Radiofree West Hartford - A NOT-SO-GREAT DAY FOR AMERICA by Tim Siggia

A NOT-SO-GREAT DAY FOR AMERICA

By Tim Siggia

September 15, 2006

A liberal friend recently proclaimed Tuesday, September 12, 2006, to be, in his words, "a great day for America." What he was referring to is the primary victory of our old friend Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island over his challenger, conservative Republican Steve Laffey, with 54 percent of the vote over Laffey's 46 percent. The victory, of course, was predictable. Besides the obvious advantage of incumbency, Chafee also enjoyed the support of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and of President and Mrs. Bush, who endorsed and campaigned for him. He also was the liberal candidate in a very liberal state. That the conservative Laffey was even able to get on the ballot there, let alone garner 46 percent of the vote, is a near-miracle.

One might wonder, however, at the Bush endorsement. That he would endorse a liberal candidate over a conservative one in itself comes as no surprise. For reasons one can only guess at, the Compassionate Conservative has been doing this throughout his presidency. Two particular examples of this come to mind: the Bush endorsement of Richard Riordan over Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California special election for governor, and his similar backing of Arlen Specter over conservative representative Pat Toomey in the Pennsylvania Senate race. In the case of Lincoln Chafee, however, we find slightly different circumstances.

Where the now-Independent Jim Jeffords left off in regards to Republican non-support of his own party's agenda, Lincoln Chafee has taken over. The living, breathing definition of RINO, Chafee could very accurately be called a Democrat in everything but name. That he does not support the agenda of the national Republican party is an understatement. This is a man who has voted against virtually every Bush initiative, voted against the war in Iraq, and even voted against President Bush himself in the 2004 election. It doesn't take a clairvoyant to figure out that Chafee in fact despises the Republican Party and everything that party stands for. So why, then, is he a Republican? Some might say tradition: His father, the late senator and former Navy secretary John Chafee, from whom son Lincoln inherited his Senate seat, was also a Republican, as the Chafee family has been for generations. I would suggest, however, that there is a more sinister reason for Chafee keeping the initial "R" after his name: that he realizes that he can more effectively work to undermine and destroy the Republican Party from within its ranks than he ever could from without. This, I believe, is the ultimate goal of many, if not most, RINOs.

The key to understanding RINOs lies in something to which I alluded in a previous column: that a liberal's first allegiance is always to his ideology. It isn't enough for liberals to know that they already have total ownership of one major political party. They want to own the other as well. In that way, American voters will be denied a true choice at election time, as they currently are in states like Rhode Island, Connecticut, and others throughout the Northeast. This is what liberals envision for the entire country, which brings into focus one of the key differences between liberals and conservatives. Where the goal of conservatives has always been the freedom for which our country was originally founded, the goal of liberals, which none will admit even to themselves, is totalitarianism.

Sound extreme? It isn't, really. The fact that liberals are not content with sole ownership of the Democratic Party, but now must have the Republican as well, is a strong clue here. It doesn't stop there, of course. Once liberals are in a strong position to legislate their ideology, they will waste little time in their effort to marginalize, and eventually destroy, conservatives. One can easily imagine purges of conservatives from all walks of public life, in the tradition of one of the heroes of liberals, Joseph Stalin. A major reason this is so imaginable is the fact that it is happening right now on college campuses throughout the United States, where students are routinely a one-sided world view rather than a balance of viewpoints. The free exchange of ideas, supposedly the hallmark of college life, is glaringly nonexistent on many, if not most, American campuses today. Many of the student radicals of the 1960s have become the college faculty of today, and both students and professors who dare to publicly espouse conservative viewpoints face disciplinary action from liberal administrators. Global warming is presented as absolute fact, and Darwin's theory of evolution has on too may college and university campuses become Darwin's Law, which brooks no contradiction despite what is already known in the scientific community in that regard. Conservative speakers are either barred from campuses altogether, or, if they are permitted to speak, are routinely shouted down and silenced by liberal students and professors.

This is what liberals, whether or not they care to admit it, envision for all of America: a country in which all subscribe to their ideology whether by choice or coercion, where conservatives, libertarians and others who would differ with the liberal viewpoint would either be totally silenced or banished from the country, where "elections" would be of candidates from two political parties espousing the same doctrine -- somewhat reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, the only difference being that where in the USSR there had been only one party -- the Communist -- in America there would be two which would be identical twins of each other. This situation, as earlier noted, already exists in the Northeast. It isn't hard to see why liberals long for this scenario throughout the entire country, and even now are working doggedly to achieve that end.

So let us therefore modify that opening statement regarding the Chafee victory in Rhode Island. Call it a great day for liberalism. Call it a great day for the Democrats. Call it, if you will, a great day for the liberal Northeast in general, and for ultra-Blue Rhode Island in particular.

But don't call it a great day for America. Northeastern liberals may agree, but real Americans will beg to differ.