Your Daily Don Surber
Upgrade to founding
Rules for RINOs
The Blaze reported on January 30, 2023, “On Friday, Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado joined two other House Republicans in defending Omar after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy booted her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”
The other two were Congresswomen Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Victoria Spartz of Indiana. Omar, a virulent anti-Semitist. A fourth Republican, David Joyce of Ohio voted, present. The ban passed 218-211.
Zero Democrats voted against Omar because Democrats put their party above anything and everything else. New York City’s last Jewish congressman, Jerry Nadler, learned early on that he is a Democrat first, whale second.
Republicans are different. They would rather switch than fight.
Two years ago when Nancy Pelosi banned Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia of all committee assignments, 11 Republicans joined the Democrats in a show of virtue signaling. Democrats were following No. 13 in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
RINOs, Republicans In Name Only, have their own rules:
- 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
- 12th commandment: “Except when they are in trouble.”
- 13th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Democrat who is in trouble.”
- 14th commandment: “There are no exceptions to the 13th commandment.”
What Republicans need are more MTGs. At a hearing on Twitter censorship, she told the Twits that Musk canned, “You permanently banned my personal Twitter account and it was my campaign account, too. You abused the power of a large corporation, big tech, to censor Americans. I’m so glad you’ve lost your jobs. Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter.”
Instead of more MTGs who take their gloves off and fight, we get Mittens. At the State of the Union, Romney called out Republican Congressman George Santos who lies so much, he could be a Biden, except Mitt never called out a Biden.
Romney later said of Santos, “He’s a sick puppy, he shouldn’t have been there. Given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation he should be sitting in the back row and being quiet instead of parading in front of the president.”
Ed Driscoll observed, “If only Romney had that level of passion over Obama, Candy Crowley, and the rest of the DNC-MSM, 2012 might have turned out very differently for him.”
Mittens would rather be polite than president.
As for the three Republicans who supported Omar, we have too many of them.
Spartz defended her opposition to punishing Omar for anti-Semitic remarks, saying, “Two wrongs do not make a right. Speaker Pelosi took unprecedented actions last Congress to remove Representatives Greene and Gosar from their committees without proper due process. Speaker McCarthy is taking unprecedented actions this Congress to deny some committee assignments to the minority without proper due process again.”
Omar received due process: a vote by the full House.
Spartz is correct. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do. The trouble is that by the time you have made all those turns, you are dizzy and miles from here you wanted to go.
She was following the next Rule for RINOs:
“The defense for the indefensible is to say you did it for principle.”
Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Ryan and every other poseur conservative who stabbed their party’s 2016 nominee in the back always cited principle. They never said what that principle was.
Oh, they mouthed a lot of words about Trump’s behavior and clutched their pearls when they learned he used the word pussy in a private conversation 11 years earlier. But just what their principles were, they never said.
Their refusal to back him in 2020 exposed their perfidy. Other than his mean tweets, they had no reason not to support him unless they were opposed to ending Roe, cutting taxes and making America great again.
The logical conclusion is RINOs like abortion and high taxes but hate the country and their party. William F. Buckley Jr. would call their opposition to Trump a tergiversation.
My guess is Kristol and company were deep state puppets pretending to be some sort of loyal opposition. Never underestimate the power of fear and conformity. Democrats often deploy No. 4 in the Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Given RINO reactions, you can see why Democrats do that.
Spartz need not worry about backlash because Republicans have all the discipline of a sixth-grade class after the teacher leaves the room. No. 12 in the Rules for Radicals is, “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
Its counterpart in Rules for RINOs is “The price of attacking one’s own is forgiveness.”
The last paragraph in NPR’s story, “House Removes Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene From Her Committee Assignments,” two years ago said, “Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, was the subject of discussions in the GOP Conference over her vote to impeach Trump. Late Wednesday night, House Republicans voted to keep Cheney in her leadership position.”
Three centuries ago, Alexander Pope wrote, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” But Cheney did not vote in error. She deliberately and unapologetically supported impeaching a Republican president after he lost the election. Once he lost, she dropped her mask and revealed the Liz-zard she truly is.
To their credit, House Republicans eventually grew tired of her act a couple of months later and dumped her from leadership. Wyomingites were not hesitant and jettisoned her like a Kardashian’s ex-husband. Go back to the NBA!
But that is an exception to the rule of forgiveness.
