Is our worst fear being realized?

I'ms seeing way too many articles like this Jed Babbin piece at The American Spectator for my own comfort.  There's a pervasive sense taking hold among conservatives that, within Romney's character makeup, the ratio of ideologically principled warrior to decent guy who's got a great business head is tilted in favor of the latter.  In short, he's too afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome to rescue America.  It's looking disturbingly like we've cast our lot with yet another mush-head, just as we have every damn election for the last fifty years excluding the two when we chose Ronald Reagan whether we won them or lost them.

There is an ample supply of fire-breathing, plain-talking champions of freedom and American greatness on the political scene today - Allen West and Paul Ryan come to mind (as do a number of Romney's primary opponents) - but in general, there is something about the right-of-center sensibility that renders it ill-suited to go up against those who will spare no thuggery in their imposition of statism and decline.  From committed conservatives to those skirting the center line from the right, we all tend to assume a level of comity among our opponents, a shared sense of decency.  Even the fact that I would here choose the term "opponents" rather than "enemies" in order to keep my prose from striking the reader as distractingly purple demonstrates in the first person what I'm addressing.

By definition, conservatism is about preserving that which fosters human refinement.  It is about high standards for interaction with others.  We rightly champion the ideas and verities that  define us.  The irony is that one such core principle is a national willingness to mount a defense against foreign forces that would violate us that's commensurate with the challenge.  Nothing short of victory, ever.  Why would we bring any lesser degree of resolve to political stuggles?

My alarm level was raised considerably a few months ago when Romney said, "He [the MEC] is a good guy; he's just in over his head."  It is now time for him to walk back that statement.  It's the kind of admission of a mistake that would not only not harm his standing at this point in the race; it would galvanize his whole campaign and electrify huge numbers of currently wary voters.   He could say, "I've had a chance to consider my opponent from a wider perspective now, and I can see that he is not a good guy and the problem is far worse than his being in over his head; he's a socialist who holds the country he presides over in utter contempt."

I mean it.  It's time to talk about the MEC's lifelong radicalism, about how the principle that a person's money is his own knows (or at least should know) no class boundaries, about how the EPA, the HHS, the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, Thransportation, Education and the Interior have been turned into tools of a mad regime, about the peril posed to the world from no longer having American leadership, about czars, executive fiat, ruinous debt, the vulgarity and nacricissm of the celebrities with whom the MEC chooses to associate, the childishness of class envy, about how health care by definition cannot be considered a right, and about how late in the day it is.

Maybe there's somebody on Team Romney whose job duties include taking the pulse of the conservatism, reading articles like Babbin's, listening to Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh.  If so, that person ought to be authorized to bitch-slap our ostensible standard-bearer and tell him to get a clue and fast.