Principled conservatism triumphs

By Aussiegirl

Tony Blankley is becoming one of my favorite columnists. He gets it exactly right (pun intended) with this column. It is not some extreme, childish wing of the party which opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers, it was the entire spectrum of mainstream conservative thought, from the right-wingtip of Buchanan to the neoconservatives on the opposite end of the movement. With this nomination, Bush unwittingly united the entire base of the party which has been responsible for winning elections for decades, and in doing so he has brought it, and his own presidency back from the brink of destruction. In the process I think the Bush White House learned a lesson, that its strength and power would not be enhanced by severing that base, but instead has found that his presidency is reinvigorated by its coalescence behind the demand for judicial excellence. It is this sort of principled internal debate which the democratic party is lacking and which is increasingly allowing it to be hijacked by the most exteme elements on the left. Until the democrats have a healthy family fight, they will continue to be marginalized and reduced to staging temper tantrums and stunts like they did yesterday in calling for that unprecedented secret session.

What a difference a week makes. One week ago the president looked weak, and on the verge of premature lame-duckdom. Today, he has a brilliant and unassailable nominee for the court, a new tax proposal, a proposal to handle the bird flu, and if we can only hope that we will see some willingness to address the problems of the borders and for the senate to finally show some gumption, we stand on the verge of a grand new age of conservative rule in this country. We keep winning elections, there is no need to continually apologize for that to the party which keeps losing.

Townhall.com :: Columns :: Principled conservatism by Tony Blankley

Last week, the conservative movement had its Rosa Parks moment -- we refused to give up our seat on the bus even for a Republican president. Regarding that event, liberals, mainstream mediacrities as well as conservative movementistas all shared a common impression: Something important happened last week for conservatism -- and thus for the broader political scene.

The successful opposition to Miss Miers was not a triumph for just some faction of the conservative movement. If it used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer, then it also could be said that the conservative opposition to Miers was the entire conservative movement on the hunt -- at full regimental strength.

From the market-oriented Wall St. Journal to my own Washington Times' classic Reaganite conservatism, to the social conservative opposition of Phyllis Shlafly and so many others on the social and Christian right, to the neoconservative opposition of The Weekly Standard and Charles Krauthammer, to the paleo-conservatism of Pat Buchanan, to the high Toryism of George Will, to the popular talk radio titans Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and their legions of regional voices, to the lawyer-turned-hip radioist Laura Ingraham, to the iconoclastics Michael Savage and Ann Coulter to most of the conservative blogdom (with the prominent exception of the always magnificent Hugh Hewitt who rode heroically and almost alone with the fox rather than us hounds) -- this was a never before seen moment of comprehensive conservative opposition to a Republican initiative.