First remove the board from your own eye. . .

Warner Todd Huston writes in The Conservative Voice:

. . . nation wide no less than 21 Republican incumbents holding both state offices and Federal have been defeated in their own primaries by more conservative GOP opponents in this voting season. And this is probably just the beginning.

-Sitting Representative Chris Cannon is forced into a primary in Utah instead of automatically getting the nod from the Party.

-Tom Osborne lost his bid to represent the GOP for the Gubernatorial contest, even though Osborne is a well-known, long-time politician in the state of Nebraska.

-Five incumbent city council members of Herndon, VA lost their seats due to their support for a "day labor center" for illegal aliens.

-And, in the worst slaughter, in Pennsylvania, 14 GOP incumbents lost their primary contests statewide (both Federal and state and local) to more conservative opponents.

This must be a wake up call to the Party. Are you listening Ken Mehlman? Are you paying attention Karl Rove?What you are seeing is NOT the "Conservative crack-up" that so many lefties are hoping for, but a steeling of the spine of the Conservative voter base.

Give Mr. Huston the gold star.

Too many people are taking the position that criticism of Republican elected officials, especially the President, must be suppressed in the interest of party unity. The result in some quarters is a kind of small scale cult of personality like that which surrounded Stalin in the USSR and still surrounds the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

Needless to say this is deeply unhealthy in a democratic society. It is also suicidal in a political party like the Republicans. Democrats can pull off the “check your mind at the door and march in lockstep” approach to politics. They start off as collectivists with a sheet of talking points instead of a brain. Just listen to one of Rush Limbaugh’s collection of identical quotes from Democrat politicians or mainstream media commentators next time some political story breaks.

Republicans, on the other hand, are individualists. They will not simply shut up and toe the line. Feed them a line of BS and they will smell it a mile away and lose respect for the source. Republicans, or to be more accurate conservatives, respect the truth. That’s why they’re conservatives. You must first of all be honest with them.

Mr. Huston concludes his essay with the warning that conservatives need to be careful and only unseat the RINOs when a true conservative candidate that can win in the general election is available. This is true and I believe that the average conservative is mature and intelligent enough to understand this.

It is fine to say “we must reelect Lincoln Chafee because in Rhode Island it is either him or a moonbat even further to the left whose presence in the Senate will help give Democrats majority status”, but it most defiantly was not acceptable in Pennsylvania where a true conservative could have won. All that the Republican establishment managed to do there was clutch a viper to their breast and make conservatives that much more alienated, mistrustful and angry.

To sum up we need to realize that the Republican Party has value only as a vehicle to advance conservative ideals. Sometimes this will mean supporting people who are not conservative. Just as the US and UK had to ally themselves with the USSR to defeat Hitler. However we must never lose sight of the fact that if all our actions are not directed toward the victory of our values and ideals we will lose in the end.