MASON CONSERVATIVE

OAR - This Town

In my soul-searching whether to plunk down some serious cash to go see O.A.R (from Rockville, MD) at Merriwether in August, I've decided to share with you all one of my favorite songs of theirs and I believe its the newest single, enjoy! 

Hey Terrorists, Come On Over!

Virginia looks like it will be the new home of America's favorite Gitmo guests, specifically Alexandria.  Rep. Frank Wolf has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder inquiring about this.  I have to say that it makes me worried about the safety of our area with these animals being detained, because if they are crazy enough to fly planes into two towers, don't you think perhaps plans might be made to try and literally bust these guys out?  How can we guarantee the safety of our citizens with such an international bulls-eye on Alexandria now?  

It feels like the Obama Administration in fulfilling a campaign pledge made to win over the far left is putting a lot of people in danger because Alexandria is so densely populated.  Why not someone in the Midwest or the west, somewhere that's safe and wide-open where there is less danger?  And I'm sure our senators and Democratic representatives will support Rep. Wolf in his inquiry, right? 

Right?

"The Frustrating Frederick Affair"

The extreme moderate mouthpiece Loudoun Insider (still not blogging under his/her real name to back up the attacks) has the latest screed against Jeff Frederick based on Bob McDonnell's campaign kick-off and how the DCPost mentioned Frederick in the piece.  I must use this to reiderated that the puritans in the party aren't conservatives, its the moderates like LI and the like. 

He said that under Frederick the RPV is "doomed to fail," but my question is when have we been winnning with the crew that was in there?  2001 (Warner), 2005 (Kaine), 2006 (Allen), and 2007 (the State Senate) were all run under the RPV leadership of Griffin/Gillespie/Hager that was backed by many of the people who are now attacking Jeff.  Listening to LI and the other moderate puritans you would think that 2008 and the electoral disaster it wrought in Virginia was some sort of anomoly that Jeff Frederick was soley responsible for.  For the last eight years Republican leadership in Virginia has compromised, flipped, flopped, and made bad decisions.  Let me count the many . . .

1. Republicans backing the Warner tax increases, which lifted Warner from do-nothing to bi-partisan champion that brought us the Democrat Era of the 2000s
2. The Death Penalty ads . . . the insiders told Kilgore this was a good idea
3. Allen filling his campaign with insiders and national folks that left him out of touch with Virginia.
4. Responding to maccaca by highliting Webb's novel writings
5. Backing the abuser fees
6. HB3202
7. Not running candidates in 2007 delegate races in Fairfax
8. Not rallying behind Jim Gilmore, because even though he was going to lose, not uniting behind him cost us badly

There were exactly two major statewide initiatives that was backed by conservatives - the anti-tax referendum and the marriage amendment - and both passed overwhelmingly.  So lets not lie to ourselves and believe the myth that its "puritan" conservatives who have driven this party to where we are.  Over and over, moderates and the leadership - driven by consultants and lobbyists - consistantly compromised on transportation and taxes and every issue that supposedly defines us as a party.  Instead, we "compromised" and voters looked at us like, "whats the point, they don't stand up for themselves." 

So what exactly has Jeff Frederick done in the last year that can match the shear disaster the last eight year where insiders, lobbyists, consultants, and establishment leaders of all levels taking us down to defeat after defeat.  I of course agree that the first year of Frederick's chairmanship hasn't been smooth, but like I said this has nothing to do with Frederick in the long run.  Its about power, and who has it.  The "leadership" that we've had don't want to lose power.

LI then attacks every member of the NOVA state central as people who "couldn't get elected to office in their local jurisdictions."  These leaders have sent out an email saying they support Frederick.  And while LI and his ilk might brush them off as mere "wingnnuts" who can't get elected, I know many of them as the most dedicated Republican activits in the area that come to unit committee meetings, work for all of our candidates, and some in the past of been local unit chairman.  Vellie Dietrich Hall was just specifically called out by Bob McDonnell at the Annandale kickoff as the exact person Republicans should be reaching out too, but I guess she's jsut a wingnut who can't get elected right?  And while moderate "leader" Tom Davis was sacrificing the local party to get his wife reelected, Hall put in a hard-working, uphill race in liberal Mason District against Penny Gross.  She lost, but I bet she feels much better about her race than Davis does about letting three Dem delegates go unopposed and his wife still lost by 10 points.  I know I did.

