Written for TammyBruce.com: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”

Inspired by the Republican Party primary process, the regime of Barack Obama, and the words of Sarah Palin, here is my latest piece written for TammyBruce.com, which you will find here at its original location: “A Warning From Canada for the GOP”. Listen every weekday at 1pm Eastern to two hours of uninterupted independent conservative unruliness, streaming here at Talk Stream Live.

UPDATE: Click here to listen to Tammy Bruce discuss this column on her nightly podcast (5:45 clip).

A Guest Post by Canadian TAM Flaggman

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing these past few days among Palinistas over the former V-P candidate’s apparent defense of Donald Trump’s machinations and Ron Paul’s fanatical followers. These two positions are clearly harmful to the Republican Party, which makes it clear to me: Sarah Palin sees the GOP itself as the problem, not the solution, in this election cycle. When she warns the GOP against isolating Trump and the Paulites, she’s not endorsing a Trump independent run or a Paul presidency per se. What she is doing is firing a shot across the bow on behalf of the Tea Party, saying to the establishment: don’t you dare go dismissing constituency groups within the Republican Party. If it’s Trump and Paul now, it’s the Tea Party next, and that is simply not acceptable. This gives us pause to reflect on a little Canadian political history to see what can happen when the grassroots of a what is supposed to be a conservative party are ignored, humiliated, and isolated.

The 1970s and early 1980s in Canada were run, essentially, by Barack Obama, in the person of the America-hating incompetent-socialist demagogue leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. When he finally got tired and walked away in 1984, he left the country pining for a conservative renaissance, and Brian Mulroney rode that sentiment to leadership victory in the Progressive Conservative Party, and a landslide in the polls later that year. Despite running as a conservative warrior, Mulroney was the ultimate insider, foisted on the party membership from the Toronto-Montreal legal establishment, and rather than peeling back the Trudeau experiment, he expanded upon it by further nationalizing the health care system, adding a 7% tax-on-everything, and leaving us with crushing deficits that led Canada to the edge of credit rating downgrade. In the 1993 election, with the Conservative-in-name-only Mulroney abandoning ship, and the socialist Liberal Party running on a platform to the right of the Progressive Conservatives, the results came in: the PC Party, the purported conservative side of what was essentially a two-party system, was destroyed. It held on to just two seats in Parliament, and never recovered. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada today is a result of the gutting and scuttling of that party by small-c conservatives in the ensuing years, forming it eventually into today’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

How does this relate to Palin’s comments on Trump and Paul? The key is what happened from 1984, when our McCain-Romney figure (Mulroney) took over, until 1993, when his party essentially disappeared. On two fronts, Mulroney ignored his base. In Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province, the big-government federalist encroachment so enraged the French-majority voters that they left to start their own separatist party that nearly ripped the country apart via referendum in 1995. In Alberta, Canada’s energy-producing behemoth, the big-government encroachment so enraged the rugged individualists of the West that they founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, which was essentially our Tea Party movement of the 1990s. (Not coincidentally, Stephen Harper was a founding member of the Reform Party after abandoning Mulroney’s PC’s.)

The splintering of the PC party, a direct result of the establishment placing a higher priority on centralizing federal power than on promoting the will of the grassroots, led to 13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule, while the grassroots worked tirelessly to organize and establish itself as a viable national alternative under Harper. But now that a principled conservative party is in charge (not that it doesn’t have its share of RINOs, but that’s for another day), we have a principled government in Canada that, with the majority mandate earned in the 2011 election, is finally beginning to peel back the layers of federalist socialist intrusion into the lives of Canadian citizens.

So don’t dismiss Palin’s apparent defense of Trump and Paul-bots as nonsensical rantings or bitterness. The splintering of the Republican voting base could open up the danger of another decade in the wilderness, and Palin knows this. It’s not so much the loss of Trump-ites (of which there are few) or Paulites (of which there are a few more) she is concerned about. It’s the attitude of dismissiveness by the establishment that could ultimately result in the loss of the Tea Party constituency – and that would be a disaster for the Republicans. And the implication is this: if the Republican establishment tries to force an American Brian Mulroney on the grassroots, the Republican party will be be no more. And the rebuilding under a different name could begin at any time.

-Neil Flagg is a Toronto-based businessman, blogger, Conservative Party of Canada member, and TAM. You can follow him on Twitter @NeilFlagg

When the Left exiled Life: Nat Hentoff on Abortion, Jesse Jackson and the Village Voice

Nat Hentoff, c.1958

In this world turned upside down, the “compassionate”, the “caring”, the “good guys” on the left of the political spectrum have succeeded in twisting the abortion issue, and exiling all dissenting opinion from pro-abortion orthodoxy. In this fascinating piece from 1992 I came across today (thank you to a mysterious MIT-based web site for keeping it alive), Manhattan-born atheist-Jew Jazz-loving left-leaning civil libertarian and legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us, among other things, that both Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton were once staunchly pro-life. A taste from “Pro-Choice Bigots: a View from the Pro-Life Left”:

Not too long ago, (Jesse Jackson) was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life,” he would say. “That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn’t. Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being, he warned: “That’s how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do–and not even feel like they’d done anything wrong.”

