Father of our country

Slated on Backbone Radio, Feb. 22 Listen every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver... 1460 KZNT, Colorado Springs... and streaming live at 710knus.com.

Who is your exemplar of the model American? Mine is George Washington. Even as the city named for him seems tarnished and small, the Father of our country stands tall across the centuries. We're in awe of Washington's valor in persevering to victory against all odds in America's war of independence. Washington's self-denial in surrendering his command when he could have been king. His wisdom in chairing the Constitutional Convention. His integrity in demonstrating what the Presidency should be. His nobility in standing down after two terms.

The nation once honored this giant on his birthday every Feb. 22. Now he is marginalized in memory, diminished in textbooks, irrelevant to current issues and politics. That's wrong. All of us, as patriots, are George Washington's spiritual descendants. Backbone as he exemplified it is our keynote this Sunday.

** What's next from Obama and Congress, now that the stimulus monster has been birthed? I'll talk with Katie Packer of the Workforce Institute about card check and the labor unions... and with DA Ken Buck about illegal immigration.

** How do Colorado conservatives get back on offense? I'll talk with Amy Oliver of the Independence Institute about transparency legislation... with CU Regent Tom Lucero about academic freedom and clean government... and with GOP vice-chairman candidate Leondray Gholston.

At the inaugural, our new president quoted General Washington. Fair enough. But try to imagine Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden at the commander's side at Valley Forge, deliberating with him at Philadelphia in 1787, or in his cabinet during the French crisis in 1793. Citizens have their work cut out with these mediocrities in charge. Let's get to it.

Yours for self-government, JOHN ANDREWS

With a whimper?

If anyone has ever wondered how our democracy will end, it is now clear. Step 1, flood the country with millions of illegal immigrants that all vote Democratic. For example, consider this. Succeeding steps and symptoms would include the following:

o Politically, the country would become a one party State. Elections would become the rubber stamp variety, the Saddam Hussein 90% approval sort, with no real opposition.

o The center-right middle class would be disenfranchised and impoverished with inexorable governmental wealth transference taxation.

o The "middle class" would disappear, to be replaced by one large "Government Dependent Class".

* With absolute electoral plurality, Presidential term limits can be removed. The young President Obama would be President for life. (This has been seriously proposed by a US Congressman, and Chavez in Venezuela recently won such a plebiscite.)

* The cult of personality surrounding President Obama would transform America into a Peronista-style quasi-dictatorship

* Continually manufactured "Crises" will mobilize and manipulate the people, making the Government all important and all-powerful. Non governmental organizations would fade, including private charities, private businesses, rotary clubs, and churches.

The unknown underlayment in this scenario is the role of Islam. Islam is waging Jihad against us to subjugate us to Shari'a Law. The Progressives are currently allied with them to pull down the center-right middle class, seemingly ignoring the Jihadist threat. Ideologically, there has to be an eventual mutual betrayal.

Breaking: Rally Today at Capitol

Join us at noon today on the west steps of the State Capitol in peaceful protest of the Stimulus Bill as Obama signs it here in Denver. Please gather on the steps by 12 noon today.  A press conference is scheduled for 12:15 p.m., with the Rally underway by 12:30 p.m.  The steps have been reserved until 2 p.m.  The rally theme is, "You Don't Know Stimulus".  Special guest speaker is Michelle Malkin, author, Fox News contributor and manager of www.hotair.com  Also attending will be Jim Pfaff, Colorado president of Americans for Prosperity, Bob Beauprez, Dick Wadhams, State GOP Chair and other members of the GOP leadership.  U.S. Congressman Mike Coffman may attend and Rep. Doug Lamborn has been invited. 

 It is imperative that our voices be heard today in protest of the president's plan to mortgage the financial future of this great nation.   Come down to the Capitol and watch the 'hog roast'! 

The Capitol is located at 200 E. Colfax.  Off of I25, take the 210A exit.

Partisan in chief

Everyone knows that Barack Obama went to Columbia and Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Law Review. And though he may lack real-world experience -- so-called "life experience" -- he certainly got a good education. Much was made during the campaign of Obama's thin resume and his lack of leadership experience. But in reality, Obama is like many in the Congress for whom government and public service is not a new phase of their career, it is their career. Obama didn't enter politics after a successful decade as a corporate lawyer, judge or businessman. Rather, he came to politics in his mid-30s after spending time working the voters and religious organizations of Chicago's South Side, all as part of a coordinated plan to be a politician. . His success -- becoming President of the United States at the tender age of 47 -- is unprecedented. But rest assured that if it had taken another 20 years, Barack Obama would have stayed in the United States Senate, preparing and planning for a run at the White House. So, you'll have to forgive Mr. Obama for not knowing much about the practical, business side of economics. You see, Barack has never had a proper job in a corporation, had to hire or fire anyone or had to look at his balance sheet and make tough choices about strategy. And, of course, that goes for a large percentage of those in the U.S. House and Senate -- many of whom have been there for decades and don't have much experience at running anything. Our political class is largely divorced from real work of the kind that most voters do, and of the kind of economic challenges that most voters face. For them it is either an academic or an ideological exercise: throwing money at the problem makes people feel like something is being done. And if you can satisfy your social engineering agenda and pet projects in the process, so much the better.

And so it is that the new President and the Democrats in Congres have pushed through a "stimulus" package that has goodies for every pet cause, from environmental protection to family planning. In the process it rolls back many of the practical effects of welfare reform, and makes what is only a down payment on massive new spending on health care, alternative energy and redistributive social programs. The left now has a blank check to redesign our social structure the way it "should be" -- on the basis of equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. It isn't enough to provide a level playing field; vast sums will now be spent to ensure that those groups that have been historically oppressed now have the opportunity to get their just desserts. Call it justice, retributive style.

