No Risk, No Reward

There are people who insist that Barack Obama will be reelected in 2012. Head to head polls show him leading over the various GOP presidential contenders. America, you are walking in the dark.

Don’t fret over the numbers and the opinions, though. In 1980, polls showed Jimmy Carter leading the field of GOP presidential contenders despite high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates. Had we been having this discussion then, we’d be shaking our heads just as strongly as we are now.

Despite what the punditry told us and despite what the media said, a supposedly unpopular, unelectable dunce named Ronald Reagan was elected president in a landslide. Americans may look stupid on paper, but when they look in their wallets and bank accounts, they smarten up pretty quickly before walking into the voting booth.

George H.W. Bush was kicked out for a way lesser economy. In fact, the mere perception that it was “the economy stupid,” lost him a second term. The truth is the economy was already on the beginnings of an upturn during the fiscal quarter when the 1992 election took place and went up ever since. Bill Clinton had not even been a glimmer in the eyes of the American people when the business cycle and mechanism of the economy began to swing back. It would not be until after the election that the numbers would come in to prove this.

Such is not the case with Barack Obama. Our economic numbers are a reflection of recently past activity. Think about how a business works. At the end of the month, you do your reports and you look at last month’s numbers to determine how things are going. Well, tomorrow’s “last month’s numbers” are happening today, and it’s not pretty.

We continue to bleed jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Our economy is in such dire straights right now that more and more people are being added to the welfare and food stamp rolls every day. My job is lost at the end of July. Don’t tell me that things are getting better, Mr. Obama.

And it’s not just my job, personally. It’s my position as well as others. My employer eliminated 7 positions. We are not being fired so they can replace us. We are being let go because the company is sucking for air in an economy where there isn’t much money in the system. Everyone is cutting back. Even the rich are cutting back. I go to Lake Gaston once a month and there is nothing even closely remote to the activity I remember seeing there years ago.

We once wandered through the desert leaderless. We are now in a dark forest grasping to the hope that if we can just find the one who carries liberty’s lamp, that they can lead us out to the shining city. But, even then, if we take control of the city, the city is run down and it needs a lot of work to make it shine again.

Some say we are still leaderless. We are because we think we are. We are because people in our movement have not had the guts and the wherewithal to stand up for the one person who electrified a nearly dead Republican Party nearly three years ago. There are those who walk amongst us in this dark forest who bought into the media lies and the caricaturing of a great woman who put it all on the line for us. She inspired us enough to believe against all odds that we could take our country back. Rather than lie down and die after 2008, many of us joined the Tea Party and united in the idea that we could fight city hall and win. 2010 is proof of that. We need to finish the job in 2012.

Sarah Palin could have left liberty’s lamp on the ground and walked off to her own personal castle after cashing in on the fame (and notoriety) of being the first female Republican vice presidential candidate; she didn’t. She could have given us the Italian salute and raked in the royalties from Going Rogue before hitting the rubber chicken circuit to collect her speaking fees. She didn’t. She didn’t have to become a political activist on Facebook and Twitter. She didn’t have to raise money and help the Tea Party win elections in 2010.

Instead, she carries liberty’s lamp. She is the beacon of light that many on our side refuse to see. Like those who followed the other group to the wrong side of the ship in the Poseidon Adventure, there are Republicans who don’t want to believe that Sarah Palin is the answer and the way to victory.

If America reelects Barack Obama in 2012 with unemployment like it is, gas prices through the roof, the housing market in the tank and the debt at near crushing limits, we will know we have reached our Nero moment. We will know that we have put our better days behind us and that the future is nothing more than fending for ourselves as we watch our country become third world. If the Republican Party lets this happen, they’re gone the way of the Whigs.

Some will think it’s too risky to run Sarah Palin. But like I said, if America reelects Barack Obama in 2012, it’s already over. We will never know how great we can be again if that happens. We will never find our way back to that shining city on a hill if we choose business as usual over true risk and reward. This is not about safe choices. Our country is going to hell in a hand basket.

