Via Pat Cleary. The video is a little out of sync, but the sentiments are right there:

Plus, bonus points for the Rush reference; a band that was pretty much constant background music for me for most of my college existence.

Victoria Taft took the trouble to write down McCotter’s five principles:

Our liberty is from God not the government.

Our sovereignty rests in our souls not the soil.

Our security is through strength not surrender.

Our prosperity is from the private sector not the public sector.

Our truths are self-evident not relative.

…which is a pretty good set with which to start with. The devil is of course in the details, or at least in the implementation of them; rebuilding the brand is not going to be the work of a moment, although the Democrats seem determined to help us along via constant assault. The concept that the country prefers a two-party system – and that it gets nervous whenever one party or the other appears to have too much control for too long – seems to have not percolated down to their street-level operatives yet. Or perhaps they simply were never told this by their betters. Goodness knows that the netroots function best when they aren’t thinking too closely about what they’re doing. Or at all.

Anyway, McCotter’s right: we’re in the middle of a reorganization. And while distressing it may be to be going through this current time of internal conflict in the Republican party, it beats the alternative – which was to do nothing at all. I understand that doing nothing is a temptation for a lot of people; it’s easy, and it doesn’t get your hair mussy, or your personal principles thwarted. It also doesn’t accomplish anything worthwhile, and it ends with you in a subordinate position to the people who did do something. I refer the interested reader to this classic conservative tome for a elegantly simple explanation of the process.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.