As I mentioned the other day, James Dobson has dedicated the last three days of his radio program to airing a speech he delivered back in 1998 at a gathering of the Council for National Policy in which he laid out his views regarding the GOP's continual abandonment of the Religious Right and the issues they hold dear.
Today, Dobson aired the final portion of that speech in which he focused largely on attacking the Republicans for ignoring basic moral principles in order to maintain political power and threatened that the Religious Right would leave the coalition if the party continued to do so:
It's a lack of conviction that there is a boss to the universe and that there are moral standards that we are held to and we need officials who will stand up and represent them.
What that conveys to the constituency I'm talking about is that principle does not matter, it's party over principle. That there are some things that you stand for whether it is popular or politically astute to do so or not. That's what that pro-moral community stands for.
And yet it seemed to me that what I heard from the Republicans in Indian Wells was we cannot have power if we stand on principle - please don't take away our power.
What good is it to have power if you don't use it for good?
The Republican Party was born in the crucible of conviction and courage and moral righteousness, that's where the Republican Party started.
It took a stand against slavery in a day that cost six hundred thousand lives in the Civil War. But they knew is was wrong and they took a stand on it, whether win, lose, or draw, that's God business. They took a stand on what was right.
If they party has left that and it is now going to mouth these two things every two years and then go on to something else, I think we need to look for another. And it would be tragic if that happened. I don't want that to happen. There are many state houses of government where Republicans will suffer if that happens. It will be a disaster for the country, but somebody said "if you do that, you have no voice at all." I don't think we have a voice now. I can't hear the voice.
So, to hear Dobson tell it, the problem with the GOP it its utter lack of conviction to stand on principle even if it means losing some political power.
Of course, that sort of condemnation from Dobson might carry a bit more weight if Dobson didn't repeatedly do the same thing, constantly threatening to abandon the Republican Party only to fall back in line when Election Day approached.
Does anyone remember this?
Should John McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on the virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life.
That announcement was followed just a few months later by this one:
This has been the most difficult moral dilemma for me. It’s why you haven’t heard me say much about it because I have struggled on this issue. And there are some concerns here that matter to me more than my own life and neither of the candidates is consistent with my views in that regard. But Senator McCain is certainly closer to them then Senator Obama, by a wide margin. And there's no doubt, at least no doubt in my mind, about whose policies will result in more babies being killed. Or who will do the greatest damage to the institution of marriage and the family. I'm convinced that Senator McCain comes closer to what I believe. So I am not endorsing Senator McCain today … But as of this moment, I have to take into account the fact that Senator John McCain has voted pro-life consistently and that's a fact. He says he favors marriage between a man and a woman, I believe that. He opposes homosexual adoption. He favors smaller government and lower taxes and he seems to understand the Muslim threat, which matters a lot to me – I am very concerned about that.
If Dobson is going to spend three days airing a speech blasting the Republican Party for abandoning its principles for the sake of politics, maybe he should spend the rest of the week examining his own blatant hypocrisy.
