Tony Blankley is tired of various groups of Republicans trying to read one candidate or another out of the party.
My goodness, professional conservative activists and commentators certainly are busy these days trying to put up a pup (rather than a three-ring) tent for the GOP. A few weeks ago, it was social conservatives reading Giuliani out of the party. Now, in an almost Sicilian revenge pattern, several free-market, low-tax conservatives are coming after Mike Huckabee with baseball bats -- or perhaps with badminton rackets (given the elite Eastern origins of the attackers.)
I so agree. Let these guys compete for the votes of Republicans. If we start carving out this exception here and that exception there for whom we consider solid Republicans, we'll be left with a very small core that might be pure by someone's standards, but will never win elections. In a two-party system such as we have, it is the party that welcomes the widest number of people that will win elections. Fight the issues out on their merits and let people choose their nominee. We no longer have smoke-filled rooms where a few party leaders can pick the candidate. As Blankley points out, the conservative movement is evolving and that is a healthy pattern.
As a Burkean conservative, I believe in the organic development of our institutions and methods. It has always been the left that, with the unjustified intellectual pride of the atheist, attempts to impose man-made party ideologies on his fellow man -- rather than let our civilization slowly unfold through the fuller play out of our character, institutions and values.
But Burke also wrote, "A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation." So too, conservatism needs the means for change.
And yet today, it is many of my fellow conservatives -- both social and economic -- who insist on an ideological and programmatic purity, even as a baffling and fast-changing world has only just begun to humble the conceit of the overconfident and certain.
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