved men from damnation." Without doubt, your soul will be filled with the bread of grace in this life and of eternal glory in the next. Amen. (Saint Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary, The Twentieth Rose. )

 

Catholics trust in Our Lady and her Most Holy Rosary and her Fatima Message, not in the "clever" strategies of naturalists who aren't even very good in promoting a consistent form of naturalism.

The twin, matchless Hearts of love that are the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus do not live comfortably with the murder of the preborn. Neither should we. Not once. Never.  We do not seek to pin the tail on the next "Bob Dole." We try to plant the seeds as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus through through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary when all men, celebrating the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as a result of the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message, will exclaim with jubilation:

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saint John Leonardi, pray for us.

Saint Denis, pray for us.

Saints Eleutherius and Rusticus, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?