“Waving the bloody shirt” is a timeworn political ploy first used by the venerable Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, in order to get controversial legislation passed through the Congress the Republican Party would not so subtly remind the public in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, just who had fought first to preserve, and later to reunite the Union…and whom had worked to tear it asunder. By using such rhetoric, and by sometimes literally waving a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of Union soldiers spilled in the War Between the States, the Republicans were able to silence Democratic opposition to all manner of policies. “Waving the bloody shirt” was used in part to give us the so-called Reconstruction Amendments that outlawed slavery, made the former slaves citizens of the United States, and granted them the right to vote. The tactic was also used to help in the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the history of the Republic in the years of 1866, 1872, and 1875.

In the decade of the 1960s the Democratic Party brought the tactic back with a vengeance after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nearly every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson wanted passed was foisted onto a mourning public as one of Kennedy’s major legislative priorities, which allowed Johnson to get just about anything through the Congress and onto his desk. It seemed that everything from the Job Corps, to Operation Head Start, to Medicare were packaged by the wheeling-dealing Johnson as one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished ideas, and in the shocking aftermath of Kennedy’s murder no one wanted to be seen as thwarting the last wishes of King John of Camelot, so several trillion dollars later we are still stuck with LBJ’s Great Society schemes.

Since then, politicians have used some variation of the bloody shirt in nearly every decade, especially when there is a war being fought. John Kerry and his band of lying miscreants used it in the fraudulent Winter Soldier hearings; George H. W. Bush did it when he campaigned in 1988 with the badge of a slain New York City police officer as a symbol of why we needed to fight the War on Drugs; and various politicians use the tactic when they stage photo ops with wounded servicemen to show their support for the troops. The bloody shirt will occasionally recede into the political closet, but it never truly gets retired.

With the death of Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, the Democrats have decided to dust off the bloody shirt again and wave it wildly in a last desperate attempt to resurrect a healthcare bill that seems to be dead on arrival. Senator Robert Byrd (Klan-WV) has proposed that the bill (or bills) winding through the Senate be named in honor of Senator Kennedy, whom everyone recognizes as a staunch supporter of a nationalized healthcare bill in a last ditch attempt at getting the sympathy vote for a bill that the majority of the people of America simply do not want. The line of thinking seems to be that Kennedy’s death should be used as a catalyzing agent to bring any recalcitrant Democrats around on the issue, and to stir up some much needed public support for the failing plan. What this line of thinking ignores is the most obvious point in the whole debate: The people do not support this idea! No matter whom the bill is named for, or said to be in memoriam of, the American people have spoken in poll after poll and the conclusion is always the same: We don’t want government run healthcare or government issued health insurance.

What is really appalling about this idea is the base motives involved in even making the proposal. The vast majority of the members of the United States Senate publicly claim to have been friends and admirers of Senator Kennedy, but before his body could get cold or his family could properly mourn his passing, his “friends” in the Democratic Party began plotting to use his passing as a political tool to pass their beloved healthcare legislation. They had barely begun rewriting the history of his life to make him into some type of tragic/heroic figure before they struck upon the idea to use his death as the bloody shirt they hoped would get them  power over one-sixth of the American economy. Alas, I should not have been surprised with this after the way the memorial for Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked and turned into an impromptu anti-Bush political rally; yet it is just as unseemly now as it was then, and I had hoped they would avoid exploiting the death of their treasured “friend” for naked political gain.

However, no matter how enthusiastically they wave this bloody shirt, it will probably not have its intended effect. Even if the American people were united in their love and admiration of Teddy Kennedy, it probably would still not be enough to shake them from their fears of the federal government doing to American healthcare and health insurance what they have done with the postal service and Social Security. The American people will not fall for such a shameless ploy, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by their attempts at exploiting the death of one of their own in the pursuit of political power. Alas, we know that they won’t because liberal Democrats may feel your pain, but they feel no shame.