Countries, like people, when on the brink of death don’t sit there and think about it pondering the what ifs. They know they need to act quickly. This doesn't mean choosing Sarah Palin has to be a reflexive response.
Choosing her is not a blind risk, it's a calculated risk.  She's been vetted. All the other Republican candidates are fresh meat. Their garbage cans have not been sifted through nor have all their skeletons come out. Those who think the media won't do to them what they did to Palin are mistaken. With Palin, we know what we're getting. Mary Beth House makes this point perfectly in An Open Letter to Sarah Palin.

You are perhaps the most vetted candidate we’ve seen in who knows how long. Any potential skeletons have long ago seen the light of day and have lost their sting. You’ve been attacked endlessly from every angle on a range of issues covering the absurd to some of the vilest, most irresponsible insinuations. And yet, you’re still standing. As an analogy, you’re like a toy who’s been played with by energetic toddlers but are no worse for wear. So why would we want to latch on to a new, shiny toy who has not been through the gauntlet you’ve endured? Who could very well break the first time its picked up?

Take all of the factions in the Republican Party and get them dead set behind Sarah Palin and we will win. If elected, she will do the hard work required to renew and restore America (and we will be excited again the way were under Reagan). Choose someone else, and if that person beats Obama, great. But that won’t be a win. It will just be preventing a loss which will return us to business as usual. With Obama gone, the complacency will set back in. We can’t go back to business as usual. It’s how we ended up here in the first place.

The Light Grows Brighter

It’s been two and a half years now since we found ourselves cast into the political desert. As our economic water dried up, we wandered thirsting for the prosperity that our once beautiful shining city - now in the hands of leftists, unions and community organizers – offered us during our better days. We pulled ourselves together and found our way through the dark cold nights and the blistering hot days. In 2010, we made important headway toward getting ourselves back to our wonderful city. However, 2012 remains a dark forest which we must go through with some uncertainty about which way to go and an outcome still not yet determined.

The problem with bringing the millions of people that need to return home to the city is that many of them are nervous and unsure as to whether we are taking the right path back. We know that returning to the city requires us to walk through the dark unmapped forest that many have not seen before. Some may want to take a route they think is safer while others want to make this the last stand – an all or nothing fight that will either wrestle our city back for good or result in our losing it forever.

Those who are Sarah Palin’s age and older remember a similar journey in 1979. Some of us have been here before. Back then, the city was run down and in the hands of indecisive leaders who allowed the economy to sink and our military to become weak. In taking back that city, Ronald Reagan led us down a path that many thought would clearly lead us to ruin. Yet, he became the man who made that city shine again. In 1980, against all polls and against all odds, Ronald Reagan led his troops across that threshold. He stood overlooking the city from the Capitol building and told the citizens that we were about to get government off the backs of the people and unleash our industrial giant.

Eight years later, we were the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth.

So when we try to take people who have never been here before down that path again, they buck. They want to take a more traditional route. They believe that if we follow traditional paths (which is why we’re here in the first place) that we can get back to the city. But their city is not a city that can shine from within. It’s a city that they can put a coat of paint on and call it done. That city is called business as usual.

While our allies and friends who are lost in these woods with us firmly agree that Obama must go and we must take back the city, some fear they want to go settle for going back to business as it was before Obama. I argue that it was business as usual that gave us Obama. We did not upkeep the city. We didn’t make it stronger. We allowed it to slip from our grasp because we became too comfortable with Washington's ways and the taste of the Potomoc water.

Should God grace us with the ability to get that city back, we should make a compact that we will restore and renew it and ourselves everyday. We must heed the words of Ronald Reagan that freedom must be fought for every day and by every generation.

Business as usual cannot be acceptable. Yes, the alternative is riskier. However, we are closer than we have ever been to getting a Tea Party sized group of Americans to actually believe that you can fight city hall and win. The once silent majority has gotten up and gotten out to make their voice heard. They scream “we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.” We cannot let this effort go to waste.

We can’t expect those people to settle for business as usual.