…

Yet being without theology isn’t the slightest hindrance to being pro-life. As any obstetrics manual–Williams Obstetrics, for example–points out, there are two patients involved, and the one not yet born “should be given the same meticulous care by the physician that we long have given the pregnant woman.” Nor, biologically, does it make any sense to draw life-or-death lines at viability. Once implantation takes place, this being has all the genetic information within that makes each human being unique. And he or she embodies continually developing human life from that point on. It missses a crucial point to say that the extermination can take place because the brain has not yet functioned or because that thing is not yet a “person.” Whether the life is cut off in the fourth week or the fourteenth, the victim is one of our species, and has been from the start.

Yet rational arguments like these are met with undiluted hostility by otherwise clear-thinking liberals.

A very smart man. And, oh yeah – he’s got Obama pegged, too.

Barackolytes: Time to wake up, tax hikes are here

Barack Obama’s 2008 voting base can be broken down into three main groups: “The Grad School Left”, who understood perfectly who the man was and what the codes he was speaking meant; “Democrat Tribalists”, who have a pathological hatred of Republicans and would have voted for the remains of Michael Jackson if that is who the Democrat Party nominated; and “Barackolytes”, the dreamy-eyed celebrity-obsessed masses who ignored content, context, and all concepts of common sense, and essentially laid supine saying “Lie to me, sexy!”

The Barackolytes who believed this oft-repeated applause line last fall:

Should watch this and finally say, “the right was right – he is what they said he is”:

The Cost of Liberal Tribalism: Iranian Freedom Marchers Hung Out to Dry

Much has been said about the situation in Iran over the past couple of weeks. The images of peaceful opposition demonstrators, and the thuggery displayed by the Islamic Revolutionary rulers of Iran, speak for themselves. It was absolutely clear: the demonstrations were not about vote-counting fraud, or about the non-reformist “reformer” Mousavi. The demonstrations were about freedom. Handed an opening by Mousavi and his brave wife (who seemed to be the one pushing her husband far beyond where he ever expected to go in his opposition to the Mullahs), hundreds of thousands of fed up Iranians took to the streets and shouted “Down with the Dictator”. While many in the west took this as opposition to the psychopathic lackey Ahmadinejad, Iranians know this was a chant not against the apocalyptic holocaust denier, but against the Ayatolla and the regime itself. The vast majority of Iranians are fed up with Islamic revolutionary rule. The vast majority of Iranians want a new revolution.

Now, what Western liberal wouldn’t stand with freedom-yearning demonstrators against a tyrannical theocracy? Ten years ago, you probably couldn’t find one. And yet liberals throughout the Western world followed their new messiah, Barack Obama, off an amoral cliff, ignored their own instincts, and worked overtime to justify the US administration’s official policy: do not show any support for the Iranian opposition. “Don’t meddle”…”if we speak up, they will blame us”…”we don’t want to encourage them, in case they get slaughtered”…”we still have shame because of some 1953 coup”. 

The cowardice displayed by most liberals over the past two weeks is the cost of the liberal tribalism of the past decade. Lefties everywhere spent eight years following orders: oppose, mock, and deride George W. Bush without hesitation. If it’s Republican, it’s wrong. If you’re part of the liberal tribe, you fall in line, and accept the new marching orders. Mockery of Bush’s freedom agenda, which aimed to support democracy and freedom anywhere and everywhere – a bipartisan agenda if there ever was one – was labeled “neo-con” and thus unacceptable. A principled position became Bush-bashing fodder for Democrat operatives and late-night television idealogues. Millions of Iraqis celebrating free and open elections joyously in the streets were ignored almost completely by the mainstream culture. A generation’s Berlin Wall moment was treated like it never even happened.

Liberal tribalism of this most heinous kind got Barack Obama elected. Unfortunately, it seems that the President not only accepts the anti-freedom-agenda as a tribal position, he takes it seriously. His absoulte abandonment of the young freedom protestors in the streets of Tehran led to the slaughter of many, the arresting of thousands, and the snuffing out of freedom at the hands of Islamo-fascist thugs. Would the crackdown have occurred anyway? Perhaps. But the message would have been sent: the free world supports freedom for all, and stands against thuggery everywhere. Now, we cannot say this, which is a travesty.

Now that the inconvenient little uprising is more-or-less over, Obama can return to negotiating with that “unclenched fist”. Hopefully, some of Obama’s tribal acolytes will have had their eyes opened, and understand that what has happened is an absolute moral tragedy that must never happen again. This shame cannot be washed off.

CatholicVote.com’s Anti-Abortion Commercial Phenomenon

It’s hard to imagine even the most fervent pro-abortion advocate not having second thougts after viewing this 30-second clip:

Barack Obama, POTUS-Elect

This Is America

I don’t think an Obama Presidency will be, on balance, good for America, Canada, or the world. I hope I am wrong. But it is a great moment for the United States that, once and for all, race can no longer be considered a barrier to any level of achievement. Congratulations, America. But hold his feet to the fire! Because, in a nation where checks-and-balances are the governing philosophy, the only check remaining will be the united voice of the conservative grass roots.

