Will The Odd Get Even?

Everyone looks to the Republicans as the odd ones out. They lost, they lost big.

Well yes, to a degree. But now the newest issue of Time magazine posits: "How The Right Went Wrong."

Time author Karen Tumulty writes:

These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who — except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum — have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax initiative.

Star Parker, however, in Townhall.com writes:

The liberal media are having a field day trying to portray the Republican Party and conservatives in disarray. The crescendo has reached a new peak this week with Time magazine's cover picture of Ronald Reagan with a tear on his cheek.

Further, she hits a Reality Home Run:

The idea that anything as American as differences of opinion within a party and political struggles for leadership would bring Reagan to tears is a joke. The only tears about his party and this country that he shed were tears of joy to be part of this great, free country.

So as we approach an election year with an outgoing second-term president, and a vice president who is not stepping forward for his party's nomination, intra-party strife, as competing candidates try to define their own uniqueness, is as natural and American as apple pie. Ronald Reagan would have been perfectly at home.

It is actually not Republicans who are confused, but Time magazine.

When Reagan said, in 1985, that the "other side" was "bankrupt of ideas," he was right. He meant that Democrats had no answer to the challenges this country was facing other than the big-government materialism that had already been shown to be the problem, not the solution.

This is as true today as it was 20 years ago.

It is also true that the ideological core of the Reagan revolution -- traditional values and limited government -- points the way to our future as much today as it did then. And Time's reporters or anyone else would have a hard time finding conservatives who would question this.

Star Parker manages to whip it right back at Karen Tumulty when she says:

If journalists want to examine party disarray, perhaps they should be asking what it tells us about the state of the Democratic Party that Sen. Barack Obama, an unknown, with barely two years' experience in a major political office, can be a serious candidate for its nomination for president.

You go, girl.

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Now to comment:

I've already done a post on this. Thousands of bloggers have done thousands of posts on this. They primarily come down on party lines. And there are those within each party who do nothing more than trot out what they expect to be the Standard Party Line, dependent on which side of the aisle one serves.

I have been taken to task on occasion for not completely towing said line for the GOP. OFW. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we Conservatives cannot stop and stand a little introspection or some spit and lightning thrown our direction, then we truly are lost.

C'mon, get serious. We KNOW what to do. We KNOW how to get back to our basic values and tenets. It's just a matter of finding the politicians with the proper set of balls, male or female, to get us back on track. I've already written about it here, following the recent election, and here following introspection on Reagan.

This is nothing particularly new; no one in either party stalks a strict party line. Yes, the GOP finds itself in some disarray. Pundits and bloggers such as myself disagree as to what it will take to reachieve our goals. But falling apart at the seams like no other time in GOP history? Nope. Wrong.

BZ