Retributive justice thus explains why decisions are now being made that defy both economic logic and historical precedence. Everyone knows that trying to stimulate the economy by using massive government spending while forcing banks to loan money to those who can't repay it is a recipe for an even greater disaster -- where the cure is worse than the underlying disease. And history shows clearly that past experience with this kind of centralized control of the modes of production and credit -- both in Japan in the 1990s and during our own Great Depression of the 1930s -- only makes things worse. Surely, those who now advise Barack Obama know these facts better than anyone.

And of course it doesn't matter, because what we are witnessing now is a march of hubris fueled principally by a desire to remake the nation in a kinder, gentler form, with social justice for all. Obama's choices on the stimulus package show clearly that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, he sees his role as partisan-in-chief rather than as a sober steward of a nation with serious, systemic problems. What Obama, Pelosi and the liberals in Congress have done now won't help the economy, but it will further the liberal political and social goals that they are so certain this country wants and needs. Eventually -- three, five or ten years down the road -- the economy will recover, albeit saddled with $ trillions in additional debt. But the social goals that this stimulus makes a down payment on will live on forever.

I wrote often of my fear of Barack Obama and the Democrats during the campaign. Turns out now that I wasn't nearly scared enough.

Lincoln as exemplar for GOP today

If Republicans are serious about recovering constitutional government, it's hard to imagine how they would be successful without Lincoln. Editor: So writes Prof. Tom Krannawitter of Hillsdale College in an IBD opinion piece today. Amid a news cycle now measured in minutes, we need the perspective of the centuries to realize Lincoln's relevance for the momentous decisions of 2009. Here is the article in full:

Lincoln's Defense Of Constitution Is Moral For Today's Republicans By THOMAS KRANNAWITTER

This is the 200th birthday of the first Republican to win a national election, Abraham Lincoln. It is good for Republicans today to remember Lincoln, not to be antiquarians, but to learn from his principled defense of the Constitution.

By becoming students of Lincoln, Republicans can win elections and would deserve to win by helping America recover its constitutional source of strength and vitality.

The greatest political crisis America faces today is neither the recession nor Islamic terrorism; it's not health care, education, immigration or abortion. It is that the United States Constitution has become largely irrelevant to our politics and policies.

All three branches of government routinely ignore or twist the meaning of the Constitution, while many of our problems today are symptoms of policies that have no constitutional foundation.

If we are to recover the authority of the Constitution and the many ways it restrains and channels government power, someone or some party must offer a principled defense of the cause of constitutional government.

They must understand not only the Constitution, but also the principles that informed its original purposes and aspirations, principles found in the Declaration of Independence among other places.

No one understood that better than Lincoln.

Employing a biblical metaphor, Lincoln once described the leading principle of the Declaration of Independence — equal natural rights — as "the word fitly spoken which has proved an apple of gold to us," while the Constitution stands as "the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.

"The picture," Lincoln argued, "was made not to conceal or destroy the apple, but to adorn and preserve it."

Lincoln's right. The declaration's assertion that legitimate governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" because "all men are created equal" is precisely why "We the people" are authorized to "ordain and establish this Constitution."

Further, the Constitution limits the power of government because, as the declaration makes clear, the purpose of government is limited to securing the God-given, not government-granted, rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And a government of limited purpose should be one of limited power.

The Constitution, however, has suffered two nearly fatal criticisms: It's old and it's racist.

The former was launched by "progressive" thinkers more than a century ago and backed up by sophisticated theories of social and political evolution. Woodrow Wilson, for example, once compared the Constitution to "political witchcraft."

The charge of racism, mainly due to the Constitution's accommodations for slavery, found its loudest voice during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and following decades. Justice Thurgood Marshall voiced this critique in a 1987 Bicentennial essay when he refused to celebrate the original Constitution of 1787 because, he alleged, it was racist and therefore immoral.

The progressive and civil rights critiques have given us a century of New Freedom politics, New Deal politics, Great Society politics, Third Way politics, Compassionate Conservatism politics and now Responsible politics.

What we need, however, is a revival of constitutional politics. But the Constitution cannot be defended against these powerful criticisms unless someone can demonstrate that the Constitution incorporates principles that are both timeless and good.

And any such defense must confront two stubborn facts: The Constitution was indeed written long ago, and it did offer certain protections for slavery.

It was Lincoln's purpose to remind all Americans, white and black, that political freedom rests on an "abstract truth applicable to all men and all times."

That "abstract truth" is the principle of equal natural rights, a principle that cuts across time and space and is, contrary to progressive opinion, valid always and everywhere.

Regarding slavery, Lincoln explained that a constitutional regime dedicated to the declaration's principle of equality is a regime where slavery must be "placed in the course of ultimate extinction."

"If we do this," Lincoln said rightly, "we shall not only have saved the (constitutional) Union. . . . We shall have so saved it as to make and keep it forever worthy of the saving."

At Gettysburg's cemetery, as he struggled mightily to save the Constitution, Lincoln rededicated America to its original noble purpose in one of the most beautiful speeches of all time.

Lincoln understood that slavery did not make America unique. America's uniqueness is being the first constitutional government built on a foundation of equality and the terrible price America paid for ridding itself of slavery.

Lincoln's constitutionalism, I believe, is the only effective rebuttal to progressive and civil rights criticisms. Thus if Republicans are serious about recovering constitutional government, it's hard to imagine how they would be successful without Lincoln.

With Lincoln, it's hard to imagine how they would fail.

Krannawitter teaches political science at Hillsdale College in Michigan and is author of "Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President." This article appeared in the Investor's Business Daily on 2/12/09.