Conservative's Last Stand

Tomorrow is March 15th and likely the day that Donald Trump either secures the Republican nomination, or opens the door to stop him. It's all going to come down to who wins Florida and Ohio. If Trump wins both, it's over. He's nominated and a Democrat is elected president. Any other scenario leaves the door open to a brokered convention and (IMHO,) also a loss in November. If Ted Cruz were to end up actually beating him with more votes, the Republicans might prevail in the general. But if he, or anybody else is handed the nomination in a convention deal, they would be toast.

The Republican party is not my party. I am a conservative-libertarian who has voted Republican with virtual exclusivity since 1976, because they always had the most conservative candidate, be it for president, governor, senator or county supervisor. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, moderate Republicans said he'd never get elected. Too extreme they said. Shades of Barry Goldwater! He'll be portrayed as a right wing nut, and we'll never get the center to vote for us. But they were wrong. He engineered two landslide victories by being consistently conservative. That goodwill carried over for exactly one election cycle. George H.W. Bush won four years by pledging "Read my lips, no new taxes," and then tossed it all away by doing just what he said he wouldn't. Four years later we ran Bob Dole to get that moderate vote, and whiffed again. W unveiled compassionate conservatism, which I detested because it clearly implied that conservatism lacked compassion to begin with. Instead it turned out to be conservative light. His unpopularity lead us to put up John McCain and then Mitt Romney in a lurch, once again, to the middle, which got us nothing.  

And the entire time Rush Limbaugh kept telling us, "Conservatism works every time it's tried." Then Donald Trump took up his pet cause (No amnesty!!) and he promptly threw it all overboard in order to "win." He thinks Trump is Ronald Reagan now, and has an excuse or counter argument for each Trump outrage. Today, he tried to cover for him inciting his people to attack. His argument? Rush remembers how angry he used to get watching leftists get away with all this same stuff, and nothing happened to them! He starts by saying two wrongs don't make a right but..... And then proceeds to lay down a smoke screen so that the Trumpster isn't seen as the complete jerk that he obviously is. This is all rather sad to me. I always thought Rush to be an honest broker. But all he can do these days is "explain" Trump. And he does so without end. He firmly believes that people just don't understand him, so he'll spend hours telling the audience about how all those evil moderates have acted so traitorously that the conservative masses have just risen up and yelled "STOP." And lost in all this is how conservative principles have been kicked to the curb. It's all about winning now, even as they secure defeat with Trump at the helm. Not conservative now, and never has been. Neither are his supporters.