1976 Redux?

Recently by Christopher Manion: The Wal-Mart Mordida Monster

The Mitt Romney nomination reminds me of the 1976 convention that nominated Gerald Ford. Back then, Ford’s fixers (Dick Cheney and James Baker III) did everything they could to eviscerate Governor Reagan’s supporters at the 1976 RNC – and then tried to “reunite” the GOP and try to recoup the Reagan supporters they had alienated, all to no avail.

It failed because it was sheer pretense, disingenuous on its face. Baker and his sidekick, David Gergen, hated conservatives as much as Ford hated Reagan. They hated especially the millions of “blue collar” Democrats who came to provide the backbone of the “social conservatives” that supplied Reagan’s winning margins in 1980 and 1984.

Ford was adamant and unrepentant about his loyalty to the Rockefeller-Bush establishment. He bragged in the 1990s that his proudest accomplishment was the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Stevens, who quickly became a left-wing stalwart on the court, to be joined there by George H.W. Bush appointee David Souter in 1990. Time after time, the GOP Hot-Tubbers have lied to traditional conservatives, gotten their votes, and then betrayed them.

I don’t blame Ron Paul for demurring when asked to endorse Romney. Old-time Goldwater conservatives like me who support the good doctor have been betrayed all too many times by the GOP establishment’s lip service. The "Cloud” doesn’t have enough storage space to hold all the lies, and I admire the Ron Paul delegates for not believing them.

Romney has hired virtually all of George W. Bush’s disaster-ridden foreign policy cadre. They hate Ron Paul, and they hate us, for exposing their failures, for drawing back the curtain on their murderous plunder, and for puncturing their pious patriotic palaver to reveal its mordant mendacity. With them in charge, are we to believe that a President Romney would be a man of peace and freedom? Remember, they always lie, and they never, ever apologize.

August 31, 2012

Christopher Manion [send him mail] is a columnist for The Wanderer, America's oldest independent Catholic newspaper, founded in 1868. He is president of Manion Music, LLC, which produces copyrighted, royalty-free music collections for telecommunications media and commercial and hospitality sites that use background music or music-on-hold. He writes from the Shenandoah Valley, where he is a volunteer Spanish translator for local law enforcement.

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