Yes, VERY trying.

I voted for Bush twice because I could not stomach the alternatives, and forced myself to vote for McCain because of Sarah. Give Obama hell if you must but it does look like he is trying.

what Rush MEANT by the point you have misunderstood is simple–

we cannot win by adopting LIBERAL policies and tweaking THEM to seem less liberal. He is telling us we can’t adopt Porkulus and then trim spending by 40% and say OUR porkulus is more conservative than theirs..

our PRINCIPLES should prevent us from even PRESENTING a porkulus, slimmed down or NOT. It’s TOO MUCH SPENDING at 1/10th its size.

our PRINCIPLES tell us that the way to spur the economy is by cutting taxes and FREEING ENTREPRENEURS and business to go get the profits without fearing they will be seized by a greedy hungry spend-monster government.

Can’t believe you wrote a whole column on this misunderstanding on your part.

Dave in Texas

Nothing else matters…….

Maybe we are challenged both by a general trend of “modern” relativistic thinking, which we havn’t been anaware as we should as well as a slippery slope of larger government which benefits from eroded “old” values — thus modern way of thinking boosts big government and vice versa.

Think of it this way; If we ‘update’ our ideas/ideals/principles away from conservatism, what are we really doing, but willingly changing them so as to be more like liberals?

You want fresh approaches? Well, let’s try ‘compassionate conservatism’. Oops. Been done, already, huh? What did that do except grow government?

Similarly, the movement away from our conservative values is what caused John McCain to be nominated, and what caused him to lose in the general. In a choice between socialism and socialism lite,apparently the choice is for the real thing, or nothing.

We keep getting ‘moderates’ who encourage us to move left, and guess what? Every time we do, we move farther away from where we want to be. Perhaps the change that needs to take place is moving back that 30 years that John speaks of, and thereby to a 200-some-odd year old agenda that I’ve heard of, once upon a time.

The argument should not be focused on the idea that we need to change in order to be relevant… what needs to improve is our commitment to relating how our positions are already relevant, and should never have been given up.

I see this as an ongoing process. Chesterton, I think it was, painted a word picture about a white post. If you want to keep it white, you’ve gotta keep painit or at least cleaning the thing. It’s a maintainence thing. We need to keep poinding on the principles of the thing, keep reselling them, keep the idea high in the public eye that our principles, our agenda of freedom, was, is, and always will be valid.

Rush claims 20 million listeners a week.

How is MoveOn or Daily Kos more influential on the Democratic Party than Rush is on the GOP? The numbers don’t add up.

E.g. too much social benefits erode the dependence between members of families. Maybe moral is corruped when there’s a tendency to achieve what a generously giving state wants one to do rather than to act according to what real persons around oneself are in need for?

Maybe we are challenged both by a general trend of “modern” relativistic thinking, which we havn’t been anaware as we should as well as a slippery slope of larger government which benefits from eroded “old” values — thus modern way of thinking boosts big government and vice versa. (Vice versa = conservatism enables and benefits from small government.)

I liked Limbaughs speech — partly because of his skills as a great political artist.