Similar sentiments from the brilliant Jonah Goldberg:

Look, I expect to be one of the most severe critics of the Obama administration and the Democrats generally in the years ahead (though I sincerely hope I won’t find that necessary). But Obama ran a brilliant race and he should be congratulated for it. Moreover, during the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. Let us hope that the Obama his most dedicated — and most sensible! — fans see turns out to be the real Obama. Let us hope that Obama succeeds and becomes a great president, for all the right reasons.

As for John McCain, he is an American hero and arguably the best candidate we could have fielded. I will in the days to come offer no small amount of criticism about his campaign. But where his campaign may have lacked qualities that would have helped it win, the candidate never lacked for honor and integrity. Thank you John McCain for your sacrifice, commitment, and honor.

God bless America, and may He guide Obama to be the best president possible.

Praying for McCain/Palin

Tonight I’m prayin’ for McCain and Palin. Even though I’ve never been a fan of John McCain, I know he’ll govern as a moderate, and preserve what has made America the greatest nation the world has ever known. Canada thrives as America’s peaceful next-door neighbour and top trading partner; a weakened America is of absolutely no benefit to Canada.

There’s no doubt in my mind, Barack Obama would weaken America economically, militarily, and morally. Stanley Kurtz, the National Review journalist who has singlehandedly done more investigative reporting on Obama than the rest of the American media combined, has him pegged with his final pre-election column: his heart is with the revolution; his tactics are pure Alinsky; and his actions show a patient, pragmatic radical leftist, ready to implement a hard-core agenda one step at a time.

I have no doubt that Obama will sell out Israel. Blogger Omri Ceren shows us why Obama-supporting Jews are delusional. On the flip-side, I have no doubt McCain and Palin will support Israel with force, if necessary.

As a business owner who owes his livelihood to the middle-American market, I worry that the economy will only get worse under Obama. Plenty has been written about the stock market’s reaction to an Obama lead in the polls as election day has approached; his tax plans, big-government ideology, redistributionist philosophy, and his would-be supermajority with leftist Democratic congressional leadership, are a big reason why the market has stayed down on the mat, and consumer discretional spending has ground to a halt – people are holding tight to their wallets as they wait to see if Uncle Barry will be reaching in for a little wealth-spreading in the coming months. Mark my words: there will be a massive relief rally in both the stock market, and in consumer confidence, if McCain wins the election. In an Obama-Pelosi-Reid America, I worry about my livelihood.

On moral issues, there’s simply nothing to be said, other than: Sarah Palin gets it, and America will be spiritually rewarded with her as VP. In the days before John McCain made his VP pick, all he would say to the press was, “my pick will be someone who shares my values.” The pick of Governor Palin gives me great faith in John McCain’s values. Barack Obama can’t even bring himself to support laws protecting live-born babies who survive botched abortions.

In 2000, I barely followed politics at all. In 2004, I followed the election closely, and was confident right to the end that Bush would beat Kerry. My logic four years ago was: America couldn’t possibly elect a Northeastern pseudo-intellectual snob as its president. My logic today is: America couldn’t possibly elect a Hyde Park radical, pseudo-intellectual socialist as its president. Prediction: McCain wins Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the White House, with approximately 285 electoral votes.

At least, I’m prayin’.

Barack Obama: If you’re buying what they’re selling, here’s what you’re getting

I still find it hard to believe that America will lose its collective mind next Tuesday, and elect Barack Obama President. People still have no idea who this guy is! By far, the most complete account of his mysterious life – obfuscated daily by his supporters, his fawning media friends, and his very own statements – can be found here at The Obama Files – a site run by the mysterious “Beckwith”, who has spent the past two years obsessively gathering together facts, pictures, videos, and analysis that piece together a history of the man who would be #44. I highly recommend spending some time here – particularly if you’re in the denial school (“he’ll govern as a moderate, like Clinton”), or the bamboozled school (“he’ll bring the country together, fix the depression, end war, and make the world love America”).

The opening of Beckwith’s site introduction gives us an unmistakeable conclusion, reached by anyone who has entered a serious and open-minded study of the facts:

I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about this guy in the last 18 months and I know less about him now than I did at the beginning.

Is he a Muslim?  — I don’t think so.

But, I don’t think he’s a Christian, either.

He’s a Socialist — and worse he’s an Alinsky socialist.

McCain may be a weak campaigner, an intellectual mediocrity, and an ideological lost soul – but he clearly loves America the way it was founded, the way it has evolved, and the way it should proceed – as a bright (but imperfect) light, a city upon a hill.

Obama wants to “Change America, change the world.” He won’t tell us what he means, which leaves us to make our own best guess. I’m quite positive – it will be an ugly, ugly change for the worse.

God help us all.