Romney faced zero consequences when he voted to remove President Trump from office after the 2019 impeachment trial.
That led to the RINO stampede in 2021, in which Romney was joined by Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania in voting to convict President Trump in the J6 impeachment.
Not only were there no repercussions but the party gave millions to Murkowski to defeat her Republican challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. Romney conspired with ex-spook Evan McMullin to defeat Mike Lee, but failed.
RINOs were the original election deniers as they never recognized the legitimacy of the man who won their own party’s nomination in 2016. When a Republican needs them most, RINOs are helping Democrats — every single time.
Democrats followed their lead. In a story on John Lewis’s death, the New York Times reported on July 18, 2020, “The two men have been at odds since before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when Mr. Lewis questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s election and said he would not be in attendance when the president-elect traveled to the Capitol to be sworn in.”
Lewis said, “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don’t plan to attend the inauguration. It will be the first one that I miss since I’ve been in the Congress. You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.”
Politico later bashed the legitimately elected president in a story, “Trump’s absence at John Lewis services highlights struggle to honor prominent critics.
“The president’s halting attention to the civil rights icon’s death stands in contrast to the immediate praise he offered for TV personality Regis Philbin.”
Unlike the election denier Lewis, Philbin was a friend.
John McCain and his family warned President Trump not to attend his funeral, but the family invited any Democrat who bashed him when he was alive including Barack Obama and Lewis. A month before the 2008 election, Politico reported, “John Lewis, invoking George Wallace, says McCain and Palin ‘playing with fire.’”
You abdicate sainthood when you wallow in the politics of personal destruction.
In a column on September 4, 2018, Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit said, “Now that he’s dead, McCain is a Good Republican. But when he was alive, and a threat to other people’s power, he was treated as a racist, a warmonger, and potentially unstable. He was vilified by the press, and by some of the very politicians who were speaking on his behalf.
“In the South Carolina primary, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, for example, used push polling to circulate the (false) rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Bush operatives also, according to a lengthy article in Vanity Fair, spread rumors that Cindy McCain was addicted to painkillers, and that John McCain visited prostitutes and was mentally unstable as a result of his time in a prisoner of war camp. Bush won the primary, and the nomination, and was on hand Saturday to praise McCain’s integrity at his funeral.”
But while Muslims say the enemy of my enemy is my friend, RINOs say my enemy will be my friend when I am dead, so I will be nice to him now.
And it is all about the funeral, isn’t it? The same Democrats who said in the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater “in your guts you know he’s nuts” praised him no end when he died. He earned that praise the RINO way by forcing President Nixon to resign less than two years after Nixon carried 49 states on his way to re-election. Was it jealousy or did the deep state blackmail AuH2O? The world may never know.
Let us compare the Rules for RINOs to the Rules for Radicals.
No. 1, radicals say, “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
RINOs say, “Power doesn’t matter. What matters is what the enemy thinks of you.”
No. 2, radicals say, “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
RINOs say, “Never listen to your people because if they were smart, they would not have elected you.”
No. 3, radicals say, “Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
RINOs say, “Whenever possible, suck up to the media. The best way is the Democrat way by attacking Republicans.”
No. 4, radicals say, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
RINOs say, “Play by the enemy’s rules.”
No. 5, radicals say, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
RINOs say, “Ridicule isn’t nice. We must not use it, except against our own people.”
No. 6, radicals say, “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
RINOs say, “A good tactic is going along to get along.”
No. 7, radicals say, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
RINOs say, “Keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results.”
No. 8, radicals say, “Keep the pressure on.”
RINOs say, “Remember the mercy rule. Let up when you can.”
No. 9, radicals say, “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
RINOs say, “ABC: Appease, Buckle and Cower.”
No. 10, radicals say, “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
RINOs say, “The defense for the indefensible is to say you did it for principle.”
No. 11, radicals say, “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”
RINOs say, “When re-election becomes impossible, shift left and hope for a job as a CNN commentator or on Paul Ryan’s Fox.”
No. 12, radicals say, “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
RINOs say, “The price of attacking one’s own is forgiveness.”
No. 13, radicals say, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
RINOs say, “Do whatever it takes not to be targeted.”
Until Republicans in Congress begin penalizing RINOs for their duplicity, expect the enemy from within to thrive while party leaders marginalize those who actually fight for Republican voters — MTG, Trump and Matt Gaetz.
