Out of the Inkwell

It was a busy week last week with the holidays and it's time to get back on track with this little quiz: "How Republican are you?"

There are some conservatives who are hoping the Republican National Committee will adopt the following litmus test to purge the party of candidates who aren’t Republican enough.

Here are the standards candidates must meet and the goal is for everyone to have a score of 80 percent compliance:

• We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

• We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

• We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

• We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

• We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

• We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

• We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

• We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

• We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

• We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

If you’re a Republican, how did you score? By the way, didn’t the last Republican president and Congress grow the government? What is the Republican-approved solution to the health insurance crisis? Do Republicans support the labor movement at all? The government doesn’t fund abortions already, right? How do we deal with illegal aliens?
I’m just asking.

© 2009 by GordonMichael Dobbs