Some post-Iowa comments

The Republican party stands at a crossroads right now, unlike anything it has seen on a national level since 1976. On one hand, a populist minister who appeals to some on the Christian Right, and many who embrace an economic message of "take from the rich to give to the poor", has pulled off an almost sure-fire annihilation of the Mitt Romney campaign. Short of a big defeat of McCain in New Hampshire, Romney is cooked, and this is good news for those of us in the GOP who find him to be slick, unbelievable, conveniently "reformed", and completely unpredictable. His campaign has been creepy, and even though I think he is handsome, I am glad to see him crashing and burning. He had no chance of winning the general election, and the fact that he could not even come close to winning Iowa after spending more than every candidate combined, shows that I have been more right all along than I thought.

With that said, the victory of Huckabee last night is good only for one thing - slowing, if not knocking out, Romney. The idea that a candidate with Ed Rollins as his campaign manager, who calls the "Club for Growth" the "Club for Greed" (is Marxist class envy supposed to exist in our party, or in the other one??), who advocates freeing rapists and murderers for inexplicable reasons, and most importantly, who has categorically demonstrated complete and total ineptness in all matters of foreign policy, and even beyond ineptness, has shown moral dubiousness in blaming America for much of the global situation we live in, could possibly deserve the GOP nomination, is frightening to me. He is a good man, but he is not a conservative, period. He is a populist who has undermined everything Ronald Reagan believed in and established. His is a compassionate conservatism of Big Government nonsense. He is a redistributionist who insults the American intelligence with talk of a national ban on smoking. He is a clever fellow who is as qualified to protect us from the Islamic Fascist enemy as I am. He is soon to be out of money, and his day in the sun needs to end, for the sake of the party. I admire the fact that he is pro-life, and publicly states his belief in the God who gave us all life and liberty (per the Declaration of Independence), but we worked for a generation to stand for smaller government, and a more muscular national defense. We can not let the party, and its evangelical base, be defined as a bunch of class-warfare advocating, backwoods, simpletons, who refuse to embrace economic liberty and national defense while they scream for school prayer and six-day creationism. We can do much, much better.

The victors last night were John McCain, who may be pulling off the comeback of the century, especially with a win in New Hampshire, Fred Thompson, who I still believe would make a good President, if he had any desire whatsoever to be one, and Rudy Guiliani, whose novel campaign strategy gets to breathe for another week. Fred should have been dead by now, and he is not. McCain is alive, and possibly soon to be leading. And Rudy is out of the equation until Florida, as he has always said he would be (though anything less than a big win in Florida, and he is dead altogether). All three of these candidates are pro-military, pro-trade, and pro-strict constructionists on the Supreme Court. In short, all three are "worthy of our vote" (though all three have massive flaws).

The GOP has its work cut out for it. Obama said in his victory speech last night that "9/11 was ... a wake-up call to the need to protect the environment". With the audacity of that kind of idiocy, I pray we get the best man in the GOP hunt nominated, soon. We can not let the cartoonish clowns who lead the democratic party go on to lead this nation. At least not if we love life and liberty ...