The Necessity of 'Outing' Colin Powell
By Christopher G. Adamo
December 19, 2008
These are painful times for most conservatives. Since Election Day, hopes of a pro-constitution Supreme Court, at least for the foreseeable future, have vanished. The prospect of an energy program that puts American workers and American industry as its first priority no longer exists. And with it goes the nation's ability to maintain and determine its own future standard of living. Socialism and "political correctness" are making giant advances forward, while any ability to stop them is elusive at best.
To make matters worse, prominent "Republicans" are now regularly coming forward to castigate the party, or at least its conservative base, as the root cause of its problems and defeats in recent years. The latest and loudest contender is the once immensely popular General Colin Powell.
In a December 11 interview on CNN, he vented his antipathy towards Republican conservatives whom he derided for attempting to use "polarization for political advantage." According to Powell, these people are unable to grasp the political need to reach out to minorities, preferring instead to maintain an agenda which he portrays as exclusionary and which he clearly identifies with white, middle-class America.
Powell lashed out directly at Rush Limbaugh, whom he accuses of appealing to "our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts." He had similarly unkind words for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whom he likewise accused of polarizing the party with her talk of "small town" values. Powell followed by pointing out his own "roots" in the Bronx, asserting that such a background has not left him wanting in the area of "values."
In Powell's world, only by distancing itself from the moral and political philosophies of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and their connection to the American heartland, can the GOP ever hope to broaden its appeal to moderate voters who ostensibly hold the keys to the party's future.
Admittedly, the overt absurdities of Powell's thinking need to be identified. Furthermore, a thorough examination of his real motivations should be conducted. He is wrong on every front, and certainly needs to be characterized as such in order to neutralize his attempted influence on the Republican Party.
For starters, consider Powell's convoluted and thus typically liberal approach to the issues of race and ethnicity in America. From the "multiculturalists" we have for so long heard the grand drivel that "Our diversity is our strength" that most people accept and believe it without question. Yet by his very words, Powell asserts that Republicans need to pander to differing minority factions, presuming no such common "strength" but an inherent system of weaknesses among them that require special attention.
To Powell and his political class, this "outreach" is of course comprised entirely of expanded government entitlement programs and increased social spending, as if all of the former massive expenditures ever yielded even a modicum of benefit to the nation's increasingly segregated and balkanized ethnic subcultures. Rampant urban squalor and despair are all the nation has to show for its past fiscal orgies, so why not up the ante?
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