March 28, 2023

I’ve thought about this for a long time now and I’ve come to some conclusions about why we allow ourselves to be constantly pushed around by our fellow Americans on the Left.

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My conclusion is that we bend over backwards, turn the other cheek and give the benefit of the doubt to those who’ve declared themselves our political enemies because we feel we must remain on the moral high ground and be true to our beliefs.

One of those beliefs is that all people have the right to speak their minds however objectionable or wrong-headed/wrong-hearted their comments and core beliefs may be. We conservatives defend the right of every person to be wrong, and because we’ve been brought up to believe that there are just some things that civilized people don’t do to each other, we leave our flank exposed to attack from those on the Left.

We let our ideals get the better of us.

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The same is true of our better nature. While we try to avoid lying to others and to ourselves, we cannot control those who repeatedly lie to us nor are we able to keep conversations with liberals on topic and avoid their attempts at personalizing them through name-calling, aspersion-casting and downright animus. We’re suckers for principles and for our faith in the inherent goodness of others. We operate on a single guiding philosophy that includes fairness, civility and charitableness. Straying from even one of these unwritten rules of behavior and allowing ourselves to openly push back at our accusers – even in the face of an ad hominem attack – guarantees us a guilty conscience, accompanied by a nagging feeling of moral desertion to our principles. So, we let ourselves be verbally abused by liberals who have no scruples and who play by a totally different set of rules… or make them up as they go. Their rules of engagement do not include giving us the benefit of the doubt nor do they accord us the same freedom to speak our minds as we provide them.

It’s as if the ‘blue’ team enters the field outfitted with a completely different rulebook and proceeds to play the game according to those rules to the total confusion of the ‘red’ team to say nothing of the bewilderment of the fans in the stands!

My second conclusion is that we conservatives have not seen through nor understood the Left’s overarching strategy, which is to repeatedly attack us and our culture with impunity and without warning. This is contrary to how we on the right wage war. We fire warning shots, give the enemy enough time to move civilians from the target zone, and if we must retaliate, we do so with proportionality.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Americans were shocked to learn that the Japanese had launched a “sneak” attack on our naval facilities in Pearl Harbor. How dare they! Totally without warning and on the Lord’s Day to boot! Americans woke up to a new reality, that its enemies weren’t bound by the same code of conduct as our own. It was a painful experience, but it taught us a powerful lesson – that in war, the first casualty is always the rulebook. The Democrats took that lesson and stuffed it into their muscle memory and would save it for later use against the rest of us in their attempt to radically transform America from the traditional, rules-based country it is into a ‘government town’ where they would reign supreme.

Let’s step back for a minute and look at what the Left wants and how it is going about getting it. First and foremost, it wants a heavily centralized government that takes its marching orders from ideologues who see a constitutional republic as an impediment, not an empowerment, for progress. It opposes states’ rights and the sovereign right of the individual to chart his/her own future. They see religion as a threat to their plans to secularize the country and make God a bit player in their drama. They view the Constitution and Bill of Rights as mere suggestions on how to form a more perfect union. To them, diversity is more important than unity, and they view everything in terms of race. They believe that our history is reprehensible and steeped in white supremacy; that it needs to be re-written and that they should be its new authors and censors.