BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
You’re a RINO!
No! You are!
I am not! You’re a big ugly RINO! And your mother dresses you funny!
RINO stands for Republican In Name Only. I got called a RINO because I hung out with “moderates.” It used to be a slam against Republicans who didn’t toe the conservative orthodox line.
I helped former New York Rep. Amo Houghton start the Republican Main Street Partnership, an organization he founded and funded to expand the influence of Republicans (and he hoped, ultimately, Democrats, too), who occupied the center of the political spectrum.
I also worked for former Republican Leader Bob Michel, who was a hard rock conservative in his day, but acquired the perception of being “moderate” because he was always being compared with fire-breathing, raw meat eating younger members like Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. Go figure.
But today, RINO is just as much an insult, but far more pervasive in its application. It is hurled at any Republican who isn’t a rebellious libertarian or flat-out anarchist, like Senator Ted Cruz or Congressman Justin Amash, or Heritage kingmaker, Jim DeMint.
Politicians with a 90 percent conservative voting record, cut from the cloth of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are today squishy RINOs if they voted to open the government after the 2013 shutdown, or if they’ve ever said something nice about immigration reform or voted to extend farm programs.
That raises the question: Is the Republican Party a conservative party that welcomes to the fold libertarian and anarchical believers, as warmly as those with centrist views, or is the Republican Party a libertarian party that replaces the welcome mat with hot coals?
In order to answer that question we must redefine conservatism in the 21st Century. That won’t be easy. It is nowhere near enough to define conservatism, as republican guru Ed Gillespie suggests, in the context of broad, helium filled, glittering generalities that pass for political principles. It is not enough to be for lower taxes and limited government. The struggle within the party has rendered those terms meaningless.
I hope the Republican Party concludes that there are, in fact, no RINOs within its ranks. If we can’t reach that intellectual height, then I hope when we apply the label of RINO, we stick it to Senator Cruz’s lapel and not the likes of Rep. Mike Simpson, or Senator Thad Cochran, or Senator Lamar Alexander, or Rep. Charlie Dent, or any of the other classic Republicans who are the glue that will bind the Republicans into a governing majority. Senator Cruz, with all due respect to his office and his views, is the RINO in every sense of the characterization.
“I’m so Disgusted, I Can’t Even Stand To Look At You”
One of the more bizarre incidents among those that reflected the nastiness of the government shutdown standoff, came from Senator Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois. He charged that an unnamed Republican, presumably in a meeting with President Barack Obama on October 10, had said to the President: “I cannot even stand to look at you.”
The White House denied the slur and later said it was a misunderstanding, but Senator Durbin posted the allegation on Facebook and his spokesman, Max Gleischman said “Durbin stands by his comments.” Senator Durbin didn’t stop there. He used the alleged slur in a campaign fundraising email, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The public ought to be told if someone said something like that to the President. More importantly, there ought to be public apologies rendered. We all have to confront and eradicate uncivil, obnoxious, and inappropriate behavior from politicians and all of American society. It is a plague on our house.
If, on the other hand, Durbin got bad information and made an untrue allegation of that magnitude, then he, an intelligent and honest broker, ought to fess up and not let something like this linger. If the false allegation came from someone inside the White House who participated in a private meeting between the President and Republican leaders, then all the more reason for full disclosure.
It is not an incident that threatens Western Civilization, but it is one that strikes at the heart of the weakened, ineffective, and embarrassing relationship between the leaders of our two great political parties.
Former House Republican Leader Bob Michel, in an op-ed celebrating the life of former House Speaker Thomas Foley said there is no more important ingredient between political leaders than trust. That goes for the relationship between people and their politicians, too.
Acronyms
I picked up a one-page summary of news articles recently and found in it 15 acronyms, those all-caps abbreviations for an agency or program. Some were familiar: GAO, DOD, EPA, EU. Others were not: TLD, FMCSA, FHFA, TIGTA, BEP.
Fifteen is actually not bad. The literature with which all of us are confronted daily, contains hundreds if not thousands of acronyms. If Congressional staff can’t come up with a creative acronym for a piece of legislation, they are branded as incapable of creative thought and confined to legislative correspondence. Most of the legislation acronyms are ridiculous and an insult to the intelligence of the public.
The AP style book used to require journalists to print out the full name of the agency or program or bill that the acronym described before using the abbreviated form, but few follow that guideline anymore, so unless you have a universal guide to acronyms, you just have to play with them like you do vanity license plates, figuring out their hidden meaning.
Why can’t we just stop using them.
Internet Anonymity
A couple of months ago, Arianna Huffington announced that the Huffington Post would no longer post anonymous comments. Outstanding.
The Post has logged more than 260 million comments in its history and its founder said in announcing the decision: “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came to London where there are rape and death threats.”
People who post anonymous comments are cowards of highly questionable motivation and veracity. They contribute nothing to public dialogue, nothing to political discourse, nothing to the betterment of our society, freedom of speech, the Internet, or the art of basket weaving. Nothing.
Our right to freedom of speech is not carte blanche. Anonymous rants are not an expression of freedom of speech; they are an abuse of it.
Words of Wisdom
“You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again. It is written: For every right that you cherish you have a duty, which you must fulfill. For every hope that you entertain, you have a task you must perform. For every goal that you wish could happen, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer.” Walter Lippmann
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.