Musings After Midnight -- Time for the day of reckoning for Republicans

It wasn't so much that Mitt Romney was a weak candidate. Overall, he wasn't. It wasn't so much that Romney was lacking in that elusive quality we call "presidential." He was. And it wasn't that Romney would have been bad for the country. He probably would have been a welcomed breath of fresh air with his genuine goodness that hearkened back to an earlier era when we here in this country prided ourselves on our integrity, our purity, our word being our bond.

The problem was that the Republican elitist establishment had decided early on that Romney was going to be the nominee, and they set out to get the rest of us to approve that choice by claiming that he was "the most electable" out of a fairly large field of candidates.

Each year the elitist establishment does the very same thing. Either one candidate is singled out above all of the others as "the most electable," or one candidate is singled out as "the most unelectable" because he or she is very popular with the average Republican voter in spite of having fallen out of favor with the elites. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul come to mind.

Reagan was denigrated as being "unelectable" throughout the 1970s by these omniscient, omnipotent gurus, until one day in 1980 he proved not only that he was electable but that he could beat a sitting president in a landslide. And then he turned around and won in a much larger landslide in 1984, one the largest in American history.

In 2008 McCain was chosen for his "electability" and then promptly lost to Obama. The same thing happened with Romney this year.

The bottom line is that the Republican establishment does not have a very good track record when it comes to choosing electable candidates. Yet they manage to convince the majority of rank and file Republicans during each presidential election that they have the inside track and know best.

Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and others were each designated early on as unelectable. But at that same point during the 1980 Republican primary races, Reagan was also designated as unelectable. In fact, Reagan was running behind some of the other declared Republican candidates who fared better in the polls in a run against Jimmy Carter. And even after Reagan received the nomination, he ran behind a very unpopular president in the polls until late September and early October. It was very late in the campaign, only a few short weeks before the November election that year, that Reagan began to show signs that he could possibly beat Carter.

Yet on election day he gave Carter a resounding shellacking.

What is my point in droning on about this? The Republican Party elitist establishment is suspect. They have a built in bias in favor of "moderate" or "liberal" Republicans to begin with. And they detest any candidate who threatens the status quo, the dangerous and deadly under the table collaborative collusion between elitist Republicans and the Democratic Party leadership. And it just so happens that those who challenge this unholy alliance are conservatives. It also just so happens that the conservatives are the ones who rarely find favor with the unholy alliance.

We are now seeing yet another example of this dangerous and deadly collaborative collusion with the current posturing regarding the so-called "fiscal cliff." Before any official negotiations have even begun, already the elitist Republicans are caving to Obama demands.

U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia caved when he said he could not remain faithful to his no new taxes pledge. Today John McCain and Lindsey Graham jumped on board the tax hike bandwagon.

But as we conservatives have maintained all along, America does not have a taxing problem. We have a spending problem. Every nickel spent by the federal government is now borrowed. The debt now exceeds what the entire nation is worth by $30 trillion. And the debt now amounts to roughly 10 times what the nation produces in goods and services per year.

That is astronomical and dangerous. No nation on earth has ever survived with a debt load that large. And making a few obligatory concessions to reducing the spending by a trillion or two is laughable. That doesn't even begin to be a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed to bring the debt under control. And raising taxes on those who create the wealth and provide the jobs will not lead to more money for the government at all. Such measures in the past have only reduced overall revenues to the government due to the fact that when wealth creators are punished by tax policy, they stop investing in jobs and markets, and the entire economy slows. Less money made means less money that is available for government to tax. That is simply the way it works. This is economic reality.

Thus, the Republican establishment is once again selling us down the river before the new Congress has even been called into session. The presidential election of 2012 is barely over and already they are busy trying to "cut a deal" with a president and with Senate Democrats who are intent on slapping higher taxes on the citizens without doing much to seriously reduce federal spending.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., made the only sane observation about the debt in 2011 when he said that in order to really make a difference in the debt, federal spending needed to be cut by $9 trillion immediately. Nobody else, not Republicans nor Democrats, would dare touch such a proposal.

But he is right. The official national debt, using the fudged numbers of the federal government, is $16 trillion. But when unfunded liabilities are added in, that is, when the money the government has promised to senior adults in the form of Social Security payments, Medicare coverage, and the prescription drug plan are added in, that debt jumps to $121 trillion. The reason? The federal government does not have the money to meet those obligations. That means that every penny spent on those programs must be borrowed.

Is it comforting to you that your Social Security retirement, Medicare coverage, and prescription drug plan is provided by funds borrowed from China, Japan, and the Federal Reserve?

It gives absolutely no comfort to me whatsoever. I am way too aware of what debts can do to a person, a business, and any entity, including a government. Debt ultimately leads to the loss of possessions that you highly value.