The one who can lead us with the beam of liberty in her eyes and the fire of freedom burning in her belly is growing stronger with each passing day. While there are many among us who have yet to believe in the possibilities, many more are seeing the light as the media myth crumbles before them.

Proof that the media myth is crumbling is in the numbers. RealClear Politics reported Palin's poll numbers as gloomy just a little over 5 short months ago. Today, she is at the highest she's ever been in the polls since polling for 2012 started. For those of you in the media, this is called a story and it needs to be reported.

According to the Washington Post/ABC News, Governor Palin Has More than Tripled Her GOP Primary Support from April. Palin is also back in the top tier of presidential candidates and within 2.2% of Romney. Her successful One Nation bus tour and a new movie will sink the smear campaign which has been going on since she was first chosen to be McCain's running mate.

The new movie, ‘The Undefeated’ could be a game-changer for Sarah Palin. Josh Painter writes: "What [Rob Bluey, director of The Heritage Foundation Center for Media and Public Policy] found most compelling about the film is that it has the potential to help reverse the negative perception of Gov. Palin that was created by the corrupt media which got Obama elected."

Even our opponents are starting to wake up to the reality. Their hysterical ranting about Sarah Palin being dumb, unqualified or unelectable warrant less and less credence with each passing day. Their strategy is changing. Their new meme is that she’s not running or that she can’t beat Obama head to head.

In sad irony for those opponents that even the comedian Titus can see the day when Palin is president and he has to kill her. It’s scary to know that people like him could even say such a threatening thing; but it’s a sign of the times that at least even the unhinged are now seeing the possibility of a President Palin.

We are starting to see people finding their way past the brainwashing that Palin's detractors have been perpetuating upon us for nearly three years now. Dennis Miller is starting to get back on the Palin train. Chris Wallace says it's the first time he thought of her as a serious candidate for president. Michelle Malkin pointed out how Gov. Plain's supporters serve as an ad hoc rapid response team in response to the left's frequent attacks on her. That's what I've been talking about. The army grows!

Liberal and Establishment pundits and writers have wasted thousands of hours of air time and millions of keystrokes tearing this woman down with full knowledge that Palin would evolve into what she is today if they didn't go all out to stop it. They have never believed she was dumb or unelectable. They only wanted us to believe that so that they could continue to pursue their liberal and establishment agendas unimpeded by the one person who could blow the lid off the whole effort to keep America out of the hands of those who would expose these agendas as the morally and intellectually bankrupt ventures they really are.

The reason why Obama is having a harder time running against the economy than he is running against Republicans is that they are going through some coalition building pains. The catch-22 is that moderate and establishment Republicans are not willing to get with the grass roots rank and file to become the battering ram that Palin needs to get through the city gate. Palin is doing everything she can to prove to them that she can do it. It's just a matter of time until they acquiesce.

This may mean the warrior from Wasilla will have to step into the primary ring to do battle with the big boys. It is here she can prove her mettle and prove once and for all whether or not she is the strongest GOP candidate and if she's electable. How much more do we need this woman to go through before people realize that she's been ready for a while now?

Kunta Evans writes (h/t Conservatives4Palin):

What awaits for [Obama] in a few months is a challenger that in stark contrast is worthy of the office of President, who has paid a price few, if any, has politically. She has defied the odds and has seen her share of battles. She’s been hurt, she’s been bloodied, she’s even been left for dead. And yet the courage of her conviction gives her steady legs and an unbowed heart. Her unlikely story will inspire many millions of people all over again to support her in her path to the Presidency.

There really isn't anything else I can write to drive this point home any harder.


Listen to Patrick's World USA on Blogtalk Radio tomorrow night 11pm ET. My special guest is Jedediah Bila.

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

The rumors of Sarah Palin’s political death have been greatly exaggerated. For nearly three years now, we have heard media pundit after media pundit tell us that she was not intelligent enough, not popular enough and not serious enough to be president. Reporters, columnists and pundits have written thousands of columns, spent countless hours on TV and cable news programs and have talked themselves hoarse at cocktail parties trying to convince us that Sarah Palin was a flash in the pan, and that she was done. Yet the wheels keep turning.

