Gird Up, Patriots: The Battle Isn't Over

It is never difficult to ascertain what liberals want. The Democrats have never met a victim they couldn’t anguish over, and now that they perceive themselves to be the victims, they’re falling all over themselves to get to a microphone and herald their despair to the four winds and the evening news.

The three biggest weepers are House Minority Leader Dick Gephart, Senator Tom Daschle and the Self-Appointed National Bleeding Heart Conscience, Jesse Jackson. They haven’t quite been able to bring themselves to say the words “George W. Bush is the president-elect” yet. One gets the feeling that they’d rather be stampeded by a pack of rabid albino squirrels than force that particular sentence past the lumps in their throats.

They’re unwilling to bow the knee, but they are more than ready to come out of the Election 2000 chaos, swinging. They have been insufferable, not requesting, but demanding that the president-elect acknowledge their fretful wails in the night. These upper-deck Democrats have told George W. Bush that they expect to share power in Congress. They expect, they have said huffily, to have appropriate and equal representation on all on every committee and sub-committee and sub-sub-committee available, right down to the task force in charge of assigning hot dishes to congresspersons for next Christmas’s carry-in dinner.

Jesse Jackson even said that it was up to president-elect Bush to come to him and other black leaders who are representing the “disenfranchised” and “extend the olive branch of peace.”

Have you thought about what all of this means to you?

If you consider yourself to be conservative, whether you are a Republican or a Libertarian, I hope that you’re girding yourself up for battle, because Messrs. Gephart, Daschle, Jackson and others (in collusion, as usual, with the media) are spitting on your shoes. And this is not the time to meekly dry your toes off on your trouser cuffs. It is time to get energized and say in a pleasant, yet menacing, voice, “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you.”

It is time to wake up, conservatives, and be ready to fight. This is not the time to do what we have been doing for the past eight years and drift off into the complacent moral slumber that has been fogging our minds. We have been incredibly lazy. We have been unbelievably weak. We have allowed liberalism to forge ahead like a juggernaut; the election chaos finally clued in many of us to the fact that the Democratic party is careening madly out of control, threatening to flatten anything and everything in its wide swath of socialism.

I do not want to get mail from those of you who want to tell me that it is all over and that we need to kiss and make up with the Democrats. I will ask you incredulously, have you taken complete leave of your senses? Have you been listening to the Democrats?

The Democrats have no intention of playing kissy-face with us, the conservatives. They have every intention of being ruthless and destructive to George W. Bush’s presidency. There is no concession from them-there are only demands and a great deal of grudge-bearing talk about the fact that George W. Bush’s presidency isn’t legitimate, birthed as it was by Al Gore’s ego.

Now I ask you, do the comments from Democrats you can read at any Internet news site sound as if these people are oozing with goodwill and the desire to work for the common good? Of course not. Considering all the remarks Senator Daschle, Representative Gephart, Mr. Jackson and other assorted House and Senate Democrats have been making, do you think that they’d be willing to extend us the same courtesy if Al Gore had prevailed?

Please.

This isn’t the time to be sharing power. Sharing is for kids with toys and for neighbors bearing tins of Christmas cookies. Power is never something to be sweetly relinquished, and if we surrender our power, we are just stupid and unworthy to be in control anyway.

I see George W. Bush’s election to the presidency and the conservative retention of the House and the Senate as a golden opportunity. This is the chance to rebuild our military-not that we are itching to go out there and pulverize some enemy just for the sake of showing off our might, but for the sake of getting back that big stick we’re supposed to be walking softly with. Since Bill Clinton took up residence in our Oval Office, we’ve been walking in the world with the gait of a pregnant hippo, empty-handed.

This is also the chance to do something real about education. In my tender daydreams, I picture a satisfying rout of the National Education Association-with all their pinko notions that are implemented in order to indoctrinate the students in our public schools into the humanistic ways of moral relativism.

There are other useful things that could be accomplished by this unprecedented administration, but four years isn’t going to be long enough if our elected officials waste time in trying to wheedle the Democrats out of their sulkiness as an overly-indulgent parent tries to bribe a toddler to compliance with a stick of candy. Why are conservatives always the ones who are supposed to make nice?

I’ll answer that: It’s because we ARE nice. Too nice. We have lovely manners born out of our reverence for traditional values. We play fair and by the rules. We are grown-ups in the truest sense of the word: staid, responsible, analytical and cautious. Maybe a bit too trusting. Conservatives tend to believe whole-heartedly in the Golden Rule.

I’m not saying that we should ditch these adult attributes-far from it-but I am saying that we need to practice them while watching our backs. We need to be forging ahead with steadfastness and good cheer. And we need to be praying. Praying is good. We need to pray for wisdom, for strength. We need to pray that we won’t once again be lulled into laying down our spears and shields and settling back for just a few moments of rest.

Those moments of rest will turn into minutes which will turn into days which will turn into weeks which will turn into months and then into years and before you know it, the Democrats will be back-and they’ll be hungry-and they’ll lay waste to all the hopes and aspirations we have about this unexpected golden era we’ve been given.

If the 2000 election taught us nothing else, it taught us to keep our guard up. We have seen just how far the Democrats are willing to go in their quest to retain power. They might go even farther in their attempt to regain power. In this election, they would never have trotted out that first “dimpled chad” if they hadn’t been expecting us to roll over. It was the shock of their lives to find us alert and ready to wage war-they thought we’d throw our hands up and meekly acquiesce, giving Al Gore his stolen presidency without a whimper. They did not expect us to fight. Now that we’ve won, they don’t expect us to keep on fighting.

The Democrats expect us to get comfy. They expect us to be so thrilled that the intern pool is no longer being used as the president’s private seraglio that we won’t even notice their insidious attempts to undermine and discredit. They expect us to be weak. They expect us to be disorganized and unfocused. In their monumental arrogance, they expect us to be bi-partisan.

It is imperative that we surprise them.

December 21, 2000

Shelley McKinney is a political writer whose work regularly appears in several Internet journals. She takes great pleasure in exposing the politically correct for their lack of logical thought.