But here we are in a lethal financial quagmire for which there are few solutions and none that do not involve significant pain. Is this how you wanted to spend your retirement years? Me, either. But we can thank our politicians over the past 30 years or so who have squandered every penny the citizens have put in every program of the federal government, including the so-called "sacred and protected" Social Security, spending those funds on whatever boondoggle they could think of, with some sort of half hearted "promise" to eventually put the money back, much like a person who embezzles thousands from a business but has an attack of conscience and tells himself/herself that they "intend to pay it back."

But the harsh truth Americans need to accept about our dire financial straits is that THERE AIN'T NO MORE MONEY!

We are only a few years from being in the exact same shape as Greece and Spain, complete with deadly and barbaric rioting in the streets. Hungry, starving people who have no more money to spend, and whose governments have no more money to give away can turn barbaric in a heartbeat.

In many ways the so-called "fiscal cliff" that faux Republicans, Democrats, and Obama are into hysterics about presently is not a fiscal cliff at all. There is no real emergency. Although Republicans warn about the massive tax increases that will kick in unless a new deal is reached, the thing they are not telling you is that massive cuts in government spending will automatically kick in as well -- something that the RINOS and liberals most definitely do NOT want to happen.

So the real "crisis" is that the politicians fear they will get the blame for the massive spending reductions in federal programs across the board. Such a thing could turn out to be much more positive for the country, in spite of the tax increases that are coming along with it.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am totally against these tax increases. Something needs to be done to stop them. But the cuts in spending? Let them fly! This is exactly what is needed, painful though they may be.

The question is whether or not you want moderate pain now, in the present, or excruciating, unbearable pain in the future, a pain so severe that you may not survive it.

I readily choose moderate pain in the short term.

But this is only wishful thinking. The politicians of the elitist establishment of both Parties will never allow this to stand, which is why they are crying foul and running around like chickens with their heads cut off attempting to create a false sense of calamity in order to stop the dramatic cuts and tax increases. But the real truth is that even if such cuts and increases went into effect Jan. 1, there would be no "fiscal cliff" or calamity.

The only real fiscal cliff is that which is being propelled by politicians such as McCain, Graham, Reid, Obama, Schumer, and Pelosi, who refuse to address the looming sword of Damocles hanging over our heads in the form of the mind-boggling $121 trillion in debt.

No one is willing to do whatever is necessary to get our financial house in order so that we can avoid the calamity being experienced by Greece and Spain. Even the Republicans are timid in this regard. The RINOS such as McCain and Graham are even worse.

So, what's a patriot to do?

I had stated quite publicly after Romney was selected as the nominee that in the interest of getting rid of Obama I would support the Republican candidate. I did not, after weeks of endless soul searching, believe that I could vote third party or a write in given that such votes would tend to be siphoned off from Romney, making it more difficult for Obama to be ousted. My only goal was to oust Obama and get a Republican majority in the Senate.

I had further stated quite publicly that after this election cycle I would throw my energy behind teaching the Republican elitists a lesson. I advocated conservatives leaving the Republican Party by the millions, no matter what the consequences, in order to show the elitist snobs once and for all that they need us to win, that if they ignore our demands we will make sure they never win another election.

That sentiment only intensified when Romney lost.

I was livid that for two elections in a row I got roped in to supporting whoever the elitist Republicans gave us "for the good of the country." And I was even more livid that just as I had predicted, we LOST with these two candidates given to us by elitist Republicans, just as we ALWAYS do when we cast our lot with moderate establishment candidates such as Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Frankly, I am ready to abandon the Republican Party, leaving them to their own insanity. In spite of losing two elections in a row, they are now claiming conservatives are to blame and propose even more pandering to the Left. That is asinine. Lunacy.

And now we have three high profile Republican senators calling for tax increases in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression. Once again, that is asinine. Lunacy.

And that lunacy is so brazen that I want no more of it. If this is the kind of "leadership" we can expect from the Republican Party going forward, then they can count me out.

I believe that all conservatives should follow suit. Together we can make a powerful statement that cannot be ignored.

As for me, perhaps it is best that I not be aligned with any Party anyway. It may enhance my objectivity.

But I am interested in hearing from you as to where we proceed from here. Do you think we should stick with the Republicans and fight like hell to reform it from within? Or do you think it is too late for that? And if so, how do you propose to get enough conservatives and libertarians to join together to actually WIN?

And the cop out statement that it doesn't really matter because we are going into Civil War anyway is alarmingly short sighted. We had BETTER have a plan in place to address political realities that are ongoing, even in a war, and even more so AFTER such a war is fought. Complete anarchy is not the way forward. We need to have a plan in place for an orderly transition as we undertake the process of restoring the Constitution, the rule of law, back to its rightful place as the ultimate expression of the Founders' vision for a Constitutional Republic in America.