There worst thing about this whole affair is that the moderates both in and out of state central never gave Jeff a chance.  Nobody reached out to work with him, nothing.  Instead they just sat coiled in the weeds waiting for a misstep, just waiting for something wrong to happen to they could spring into attack.  But thats beside the point.  The point is the leadership that is seeking to oust Frederick via this midnight coup is the same leadership that drove us down the road to minority stauts.  But that was the conservatives fault, right?  Last time I checked it was conservatives like me and many of my friends in the YRs and other groups that goes out for everywhere.  We don't stay home.  We accept the will of conventions and/or primaries.  Its important that the last two chairs:  Ed Gillespie and Kate Obenshain Griffin, where elected by state central and not by the party itself.  Frederick's election was out of the power-brokers control, and they want to fix that.  Frederick's sin was clearly that he relied on the party base and not the insiders.

So the choice is clear:  do we go back to a leadership that compromised our beliefs, lost elections, and allowed Democrats to dictate the political discourse; or do we try something new, try to reconnect with our base and our values, and put those values up front just the way Bob McDonnell articulated in his kickoff speech?  Bottom line, the previous leadership lost us elections.  Lets give Jeff a fair chance to change that.  He deserves it out of shear sense of fairness, but I have a feeling fairness has nothing to do with this. 

McDonnell-Bolling Kickoff

So I stopped by the Annandale Fire House to see Bob McDonnell's kickoff yesterday morning.  I would have had something up faster but I went out last night and am now just getting my bearings.  So I was impressed with the turnout, the firehouse was certainly packed . . . somewhere between 400-500 people for sure.  I got there right at 10 am so I missed whatever might have been going on.  Couple things, first and foremost any campaigning by the AG candidates was clearly banned because none of them were allowed to have any yard signs or literature passed out.  Botb Tom Davis and Frank Wolf gave nice little pep talks about how this is the best group of Republican candidates we've had in a long time (hey, I'm just glad TD allowed us to run candidates this year).

Bill Bolling spoke first, which is always a good idea.  He gives a great stemwinder, really gets the crowd fired up.  Both the theme he wove and the one that McDonnell talked about was using Virginia's resources to build jobs from within.  Jobs, Jobs , Jobs; that was the message that was sounded over and over.  The two main themese that dovetailed from that was energy and transportation.

McDonnell followed with what was his best speech I've ever heard him give.  What his platform is is a truly statewide platform, which I think will work well.  McDonnell talked of transprotation not just as a Northern Virginia problem, but a statewide one.  When he spoke of widening I-66 and Metro, he also talked about transportation in Hampton Roads and how it hurts our ports.  Republicans need to marry the problems in each section together. 

He also spoke a lot about energy.  McDonnell actually said he agreed with Obama that green jobs are the future, and he will fight to make those happen.  But he also vowed to open Virginia's coastline to offshore exploration that will bring capital and jobs to the area. 

Overall, it was a good speech and a great way to kick off the campaign.  McDonnell is putting together a truly unified message statewide, linking each part of the commonwealth to the other through broad and clear proposals that will bring the state party together.  One of our biggest problems as a party has been the sectional divides, the inability of our leadership to make other sections understand how helping another helps everyone.  McDonnell and Bolling seem to be work hard on this and I am, quite frankly, very excited about the whole ticket right now. 

But allow me to turn this into a pro-Cuccinelli rant for a moment.  The one thing missing from the McDonnell-Bolling electorate are the social conservatives, religious conservatives who aren't political in the same paradigm as the rest of the electorate - as well as the homeschoolers.  These are Cuccinelli's voters, his base, the people that are going to get out for him.  Its not that McDonnell and Bolling are somehow not conservative, they certainly are, but neither one of them have cultivated the SoCons the way Cuccinelli has and his addition to the ticket would complete what might be the most regionally and ideologically balance ticket we have ever had.

UFC Ultimate Fight Night 18: Meet Carlos Condit

They call him "The Natural Born Killer" and he makes his long anticipated UFC debut April 1st free on Spike TV at UFC Ultimate Fight Night 18 against Danish welterweight contender Martin "The Hitman" Kampmann (14-2).  Kampmann is highly skilled so this will be a tremendous fight.

