Democrat and Republican politicians have failed America.

Many members of Congress are responsible for the current financial crisis, and should be investigated, placed under oath and made to testify publicly, forced to disgorge money they received from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other bankrupt financial corporations.

For years, while Fannie and Freddie and other financial institutions were buying favor and cover on the Hill through campaign contributions and making multimillionaires out of politicians and their friends, few people cared, because they didn’t see how it could affect them. Now they know. Now the American public should demand that politicians like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Chuck Schumer explain why they protected these house of cards institutions, under penalties of perjury.

Where’s the outrage from the politicians, where’s their calls for investigations, where’s their press releases, their press conferences?

When the Enron and World Com scandals broke a few years ago, daily we saw and heard from Washington politicians like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and many others. Where are their voices today?

There seems to be a conspiracy of silence among Republican and Democratic politicians to protect their friends and colleagues in Congress and at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, etc. Almost daily we read about another politician at the federal, state or local level being forced to resign because of a scandal or a crime.

Power has corrupted Republicans and Democrats. And absolute power corrupted the Republicans absolutely when they had all power during most of the Bush administration. And if Obama wins the White House and Congress this November we can count on the Democrats becoming absolutely corrupt.

In the case of Republicans, they became that which they beheld.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Republicans beheld the corruption of the Democrats and their abuse of power.

Republicans promised to change things, and the people voted the Democrats out, and the Republicans in. But soon, the GOP became corrupt. Soon, the Republican majority in Congress was abusing power just like Democrats. And the Republicans became that which they beheld.

In the late 1950s, as chairman of the Young Republicans in Harris County (Houston) Texas, I would hear the party leaders talk about

·         Government being too big,

·         Government spending too much money,

·         About how we must shrink government programs, and abolish this or that government agency

Government, they said, was the problem, not the solution.

And that sounded right to me; it sounded good to me.

And I continued to hear that in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, '90s from Republicans at all levels of government.

But all that talk stopped in January 2001 when the Republicans took the White House, and held the Senate and the House of Representatives.

You could almost hear Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, Trent Lott, Karl Rove, George W. Bush and friends say:

·         “Just kidding.”

·         “We didn’t mean it.”

You could almost hear them say, “What we meant was that we didn’t want the Democrats spending the money -- but now that we can spend the money any way we want, lets blow the doors off the bank vault and spend and spend and get re-elected and re-elected.”

I can visualize a meeting in Karl Rove’s White House office in January 2001 with the Republican leadership to decide on a governing strategy and someone coming up with the idea of a one-word governing idea:

BRIBERY… as in “Let’s bribe the voters.”

…as in “You the voters have the votes…. We the Republicans have the taxpayers’ money…. Let’s talk. Let’s make a deal.”

In recent years, many Republicans in campaigning against Democrats told the voters they wanted to come to Washington or their state capitol to clean out the cesspool and voters believed them and elected them, and within a few years most sent a message to the voters – I made a mistake – this is not a cesspool, it’s a hot tub.

In the big picture, the corruption of Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and others is not a serious problem. They’ve been caught and punished and their illegal activities will not affect your children or grandchildren one iota.

However, what will seriously threaten the quality of life for our children and grandchildren is the Republicans’ legal theft, or, as Frederic Bastiat might say, the legal plunder by President Bush and Congressional Republicans.

They tried to bribe the voters with trillions of dollars of your children’s inheritance.

All of this was done for the sole purpose – the immoral and corrupt purpose – of holding onto power.

And how appropriate that it has turned to ashes in their mouths.

 

Today we have Republican leaders in the White House and the Congress who have moved left and abandoned the base of their party – the conservatives.

And because Republican leaders moved left, they allowed the Democratic Party to move even further to the left. Witness: Obama-Biden, the most liberal presidential ticket ever; San Francisco Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House; Harry Reid, who’s moved even further left since becoming Majority Leader of the Senate, and the vitriolic DNC, which sounds more and more like a branch of MoveOn.org.

Yes, we can blame Republican leaders for all this. Reagan forced the Democratic Party to move to the right. Recent Republican leaders fostered a Saul Alinsky-type for President.

A few years ago I wrote a book Conservatives Betrayed, How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.  If I were writing the sub-title today I’d probably write “How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Set the Conservative Cause Back 10-20 years.”

Here’s a message to faithful and loyal conservative Republican activists: most Republican politicians are clueless. 

Think about it. If you were on the board of a company whose leaders had wrecked your brand, blown through your money, lost a huge amount of your market share, and refused to change, no matter how bad things got – wouldn’t you try to get them fired? Not if you’re a Republican politician!

What can you say about a political party whose leaders were silent when a Senator under Federal investigation, Ted Stevens from Alaska, threatened to resign if he didn’t get $223 million dollars to build a bridge to nowhere?

The Republican Senators’ silence in the face of Stevens’s threat speaks volumes about the state of the Grand Old Party.

Voters know politicians lie to win office.

Then they write laws to keep themselves in office and hold onto power.

They abuse their power to help themselves and their friends.

So how do we change things?

How do we take charge of our own political future?

How do we reclaim America for ourselves and future generations?

We all know that one definition of insanity is: repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.

In my opinion, the number one mistake conservatives made in the last 25+ years is that they became an arm of the Republican Party. Conservatives became an appendage of the GOP.

Too many conservative leaders drank the Republican Kool-aid.

However it’s not just Republicans who have failed Americans but Democrats bear even more responsibility than Republicans for the mess we’re in. Everything the Republicans did between 2000 and 2008, they copied from the Democrats, who had held power since the 1930s. And both major parties have worked together to design a rigged, crooked game that keeps them in power, keeps competitors out, and forces the rest of us to accept their dishonest game.

Most politicians take our money, use us as volunteers, campaign on issues they know will appeal to us – then once in office promptly forget us and ignore us until the next election.

America needs new, principled leadership – mostly younger leadership – leadership uncorrupted by the system, and independent of the system.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to go off defense and on offense. At every level in most of America’s major institutions, it’s time to bring forth new leaders who are unfettered by ties to the people who have created our problems.

Today this country has a major vacuum of principled leadership.

In 2008, Americans are like the Biblical Jews who had to wander the desert for 40 years before they could get to the Promised Land. They had to wait until a generation of corrupt or faithless leaders passed from the scene.

And America will continue to wander, to careen from one crisis to another, until these leaders are replaced.

Power is addictive – so we can not wait for the failed leaders to resign – to leave voluntarily. They will have to be forced out -- sometimes by the voters, sometimes by stockholders, by donors, by us consumers, by our friends, our relatives, or co-workers, by angry Americans.

Today, conservatives and all who love liberty and freedom have a major opportunity to provide new and principled leadership for America.

But it won’t happen just because we are correct on the issues.

Virtue will not be its own reward in this case.