GOP "Frontrunners" And The Dixie Chicks
By Christopher Adamo (02/15/07)
So many invaluable lessons can be gleaned from the spectacle of this year's thoroughly politicized Grammy Awards that it is difficult to know where to begin. One in particular should be driven home to the GOP hierarchy, if they have any intention whatsoever to listen or learn.
By far the big news coming out of the Grammys was the virtual “sweep” of those awards taken by the Dixie Chicks. Yet the event should come as no surprise, given the guiding philosophy of that segment of the recording industry.
Though not as widely understood as Hollywood’s “Oscars,” the inner circle of the recording business operates in a manner similar to the “Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.” Far from being the “vindication” of the group’s leftist ideology, as claimed by liberals within the industry along with the Dixie Chicks themselves, the inordinate attention they received simply proves the existence of a similar mindset among the industry’s insiders.
America has grown weary and disgusted with incessant attempts by the Hollywood counterculture to remold the nation into its own image. Were their philosophies actually representative of the mainstream, movies such as “Brokeback Mountain,” the predictable tale of “romance” between two gay sheepherders, would indeed enjoy popularity commensurate with the enormous publicity it received.
Instead, Americans remain frustratingly loyal to the traditional depictions of courage, heroism, and masculinity more appropriately reflective of its values and its roots.
Similarly, the Dixie Chicks repertoire has all but gone extinct among the country music stations of the American heartland. And despite efforts by recording industry “elites” to tell America otherwise, this situation will assuredly remain unchanged by Sunday’s love fest.
Instead those unenlightened country stations will go on playing the sort of time-honored flag-waving, America celebrating fare that real Americans have grown to love, and are not ready to abandon simply because Natalie Maines, Jane Fonda, or Barbara Streisand tell them they should.
Oddly, those with the greatest need to comprehend the significance of this episode are the current leadership of the Republican Party. For although liberals generally ascribe to a “herd mentality” (perhaps “mob” would be the better descriptor) and therefore can be readily programmed and directed from above, their counterparts on the right are unshakably committed to a set of guiding principles that transcend politics. And they will remain immovable despite the most fervent efforts of pragmatists, even within their midst, to persuade them otherwise.
As the 2008 campaign season opens, Republicans are told that their best hope to succeed George Bush in 2008 must come from a field of only three candidates, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Guiliani. According to the “conventional wisdom” of GOP insiders, the base simply must rally to them, since only one of these three can possibly win the Republican primaries to be held early next year.
Yet what is not being publicly admitted is that none of them has any possible chance of winning in the general election.
Conservative America will neither accept a definition of its best interests that has been dictated by a wholly pragmatic party elite, nor will it be stampeded into compliance merely out of an inordinate fear of Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama. Such an approach is guaranteed to bring in approximately forty percent of the vote and no more, which in turn translates into a guarantee of defeat.
Yet aside from an actual victory in ’08, liberal Republicans have another goal for their party. Rudy Guiliani in particular holds the best hope of GOP “moderates” to fulfill their pathetic dreams of expunging, once and for all, any vestiges of the despised “religious right,” from their midst. For in order to support the likes of Guiliani, Christian Conservatives would be required to suspend (only temporarily of course), their heartfelt convictions regarding the defining moral issues of the times.
Nevertheless, from that day forward, the party leadership would know without any doubt that they need not ever take such “convictions” seriously again. In a pinch, they could always rely on the “religious right” to go for even the slight “lesser of two evils.” And henceforth, that is all they would ever offer.
With their consistent blindness, these “moderates” remain ignorant of the fact that, if expelled from the workings of the Republican Party, Christian Conservatives would take with them not only their views, but also their votes.
Of course conservative America is continually reminded of the significance of the terrorist threat that it faces, and of Guiliani’s likely competence in confronting that threat. But it is ludicrous to presume that America could possibly remain steadfast against the incursion of militant Islam from abroad if, within the nations borders, its moral and spiritual foundations crumble.
Despite election cycle platitudes meant to appease the right wing base, Guiliani, and no less Romney or McCain, would seriously undermine that critical line of defense. Such societal degradation constitutes an enabling threat, ultimately greater than militant Islam itself.
The conservative “grassroots” simply will not abandon its heartfelt concerns in order to mindlessly devote itself to the interests of the “elites” within the GOP. Party leaders who believe they can force conservatives to betray such core principles, all for the sake of a single election, are “whistling Dixie.”
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