There is not a real long list of fighters who make you say "wow, I can't believe he's not in the UFC" but Condit is one of them.  I'm a huge fan of his work from his WEC days, and he has a long list of impressive wins that include Brock Larson, Frank Trigg, Renato Verissimo, and John Alessio (all UFC vets).  His armbar win over Larson, after surviving a powerbomb, is impressive.  And then there was his last fight defending his WEC welterweight title against Hiromitsu Miura , which was a fight-of-the-year contender.  

Mark my words, Georges St-Pierre's reign over the UFC welterweight division will be long and glorious, but when the torch is passed I fully believe it will be Carlos Condit taking it from  GSP.

Rob Wittman Endorses Ken Cuccinelli

Big blow to the Brownlee campaign, as the one congressman in the delegation who would seem like a natural fit for John Brownlee (outside of Bob Goodlatte), its Rob Wittman.  He suppported John Hager for chairman last year, and as the mad scramble for Jo Ann Davis's seat commenced, Wittman was considered the "middle" candidate.  I think that the Wittman endorsement proves that Cuccinelli's campaign is connecting across the party (despite to the chagrin of many of the RINO ankle-biters out there).

Future Lee Hill District Supervisor D.J. McGuire has a great write-up on this too:

Rob Wittman is the archetype social-conservative-first Republican.  His record on spending issues has rankled this quarter on many occasions, although he did stand very, very tallin opposing TARP last year.  He is exactly the type of Republican who would normally be put off by Cuccinelli’s firm support for lower taxes and reducing government spending, and thus give John Brownlee another look.

More to the point, Rob Wittman is the kind of Republican Brownlee desperately needs.  Without the economic moderates, Brownlee has no chance of even blocking Cuccinelli on the first ballot, let alone gobbling up Dave Foster’s backers to win on the second.
Yet Wittman endorsed Cuccinelli.

Now, one could say that this was more a regional endorsement, but for two things: 1) Wittman’s base in the 1st District is the Northern Neck, which is closer to western Virginia in terms of political culture and temperament than anywhere else in the east, and 2) many leading economic-conservative Republicans in the west (Dick Mark Obenshain, Ralph Smith, and Lynn Mitchell, to name a few) also back Cuccinelli (nice catch, Brandon, and thanks).
This time last year, it was abundantly clear that Bob Marshall had the momentum in his race against Gilmore, but he had to make up a lot of ground to get to within a whisker of victory.  Brownlee (or Foster) needed a similar boost to block Cuccinelli.  Neither accomplished that.  Moreover, Cuccinelli himself has the momentum - as evidenced by Wittman’s endorsement.

Is Anyone Surprised By This?

11th District Holds

Crystal Clear Conservative has the breaking news that the 11th district committee failed to pass a dictate resolution looking to oust Jeff Frederick.  This is a huge blow for the anti-grassroots crowd that are behind this nonsense.  Amazingly enough, its in liberal Northern Virginia where the state party has some of its most dedicated conservative activists.  I'm glad they held tonight, to make sure that the will of the convention will not be broken by a midnight coup.

UFC 97: Redemption

This will be the first UFC yours truly will get to enjoy in beautiful HD at my crib in Reston, thanks to the magic that is Verizon FIOS.  This is basically a two-match card, dominated by an Anderson Silva middleweight title defense against Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ace Thales Leites and a potential war between two desperate fighters in Chuck Liddell and Shogun Rua.  Should be a good show, and I'm really looking forward to Liddell and Shogun.

The Flip-Flop: Frederick MUST STAY!

I've had it.  

I've had it with the constant venom being spewed by so many of the establishment Republicans and their blogger allies with regards to Jeff Frederick that I am officially flip-flopping.  When I said that Frederick should resign for the good of the party, I was expecting that I would get the same reasonable response from the folks on the other-side of this issue.  But as I've delved into this debate, as I've watched folks on both sides "discuss" this, I've noticed that in no way do I want to be apart of this.  I've said from the beginning that Jeff should get exactly what Hager got, one state-wide election.  He couldn't do any worse than what the establishment leadership gave us in '07.  

