It's not Tuesday, but it's a Transplant!

I like having sweet titles that use consonance, but oh well. It's Friday / Saturday and the post is a transplant... Friday I Didn't Write It? (that has assonance!) Anyway, nothing to do with anything. I used to keep up with NextGenGOP's blog more frequently, but have slacked off lately (bad me!). The good news: I found a great post written the other day, and I actually know what Mr. Man is talking about. I was watching Hannity the other night and thinking, "Sean, I love you, but your argument is weak today. Just give it up and change the subject." But he wouldn't, didn't, and Emil from NextGenGOP wrote a really great blog about Conservatives choosing their battles...

here it be!

Picking The Right Fight
Apr 15th, 2009 by Emil G. Maine.
As the Somali pirate standoff came to close I, like any other American following the crisis, was wholly reassured to see the courageous Captain Phillips escape from the potentially fatal face-off with his life. The good guys won. The bad guys lost. What better way could any foreign policy crises end? Not good enough for Sean Hannity it seems. On Monday evening Hannity ran a segment titled “Spinning The Pirate Crisis” where he criticized the Obama White House for “taking credit” for bringing about a desirable conclusion to the lengthy pirate standoff. Hannity’s outrage was so ill conceived that the chasm between his remarks and the attitude of conservative commentator and Hannity regular Bernard Goldberg was hard to miss. Goldberg was of the mind that “we have to stop going out of our way to find fault with every single thing he does”.

Goldberg has it right; by projecting a kneejerk opposition to the Obama administration the Republican Party will only dig itself further into exile. Given the way President Bush was treated during his eight year term in office I never thought I’d have to remind fellow Republicans that this type of opposition is dishonest, illogical, and hyper-partisan. Goldberg summoned it up when he said:

“You remember when liberals wouldn’t give George Bush credit for anything? If he came up with a cure for cancer, they wouldn’t have given him credit for that, and, I’m sorry Sean, I see that on the right now.”

Ultimately rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up is going to require a detachment from these sort of predictable hypocrisies. Don’t get me wrong my opposition to the direction that the Obama administration is leading our country is clear and unwavering, but it is based on recognizable ideological and political disagreements rather than petty objections. The Hannity/Goldberg disagreement illustrates an important dynamic that I hope becomes more prevalent in conservative circles: Bandwagon politics never lasts long. As a party we have to recognize when our political and ideological leaders get off base and help bring them back to the fold. Although the fringe at the HuffingtonPost might consider inner party disagreements indicative of civil war, it is my belief that the center will invariably be drawn to the party that practices what it preaches in and out of power. Being ideologically opposed to the goals of the Obama administration shouldn’t mean that we have to disapprove just for the sake of disapproving. After all, this is the sort of reasoning that continues to prevent Democrats from giving Bush credit for anything he did least of all turning around a war they had already proclaimed lost. We have to be different.

Since the Republican Party is likely to maintain its minority position for the near future it would be wise to save its constructive opposition for the important battles on the horizon, rather than concern itself with whether or not Obama should get credit for taking out a couple of pirates. Picking the right fight is a lesson we ought to learn sooner than later.