The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#CPAC2017 Undeserved Victory Lap

Posted on | February 24, 2017 | Comments Off on #CPAC2017 Undeserved Victory Lap

by Smitty

Lukas and I swung by so that I could check in at CPAC. This is the bumper on the truck made famous by Stacy in an earlier post.
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We were at CPAC seven years ago  (Feb 19, 2010) when I got to ask now-VP Pence a question on Paul Ryan’s Roadmap Plan.

What didn’t happen in the intervening seven years? A year in Afghanistan, two healthy young lads, a couple of job shifts. . .
Interestingly enough, Pence’s Feb 23, 2017 address hits about every drum in the conservative kit except finances. Just an excellent pile of read meat:

One feels a certain satisfaction in having been in the choir for some key events. Others have done orders of magnitude more than I, but there’s still an echo of St. Crispin’s Day in all of it:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.

Truly, there is massive struggle ahead to climb out of the pit of Progress. ObamaCare is probably going to hurt worse on exit than it did on entry. Then there is the pension crisis.

But savor this CPAC, as Pence clearly did. One month into a contested landing on the North bank of the Potomac River, Trump is at a critical point. The Progressive establishment wants to give Trump the Full Nixon. And if conservatives leave him hanging out to dry, that establishment could succeed.

And this is a lesson of politics: you never ‘arrive’.

Savor this CPAC, because the fact that it is a happy, energetic occasion (not a necropolis full of wound-licking) is a result of the energy put into the activism, the blogging, the protesting, the keeping hope alive during the last eight years. Refusal to bow is key to restoration.

Each piece, regaining the House of Representatives in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the White House last year, was a step that kept hope alive and allowed the next step. The inability to unseat #OccupyResoluteDesk in 2012 was a setback that shows why complacency is so dangerous: learn from your foe’s success as well as your own failures.

Trump, of course, was nowhere in all of this. Donald of Orange, like the earlier William of Orange, seems a Donny-come-lately to the whole conservative scene. A vast swath of CPAC supported Ted Cruz, not Tribble-head, who blew CPAC 2016 right off.

But this is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.

No, we need to support Trump; he’s what you’ve got, and he flogs the pantsuit off of the alternative. Even if we totally blew him off at his previous CPAC appearances (he did?). Furthermore, the possibility of eight years of Trump and a segue into a Pence Administration is worth working very hard for–or did the Wilderness of Obama teach nothing?

So when Pence asks for our prayers, I say we give them. And enjoy a tiny, yet satisfying, victory lap.

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump

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