You Betcha!

You Betcha!

In all honesty, I must admit to no small amount of satisfaction at the direction in which the Republican Party MIGHT be headed if current party leaders are willing to take their cue from the actions and behaviors of two conservative stalwarts named Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin.

For those who were living on another planet the last few days, the former Vice President just fired off another broadside from the battleship Cheney’s 16-inch guns, basically calling Barack Obama gutless in the fight against the jihadist (and Islamofascist, to be honest) threat.  He also made sure there was no question what he thought of Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, and his very ill-advised witch hunt against the CIA operations and interrogations people who’ve managed to keep all of us safe for nearly 8 years and counting.

As for Sarah Palin, word is she’s headed overseas to expound on foreign policy.  Gee…I thought what she knew about foreign climes came from standing on her front porch, gazing across the Bering Strait at Russia.  At least, that’s what you might have believed if you listened only to Tina Fey and the rest of the pseudo intellectual elite, never mind that most have never worked so hard — on a fishing boat, helping to build their own home, raising 5 children (one developmentally disabled) — in their own lives to get where Palin has gotten in her own.

At least, they’ve never worked that hard and not eventually turned themselves into drug abusers or alcoholics (Roseanne?  Paula Poundstone?  Anybody else?).  So then, what are we to make of these two luminaries — one from the old (but great) guard and one now leading the vanguard in the Republican/conservative universe? 

I’m sure so-called “authentic” conservatives like the New York Times’ tame columnist, David Brooks, or the well-spoken, but ultimately ineffective, Kathleen Parker go into paroxysms of indignation at the thought of somebody like Sarah Palin going off to opine on the state of the relationship between the United States and its allies and enemies, but “it is what it is,” as many leaders are fond of saying, and Palin’s been taking full full advantage of it, first with her attacks against ObamaCare and now with her foray into foreign affairs.

The matter of Cheney and Palin continuing to maintain the offensive against the predations of the Obama administration against our ability to meet and defeat the jihadist threat wherever it may arise is a circumstance that one would think most any conservative — including the ones fond of stuffy intellectual thought and a good white wine to go along with their brie cheese — would welcome, but I think they feel they’re witnessing a sort of “barbarians at the gate” situation, and they don’t like it.

Would you want this man mad at you?

Would you want this man mad at you?

This is unfortunate, because if there’s anything Cheney and Palin have proven, it’s that a take-no-prisoners approach — when it comes to putting the Republican/conservative element back in power, eventually — is what’s working, and NOT the Olympia Snowe/Susan Collins “go along to get along” political philosophy.  After all, it seems to me that that same take-no-prisoners approach worked fine for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.

I see the truth in this hypothesis with each passing week, too.  Polls continue to show the reinvigoration of the Republican base and also an appreciation by independent voters, who are turned off by hard-left socialism and a wishy-washy appeasement mentality that only promises to worsen over the next few years, for the newly-recovered conservative philosophy that says limited government and an emphasis on personal responsibility and fiscal rectitude are the way to go.

Let Dick Cheney be Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin, for she’s surely the strongest Republican woman to come down the pike in a long time.  What’s for certain is that they both seem to get that Republicans don’t win anything by pretending to be slightly different and more moderate versions of today’s Democrat, and that you don’t get to put your own philosophies into practice when voters aren’t sure what you stand for and what you stand against.