Laigle’s Forum

The grassroots can’t see the backyard for the grass

You will have noticed how Americans at the grassroots level stopped amnesty in its tracks last summer, and also later on.

Although the major radio talk show hosts took credit for this, they lied.
It was mostly one activist armed with nothing but a web site who laid the groundwork and followed up with emails to thousands of dedicated activists who called legislators from their homes and offices in numbers that clogged the capital switchboards for days and weeks. That activist was Roy Beck.

Our article “The GOP’s disconnect, it’s worse than you think” (http://laiglesforum.com/2007/06/25/the-gops-disconnect-its-worse-than-you-think also played a role in all that debate.

Laigle’s Forum contacted Roy Beck, owner of the formidable immigration web site, NumbersUSA, and passed on the content of this article, which showed the abysmal behavior of Senator Ensign, who was trying to collect money for the GOP, telling potential donors he wanted to restore Reagan’s values to the party, even while flip-flopping on amnesty. Beck sent an alert out to all his more active members about Ensign’s glaring hypocrisy, including us, with a link to our article. What a thrill it was to see that alert!

When Roy Beck sends alerts, things happen. His readers immediately called Ensign to rebuke him for pretending to want a more conservative GOP while waffling on such a basic conservative issue as illegal immigration. The very next day the entire nation heard, on Rush Limbaugh, the story about Ensign and his wishy-washiness on amnesty, a story that we broke right here in Laigle’s Forum. And as many of you will recall, Senator Ensign’s black eye was the topic du jour not only that day, but for days to come and the pressure that story brought to bear on Ensign put legislators on notice that their every move was being watched. No one wanted to be the next Senator Ensign.
We say that partly to toot our own horn, of course.

But also because we know that the fight has only just begun and we intend to put in our two cents this time again.

If you have been following our columns, you will have no doubt noted the attention recently given to the issue of sovereignty.

We Americans are a funny bunch. We have a way of looking at an issue as though it were isolated, when in fact it is part of a chain. Imagine if a mechanic tried to fix a drive chain that had several broken links, and he fixed only one of the broken links and then remounted the drive chain expecting it to work fine with the other links broken.
This is, unfortunately, how we Americans—and people in general—operate.

The lack of border security and amnesty for illegal aliens were links in a chain called sovereignty, and the grassroots managed to fix part of this chain, while leaving the other broken links untouched. The broken parts included the encroaching supranational agreements like the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) and the Bush administration’s recent concessions to UN demands that compromise America’s ability to forge our own policies and destiny. And while luxuriating in the glory of their victory on amnesty, the American people have returned to their lives just as some American revolutionaries once returned to their plows after a few successful skirmishes with the British, oblivious to the fact that the worst by far was yet to come. This is what we call short-sightedness. America, brace yourselves for the bumpiest ride of your lives as we now face our biggest enemy ever: ourselves–again.

This flaw in our character is precisely why we now have Jim Gilchrist, an otherwise honorsable and insightful man who Laigle’s Forum had previously recommended should run for president (in case Tancredo was not interested—how quickly time changes things!) endorsing Mike Huckabee as the GOP nominee. (BTW, Jim has dropped by and left friendly comments at this site on 2 occasions and he is always welcome here).

Jim spent a major part of his life bravely defending American sovereignty as it relates to our borders and our immigration policy.

Yet Mike Huckabee, the man Jim endorses, now says he is learning foreign policy from Richard Haass (http://nationalexpositor.com/News/840.html), a man who has said he wants to “rethink” the old-fashioned notion of sovereignty and leave some internal policy making in the US up to international organizations such as the UN (http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2006/02/21/2003294021).

This is hard to fathom. If Jim were a mechanic, we would hope he would fix all the links in my broken drive chain, but who knows at this point?

Of course, Huck is supported by the Churchians. Maybe you’ve heard of them. You see Churchianity is supplanting Chrsitianity in this country and that is a major problem. It seems a man who wraps himself in the Bible and holds a cross can find his way into any GOP political convention no matter how red his background and he will be treated like royalty just for calling himself pro-life and pro-marriage. Sorry, folks. There is more to a presidency than those issues.

Of course, when you consider that Leo Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church after he published a novel (Anna Karenina) favorable to the Church, it should be obvious that the visible church (as distinct from the Church as Bride of Christ) may have trouble telling friend from foe.

The difference between Laigle’s Forum and Tolstoy though, aside from his fabulous wealth as against what could be called our decent poverty, is that Laigle’s doesn’t confuse “Christians” with Christ and his message.

Sometimes the differences are glaring.

This is why Laigle’s Forum has also long ago issued red alerts about the “Religious Left.” Apparently to no avail thus far.

But not to worry. We have only just begun to fight.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.