My reasoning for hoping that Frederick would step aside was because I saw no way for him to find a soft landing out of this for him.  Everyone has weighed in, people that really matter, and we need unity heading into this gubernatorial election.  I have voiced disgust at how this has come about, but I have granted that Frederick has had his struggles.  Those on the other side made no such attempt to find a common ground out of this situation.  Frederick was chairman when we lost three congressional districts and the state flipped Democrat for the first time in a generation.  He has to own part of that.  But he didn't have much help.  In the 11th, we had an incumbent congressman who seemed more interested grooming his Democratic successor than helping Republicans win.  In the 5th, we had an incumbent that couldn't stopped eating his own foot.  It was only in the 2nd did we have a true incumbent working as a good Republican for the ticket.  As for the state switching, its hard to sell a product that claimed to be a "conservative" yet then turn around and say he wanted to buy everyone's mortgages.  We had a candidate who had one of the unorganized campaigns in modern Republican politics.  Frederick owns those loses, but he wasn't given much to work with either.

But then again, this has nothing to do with Jeff Frederick.

I've been sensing this from the beginning, to be honest with you.  Jeff Frederick represents the grassroots Republicans, the ones who make time to go to a convention, the one who knocks on the doors and makes the calls.  It was those Republicans, the every day types that got him elected to that position.  When he challenged John Hager, he was challenging the establishment - this moment was bound to happen because the people who made Jeff Frederick chairman are people that so many of these types don't want to be in control of the party.  They want us to be good little Republicans and go out, knock on doors, make phone calls . . . but they know what's best.  These are the same people that said "game over" when Jerry Kilgore put out those death penalty ads, and had no idea how right they were.  So it doesn't matter that this is Jeff Frederick, it could be anyone.  Frederick just made the stupid mistake of trying to elevate the grassroots to a position of real leadership.  I mean, people will talk themselves into hating Frederick because his picture is on the website or whatever petty, ass-backwards, pointless action they can imagine.

That's what has finally changed my mind, because a stand has to be taken.  If its not Frederick, it will be the next outsider/grassroots conservative that makes a run for the top that will be torn apart.  You will also notice that many (though not all) of the Frederick-haters are the same ones who hate Ken Cuccinelli, a fellow outsider/grassroots conservative who has thrown grenades into the establishment of the Senate for the last seven years.  So instead of trying to logically look at the pros and cons of Frederick's brief chairmanship, I've decided that there is a more important fight in this that has nothing to do with how much money he's raised, his relationship with the McCain campaign, or anything else that has to do with the mechanics of the party.  It has everything to do who should be leading the party.

If I roll over on Jeff Frederick, then there will be more of these purges from these establishment puritans who don't want activists, independent thinkers, people who care more about what the activists say and less about what the leadership, the lobbyists, and the consultants say.  It was those who told Jerry Kilgore he could win Northern Virginia by running death penalty ads.  The establishment has run this party for most of the 2000s, and watch Mark Warner and the Democrats steamroll over all of us over and over, take our issues, and define the terms of politics in the state.  It was the Hagers, Kilgores, Chichesters, Howells, Davises, and others that over saw losses year after in every part of the state.  Rome wasn't built in a day, with the kind of Republican party that Jeff was tackling, how could he win in 2008?

I'm one of those people who finds time to attend events, knock on doors (though not as much as others), has been in unit committees, and is an active YR.  Hell, the last two years I've rented pick-up trucks for the 4th of July parade to adorn with candidate campaign sign,  I try and do the small things to help my party and all its candidates win.  This move by the state central committee is a slap in the face to people like me who work hard at the grassroots level, who went to that convention and voted for Jeff Frederick.  I cannot support this coup, this attempt to invalidate the will of the grassroots because the establishment doesn't like the people that put Jeff in that office.  These people have no constituency, nobody to answer too.

Jeff Frederick must stay on as Chairman of the RPV.  If we let him fall, every conservative after him will have the potential to fall to the same mob.  This is higher than Frederick, this is principle that just cannot be compromised.  Its the difference between an active conservative grassroots who feels they are apart of the party; or a group of unelected establishment leaders who simply think they can run the party veering left and into the ground and expect us to just do what they say like good little children.  Its the difference between people who care about building a real grassroots party or caring more about what the lobbyists, insiders, and electeds think of them.  

Jeff Frederick has my full, 100%,, unequivocal support.

Go ahead, do your worst.