August 29, 2008
As someone who worked in the last year of the Reagan and first year of the HW Bush Administration, I have often wondered why the Contract for America was so quickly forgotten and even disrespected by this administration.
The Contract for America was created honorably by a Republican party that was further extending the integrity to the Reagan vision of limited government: Limited government that frees its citizens to achieve and create new solutions, new relationships, new economies through entrepreneurial imagination, research, risk and hard work.
That Contract was abandoned with dispatch in the past 8 years as if it never existed. And where was the media to hold them accountable? Instead, as you all know, it has been replaced by a notion of “limited’ government that places no limits on our outreach as the world’s lonely (and often poorly informed) policeman, requiring a domino politics of blind loyalty while turning a blind eye to those citizens – and returning soldiers – here at home that we can do something real and measurable about. This is not to say that going to war isn't ever necessary when carefully and honestly, and courageously conceived. Just ask Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf.
Generals Powell and Schwartzkopf have often talked on record of the powerful lessons of Vietnam that they took to 1991's Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. They had learned that the leader must face the danger, the bullets and the pain just as his soldiers in the trenches do; they must see the fighting close at hand to know not only the accurate conditions and best tactics of the war, but its all too real human cost. As such, they never took the cost of one life for granted. And they led heroically and successfully. We have not witnessed our military's leaders in the trenches in the same way this time around. I was in Iraq two years ago for a week, and flew Black Hawk helicopters to 8 military bases (go to “Nick’s Kick” at http://www.headgamesradio.com/ for the diary I wrote for that week in USA TODAY) . The military themselves are highly committed and honorable, courageous people. We owe them a great deal. But the ones who call the shots are not those on the ground risking their lives but those who know no risk and no immediate human reality that might sharpen their vision and mold their decisions with the fresh oxygen of real life.
Limited Government is a powerful notion that speaks to America’s genius. It is time for Republicans to take back the party from the military-industrial Jabba the Huts – and for that matter, the obese oil industry execs who would eat their own young to cement their own fortune and power. Limited government is about freedom for the true adventurers, achievers, leaders – and heroes - of America.
Nick Lowery
(go to http://www.loweryspeaks.com/ for this Blog and more)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment