OK. This is my first foray as a "blogger." Just a test, it is the column that the Potomac News (affectionately referred to by some as the "Pot News") wouldn't run. Six months later, it holds up rather well.
LOS ANGELES — Actually fighting and winning the battle against liberalism by representing employees suffering from compulsory unionism abuses has taken me away from my family, and brought me to Southern California. This week, it also meant missing the County Republican Committee’s monthly meeting, where Board of County Supervisors Chairman Sean Connaughton’s myrmidons attempted to rewrite party rules.
Their goals had a common theme, seeking to silence or bar conservative critics of the Lieutenant Governor wannabe’s tax-and-spend record in the County, to limit debate, and to insure only four meetings per year. Freedom, thought, and a strong GOP do not serve Chairman Sean’s new-found ambitions, however much they are responsible for his current prominence.
Much like their principle, Connaughton’s cronies have demonstrated shamelessness and hypocrisy in their principle’s quest for power. But much like their principle, their defining characteristic has been their reliance upon the vilest rhetoric of the far Left.
It must have been surprising to many when Chairman Sean attacked fellow Republican Supervisor Corey Stewart (Occoquan) and John Stirrup (Gainesville) as “irresponsible” for merely suggesting that County spending should not grow as much as Chairman Sean wanted it to. Like many on the far Left, Chairman Sean suggested that Stewart’s calls for fiscal responsibility was a call for “cuts,” revealing his dishonesty, since the only other alternative was that Chairman Sean was too stupid to recognize the foolishness and inaccuracy of his premise.
Chairman Sean’s example renders predictable the application by his cronies of their principle’s rhetoric in pursuing his ends. Tactics have no ideological content. Rhetoric does.
Recent attacks by Connaughton cronies have, for instance, compared your intrepid correspondent to Michael Moore and Al Franken, though I’m neither as fat as Moore nor as funny as Franken. And while numerous critics over the years have accused me of “name-calling,” I guess my absence has caused me to miss the resulting outrage directed at those calling me a “big fat idiot,” an “ultra-conservative,” and a “little yokel.” Perhaps their outrage is reserved for those who accurately identify liberals, as opposed to those who slander conservatives without supporting their labels.
But most entertaining was being called an “extremist” without identification of even one position that is identifiable as “extreme,” accused of advancing “lies” without even one “lie” being identified. Thomas Sowell once observed that the definition of a “racist” is “a conservative winning an argument with a liberal.” Perhaps I can lay claim to Young’s Corollary: the definition of an “extremist” is “a conservative with an argument that liberals can’t answer.”
Who’s position was “extreme” on 2002’s sales tax increase referendum? Your intrepid correspondent, the GOP Committee, and 60% of County voters who rejected it? Or Chairman Sean, and many of his current cronies, who endorsed it?
Yet another attack accused Connaughton’s opponents — one, a long-term member of the GOP’s State Central Committee — of “racism and sexism.” And in an absurdity reminiscent of the Sixties’ movie “A Guide for the Married Man,” where the cheating husband was advised to deny even when caught in the act, the accusation was made that those who prevented Connaughton’s cronies from “hijacking” the May meeting of the County GOP had done so themselves.
What defines Connaughton’s cronies is their reliance upon the far Left’s vilest, most arrogant rhetoric. Echoing the Great Prevaricator’s comments to the Democratic National Convention Monday night, they claim “wisdom” without even trying to defend their agenda and policies, assuming the mantle of “responsibility” in laying claim to an ever-increasing portion of our income. And when they don’t get their way, they claim their “rights” were violated. It is the kind of arrogance virtually begging for a comeuppance.
What kind of “wisdom” embraces an agenda of a government’s claim on an ever-increasing portion of the national income? Even an elementary education in mathematics gives the ability to recognize that this trend eventuates in a claim on the entirety of individual income. How is it “responsible” to attack those who demand limited government, without ever identifying the limits that you would place on it?
Connaughton’s cronies have spent four months trying to emasculate and lobotomize the County GOP, turning it from a party of conservative ideas, robust debate, and effectiveness into a mindless instrument of Chairman Sean’s statewide ambitions, bent to his will. The reason? Attendees at the County Convention overwhelmingly endorsed state Senator Bill Bolling’s bid for the GOP nomination for Lieutenant Governor over Chairman Sean in a straw poll.
But they failed on Monday night, leaving the County GOP, for now, an instrument of electing Republicans and pursing Republican values, not rendering it a mere instrument of Chairman Sean’s personal ambition, little more than his own cult of personality. Many claimed that what they sought is to work to re-elect the President, and that it is the mainstream members of the County GOP who are diverting attention from this task by focusing on state elections in 2005. Aside from projecting the motivations for their own actions on their opponents, let’s see how many continue to show up between now and November.
Chairman Sean’s straw poll embarrassment is something that he has been unable to get over. But his response demonstrates why he is unworthy of advancement, and how far outside the GOP mainstream those who support him are. Regular readers of these pages should start to recognize certain trends: Connaughton cronies attacking mainstream GOP positions with name-calling (“extremist”; “ultra-conservative”) but no detail, and advocating far-Left position when not boosting their candidate. Why is the author of at least three letters advocating homosexual “marriage” in these pages so enthusiastic about Chairman Sean’s candidacy?
Or perhaps Chairman Sean’s pretensions to being a mainstream “conservative” are hollow, typical of liberal Republicans who demand fidelity from conservatives while denying it to them. After all, he’s the candidate who spent his last election bashing certain fellow Supervisors as instruments of developers. Since then, he’s been raking in the cash from the same developers to fund his statewide ambitions.
But since Chairman Sean’s boosters are so far outside of the GOP mainstream, what does that make Chairman Sean?
An attorney, Young lives with his wife and their two sons in Montclair.