Over the past few years as I have moved from being a Republican to being a Conservative, I have noticed that many Republicans/Conservatives harbor some serious pipe dreams. They have a tendency to long for days gone by, for situations past, and they look at those times as the "good old days". Now, those days may not ever have been as good as we like to think they were, but they still stand as beacons for the way we wish things were. We also have a serious tendency to harbor pipe dreams and make them part of what conservatives want to see happen; we make those dreams part of our requirements for candidates and use them as disqualifying points for others. But those ideas and dreams are often do us more harm than good, so here is my list of the 5 pipe dreams we need to let go of and move forward:

1. Roe v. Wade: Roe may be the worst piece of "law" ever foisted upon this country, as it is entirely based on legal fictions. It is a monument to the massive egos of the Warren Court, which decided that the job of the Court was to force it's social views on the rest of the country. It was lawless, unreasonable, and repugnant to the Constitution. But with all of that said, we need to let go of the idea that Roe is going to be overturned. No matter who the President is, no matter how many conservative justices sit in the Court, no matter how long we wait Roe is going to stand. The best we can do is hope for opinions that chip away at Roe gradually and return the decisions regarding abortion back to the states, because there will be no outright overturning of this legal abomination.
2. Federal Marriage Amendment: As much as we may oppose the redefinition of marriage by the forces gathered on the left in this country, we will never see any amendment to the Constitution that allows the practice in any way, shape, form, or fashion. It has been tried before and has failed, not because of massive protests against the idea, but because of the unwieldy mechanism of amending the Constitution. There is simply not enough support for the idea to get a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress or to get 2/3 of state legislatures in this country to call for a national convention. And honestly, this is a matter best left to the states to decide as well; the social mores of the states should be the deciding factor on whether this is acceptable or not. We just have to allow the people to decide the issue at the ballot box, and not some state court (hello Massachusetts!).
3. Internal Revenue Service: Politicians always know they can get a round of applause by going after the IRS, because everyone hates the IRS. And with good reason; the IRS may be technically a part of Treasury, but it is basically a department of its own. Not only does it have the expected tax geeks running around picking your pockets, but it has its own investigative division, and damn near has police powers! The IRS is very powerful, and very scary to most people: never forget, the FBI couldn't get Al Capone but the IRS did! So we all long for the day and for a politician to do something...anything...to reign the IRS in, and in our fondest dreams, to shut them down. After all, the existence of the IRS is unconstitutional on it's face, right? The only thing is that no one is going to do anything about the IRS because they perform a function that the federal government needs; they are the ones that do the dirty work assigned them by the Congress. The IRS did not create itself and does not sustain itself, the politicians in Washington do...and use the IRS as convenient scapegoats for their bloodsucking ways. The IRS is the face of the confiscation of American wealth to be given to the government to (mis)spent on all of its grand schemes. The IRS is never going to go away because they are the muscle that keeps the Congressional crime bosses out of trouble.
4. Department of Education: No one that looks at the educational state of America can honestly say that the Department of Education has been a boon to American education. In fact, since the federal government decided to hijack education from local school boards, America's educational standing in the world has steadily slipped despite the massive amounts of taxpayer cash that has been pumped into the system. The problem is the same as any other bureaucracy...people in Washington, DC have no earthly idea what students in Walnut Cove, NC really need. They don't know what the educational and community standards are in Axton, Va., and they have no idea if there is a need for vocational education programs in Laramie, Wyo. But you can't convince them of that, can you? And the influence of the Department of Ed. is not going to diminish anytime soon, because state and local school officials are addicted to the federal monies they receive for their districts. They have become so dependent on money for free and reduced lunch programs and Title X funds that if the fed told them to show "Debbie Does Dallas" to 4th graders as an educational tool, they would break their collective necks to do so! We may rail, with good reason, about how much of a failure the Department of Ed. is, but it ain't going anywhere!
5. Smaller government: If there has ever been an oxymoron committed to paper, "smaller government" is it! The nature of government is to expand and to grab any power that it can get without a fight. And our government is the world's greatest example of this: we have departments for energy, education, health & human services, occupational health & safety, land management, and space exploration. And in each of the areas that the government expands into, it tries to establish total control; that's why you have to get a freaking building permit to build a deck on your own property! Conservatives would love to see the government shrink, and hold fast to that idea...but  more realistic expectation is in order. Government is not going to get any smaller, so what we need to do is try to hold the line where it is. It may not be the dream scenario, but if the government is ever going to be scaled back we need to stop it from expanding any more than it has already.

So there you have it, my top five conservative pipe dreams. Let me know what you think, and feel free to add comments as you see fit!