A lot of what I say here we've said here before over the past ten months. It just needs to be repeated in light of events as they unfold.

    Last year we tried to imagine how three or four people sitting around a dinner table could turn into a movement.
    Indeed, they have, simply by finding a lot of other twosomes and foursomes sitting around still other tables. Together they (you) have exceeded all expectations, taking this Hell-fer-certain fight to the Congress now, rather than wait til campaign season next year. The Democrats' and Obama's hasty and wrong-headed legislative plans helped keep this pot stirred and boiling. It may even have been their undoing. For truly, now is the time, not next Fall.
    But the movement, (we like to use "Rebellion" even though the real revolution is being carried out by the other side) still has one or more crucibles to face in the coming months within its own ranks, and on its own side of the issues before the politics of it all will play out. First of all, the Rebellion is still only a political movement, and not one yet capable of reaching out to treat the underlying cancer that is this leftwing gang of mobsters. So our Rebellion is still playing defense for the most part.
    Defense! you ask? Well, actually, yes, for that's what I call racing around 200 acres of farmland trying to find your prize mare and lure her back to the barn...after having kept the barn door open for years. Removing Obama, and his kind, and the criminal leftist elements in Congress, and their kind is little more than getting that mare back into the safe confines of the stable. The real task is what comes next...restoring the proper relationship between the Congress and the People and the Constitution.
    The hard job, after the politics, especially in light of the anger, pain and fear that will still be fresh in our memories, will be insuring that gate stays protected by your neighbors and your neighbors' children, and your children and your children's children. For a very long time. And the only way that can happen will be to re-learn and re-teach the true blessing of having that wonderful, magical animal in the first place, and re-earn the simple laws of vigilance and duty of the ordinary citizen in keeping it protected.

    So first, we need to consider what lay ahead in the coming months within our own ranks, for there is a collision coming. That will be our first hurdle.
    Around the country some of the groups that make up the organizing center of the Tea Party and 9/12 groups (there are hundreds), are themselves guided not just by those foursomes gathered around the kitchen table, but with the financial support of some very successful men and women...and also some very vain ones, people who, just like me (with one or two minor exceptions) think they have the answer to just about everything...if only given the chance to prove it. It has been with these people in mind that we've stayed in the dark and written so much about leadership these past months, for as a simple mathematical probability, most of them will prove not to have the requisite amount.
    And then there's the Republican Party, wearing what they think is the five hundred dollar suit (in olden times it was a simple laurel wreath) of leadership. Well, we already know how that tune has played inside our rebel camps. You can't lead if the only people who will follow are all members of the same fraternity, Gamma Omega Pi.
    It wasn't for nothing that so many of us became GDI's.
    At some point, this Fall maybe, the winter for sure...the bad guys still have a lot to say about when...these orbiting planets of rebellion will begin to cross each others paths. There will be a reaching out, from both the rebels and the GOP, and try to find common ground on the issues of leadership, i.e., who will carry "our" banner next Fall, as well as our platforms and policies.
    (There is much history when a revolt from the bottom finally has to learn to melt into or at least cooperate with the old hand politicians. Remember William Wallace in "Braveheart'? Wallace had to work with the Scottish nobility, who needed his twice as much, so had to watch his back as much as the English at his front. Indeed, that's how he got it in the end, only the Brits got the pleasure of drawing and quartering him.
   The Good News, of course, is that our side knows exactly what issues and principles we will not, cannot compromise...while the Bad News is it has been so long since the Republicans ever had to consider those things, they may screw the pooch before they even have time to learn those things matter to the citizenry again...or should matter to them as well. If I sound cynical about the constitutional dedication of the GOP, it's because I am, but still, I urge patience with one another. Trust but verify.
    But I don't want to damn the GOP too unfairly. We rebels have our own failings. I was telling my son the other day that teatty-babyism is not a partisan political trait. It is generational, and inhabits the Right every bit as much as it does to the Hole-in-the-Soul gang on the Left. In 2006, the Right, conservatives, many of whom are now at the center of our Rebellion, threw just such a teat fit, stayed home, and gave the Congress over to the Democrats. They even had the temerity to brag the GOP had it coming.
    Their only mistake, despite our protests, (and Rush Limbaugh's, who still has the fire in his belly), is that they underestimated the nature of the people they turned congressional control over to, as if they could just go back and kick them out whenever they wanted. They thought the Democrats were just another political party vying for power, never believing they could really be a criminal gang, or worse, an ideological one at that...playing for all the marbles, to end the impermanence of political power as envisioned in our Constitution. In 2006, staying home, they shot spit wads with rubber bands at knife-toting gangsters.
    That was a mistake.
    But a mistake repeated is stupidity, and by Thunder, they did it again in 2008. I am quite certain that in the most private recesses of some of their hearts now, amidst almost frantic moves forward to undo now their own mistakes, is some very fancy footwork trying to cover up the footprints of those prior retreats in 2006 and 2008. Yes I said "retreat", for when someone picks up his ball and bat and heads home, even as many of you proudly boasted back then...it is a retreat, for you left the fighting to others....who proved to be wiser than you.
    I once wrote here that George W Bush did not have the authority, from God or the Constitution, to turn the other cheek when it was my face being slapped. And I say to you now, you do not have the authority to lead a fight in my name on a battlefield from which twice you retired. You can fight alongside me, but show a little humility, fer godsakes. We already know there will have to some accommodations and compromises made if we are to prevail, and I'm damned if I am going to stand by and watch a three-peat of the teat fits some of you threw in 2006 and 2008. Keep your eye on the prize and your vanity zipped.

    But let's say we win in 2010 and actually throw the Democrats out, or at least get back into that filibuster range in the Senate. Now that the White House is its own power cell, we have to do it all over again in 2012. So we can't rest.
    Let's say we win again.. And let's say the next Republican Speaker of  the House doesn't let it all go to his head, and start trying to be a power broker instead of an advocate of the people, and try to seduce secretaries over that fine oak desk that comes with the office, etc. Let's say the new Senate leader's country club had only nine holes, and his shirts were Pima cotton rather than Egyptian, and he got them at Jos A Banks...during the two-for-one sale. Let's say they both actually begin to right the national applecart with a firm and steely resolve, instead of that hands-across the aisle surrender of past leaders. Let's say they respond with eyes as black as coal every time the new Democrat leaders (Harry will be in jail, Nancy in an asylum to escape jail) whine or complain.
    In other words, let's say everything you dreamt of happens. Still, the Left will simply go back to what they were doing from 1968 thru 2008. George Soros and others will still be spitting out money like nickle slots off the Strip, and the schools will still be spitting out one hundred Van Jones, headed for Yale, for every little Glenn and Rush baby whose mom accidentally finds the AM dial on the radio.
   We will still be losing the war.
   We have to do other things...each according to our abilities and means, and we have to begin thinking about those things now, for if we lose in 2010, or 2012, or if, as Glenn Beck suggests, there is that "event" that will enable the government to suspend the Constitution, or shut down our communications, or force us into "re-orientation camps" in Nevada, "those things" will be all we will have, and we will be transported back to 1950, just like the Left did, with fifty years of building from scratch staring us in the face.
    So tell me, just how will you, at 45, maybe 50, organize the rest of your life to set into motion, to plant a tree that will not bear fruit until your grandchildren have children?
    Some of you will simply, for a third time, pack up your goods, and buy a vacation villa next to a golf course in the Lesser Antilles and become a sovereign nation of one, which so many self-proclaimed conservatives have always sort of been anyway.
    But most of us can't. A few of us won't.
    Part II, coming up.
    What to do, what to do?
Vassar Bushmills