What We’re In For

It’s not going to be pretty according to Quin Hillye at the American Spectator: Saul Alinsky Takes The White House:

Conservatives may not realize just how difficult it might be to recover from this week’s elections.

The day after the big defeat, the conservative chatter everywhere was about how the “movement” and the Republican Party (two different things) could finally unshackle themselves from the bad old habits that brought them down, and about how the ability to draw a sharp contrast with the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate would allow us to focus attention, rally the faithful, and re-storm the castle in 2010 and 2012.

Fat chance.

Too many conservatives think we’ve seen all this before — in 1964 and 1974 and 1992 — and that we know how to handle it. Fly, meet ointment: We’re not dealing with the same sorts of opponents. These New Alinskyites who are taking over the White House, combined with the most leftist congressional leadership in memory, will not let us play by the same rules under which conservatives recovered from those earlier debacles. They will try to drastically tilt the playing field, seed our side of the field with land mines and, in short, rig the process to make it next to impossible for the political right, or Republicans, to recover. And they are likely to succeed in at least some of these designs.

It will begin with their efforts to secure a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators (including the two independents). Right now the libs (and yes, all the Democratic senators, with the possible exception of Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, are libs) have 56, with three Republican moderates and one conservative leading their races but awaiting recounts or runoffs. Watch for the Alinskyites to try stealing all four, and to succeed in at least two. We’ve seen this game before. They did it in Indiana’s “Bloody Eighth” congressional district in 1984. They almost succeeded in 2000 in Florida. They did succeed, outrageously so, in the Washington State governor’s race in 2004. Those are just the most obvious of many similar examples. And now they are even more ruthless, more lawyered-up, and in a more powerful position to pull it off than they were in any of those instances.

Next, watch what happens if they regularly can’t peel off enough Republicans (or hold their own semi-fairminded people like Nelson and Joe Lieberman) to overcome whatever filibuster attempts Republicans do mount. Watch for an assault on the filibuster itself. Watch how they use as precedent the GOP “nuclear/constitutional option” on judges in 2005 — except instead of just using it for judges, watch them use it against all filibusters. It’s easy: Make the ruling from the chair that the filibuster is out of order for some reason. Instruct the parliamentarian to rule in their favor. Win the appeal of the parliamentarian’s ruling by simple majority vote. And watch the courts pronounce it an internal matter of the legislative branch and thus outside of courtroom purview.

Watch a cheerleading establishment media — the Fourth Estate as a veritable Fifth Column — actually back these lefty maneuvers. It’s all in the name of one-man/one-vote democracy, dontcha know? The filibuster once served its purpose, they’ll say, but as a vestige of Southern “massive resistance” to integration it is now being used for massive resistance to the first black president, which invalidates it (suddenly) as a legitimate tool.

Watch the left use these tactics and others to pass even more liberalized voting laws — an open invitation to even more fraud that is more creative, easier to hide, and less challengeable in court.

Read the whole depressing thing. It’s what I’ve been saying all year to those who wanted to stay home, because McCain had pissed them off too much in the past. The deck will be so completely stacked against us it will take an act of God for us to come back in the coming years.

Who’s going to be our Moses to lead us out of the desert?