This is a story about someone who once “drove” the Alaska state bus, which had its tires flattened by bloggers and frivolous ethics complainants. This is a tale of a woman who rode on the McCain bus only to be quickly thrown under it following his loss to Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign. Now she has her own bus.

When Sarah Palin was nominated for the Republican vice presidential spot, the Obama campaign, the DNC and the media set out to destroy her. As Monica Crowley has said, “Sarah Palin represents an existential threat to liberalism.” Therefore she had to be stopped at all costs. Day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year, the media poked her, lied about her and demanded that she sit down and shut up.

These great intellectuals of the written word were the self-anointed formulators of the processes that all politicians would have to adhere to if they wanted to get elected to higher office. Only those with sophistication, an open mind toward moral and social relativism need apply. Only those who would prostrate themselves before the altar of the new world order, the green movement, the pro-choice movement and the intellectual engineers of all the people living life in a peaceful Utopia, would curry great favor and live protected lives where power would be theirs provided that they “divvy up with the boys.”

Then she came along.

You can imagine the sweat on the brows of those who feverishly sent messages back and forth to each other on the Journolist listserv. You could just imagine the Obama campaign operatives calling emergency meetings. Even the awkward political threesome between moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans and lobbyists was suddenly under just as much of a direct threat as liberalism was. The Republican establishment, long part of that game, didn’t see her as their meal ticket to political domination. Instead of standing up and backing a fellow Republican, they locked the doors and hid the skeletons deep in their closets. They saw that the days of the merchants peddling their wares in the Temple were about to end.

You don't hear people using the phrase “you can’t beat city hall” much anymore. You can thank the Tea Party for this. This once silent majority who stayed home and just took it, now have a voice. They are members of the non-privileged class that makes up a majority of the citizenry, yet were once unable to fight power, money and corruption in a political system that took our country from Great Depression to Great Recession without lining a single pocket but those of their own.

It is as comforting to citizens who long for the days of Morning in America as it is discomforting for those in both political machines to know that there is someone out there with the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington attitude and that there is strength in numbers in a movement known as the Tea Party.

How symbolically ironic it is that the press which once demanded that Sarah Palin bow before it or take on the slings and arrows of smear, lies and innuendo now chases her, reduced to being called paparazzi - a description beneath their fragile egotistical view of themselves.

Palin once dodged the bullets of the media, her name dragged through the mud and her governorship destroyed by a concerted effort of those who could not tolerate anything less than an Armani suit with a good pedigree to lead them, or at least do their dirty bidding for them.

How ironic it is that Sarah Palin once called on the press to treat her fairly and to "stop making things up" and now the press is complaining that she's not treating them fairly. She has turned these once powerful elites into Monty Python's flying circus.

The Republicans have good candidates. But the choice here is between candidates who can run the country properly and one who can bring the country back to greatness again. The choice here is to nominate the lesser of two evils and vote for them against Obama or to nominate someone who has not only taken on and taken down the political establishment in her own state, but who now poises herself to do the same for the rest of the country. We can stop Obama by voting for someone who can return to business as usual or we can stop Obama by voting for someone who can restore this thing and bring it back to being the shining city it was meant to be.

If there is any indication as to who can take one term to get it straight and two terms to make it great, just look at the $12 billion surplus that Alaska runs today. Just look at how many jobs, direct and collateral, that can be created by unleashing America's industrial giant and by opening up oil and gas exploration and resource development here at home. Imagine the prosperity that would be created by a truly free market that rewards producers when we bring it back in place of the current crony capitalist-socialist hybrid system that currently punishes success and subsidizes failure.

The media may have led you to believe otherwise. But the wheels on Sarah Palin's bus continue to roll. If we let that bus go all the way, we will some day look back on this nightmare and thank God it's over. She can lead us to the days ahead where we can feel that same pride and experience that same prosperity as we did the last time someone in America took on the establishment and won.