Well, who would have thought it? 

Who would have thought that it would fall to us, some of us in our so-called declining years (unless 60 is the new 40) to rescue the Republic?  In our lifetimes, we have had the war in Vietnam, and the Reagan revival, and now we find the left has been tunneling under us all along.  Last Tuesday, the platform we thought was solid collapsed as if its underpinnings had been eaten by termites, which they had.

According to the American Spectator Romney received 57.8 million votes to McCain's 59.9 million votes.  And...who can say, it is not impossible that the Romney count is a fair count.  But, it is very surprising that Romney would garner fewer votes than McCain.  Virtually all Republicans and conservatives regarded this election as the most important in history, barring only perhaps that of 1860, and maybe more important than that. 

That makes the Romney count relative to McCain very surprising.  Very surprising.  One could say very very surprising.  Really so surprising, one might almost say incredible.  Whatever the merits of the post-election analyses about the various ethnic blocs, women, the weaknesses of Romney as a candidate, at worst Romney was presentable and made a case for himself, if not the conservative case we would like to have seen. 

Romney was in no sense a placebo.  So, given the issues, the danger to the Republic of the hard-leftism that Obama represents, the enthusiastic crowds that Romney was getting as the campaign climaxed, the damage to our lives and fortunes which will occur by turning our health care over to the Post Office, it is very very surprising that the Romney vote would be less than the McCain vote.  Truly very very very surprising.

Some may be getting the material on New Zealand, or Singapore, or Canada, or the Isle of Sark, or whatever refuge they think will suit.  But the rest of us are going to stay on this hill called the United States of America.  We are going to die on this hill.

Therefore, the mission of defending it falls to us.  What a privilege.  Who would have thought that it would fall to us to, perhaps, reach out and touch the hand of George Washington?

As Lenin put it, what is to be done?  A lot.  Pat Caddell, the renegade Democrat pollster who, being an honest man, is becoming more conservative every day, said something critical at one of the recent David Horowitz retreats.  Sitting on a panel, he asked the audience, which was off-camera, to raise its hands if they had participated personally in their local political party.  From his reaction, one could guess that the number of hands raised was sparse. 

That is our mission.  We are each going to have to find out where our local Republican Party meets and join its meetings personally.  This is not going to be grim.  It is actually going to be fun.  The Tea Partiers can hold that identity, but the operational arm of Tea Partydom has to be the Republican Party.  There is neither the space nor the time for a third party.

We are going to have to increase the presence, the mass, of the Republican Party by what scientists call an order of magnitude, a factor of ten.  This means that as conservatives, as Republicans, we are going to have to set aside a new slice of our time for politics. 

This is new.  This is going to impact our lives.  It might mean leaving the office a bit earlier than you do now on some nights and, yes, maybe the career will be a bit less brilliant.  It might mean rushing through dinner with the family on some nights.

Maybe we have coasted on the political capital bequeathed us by our forbears.  After all, the Founders committed their time personally, not by proxy.  That is what we have to do now, but once the movement gathers momentum, it will be fun.  None of us is going to be on that ice floe alone.  It is our numbers that will make this work.

An example of just one task: we need to know every detail of the voting process.  Who makes the machines?  How are they initialized?  How do we know they are initialized?  How do we know they are counting correctly? 

This will take time.  A key technique of the Democratic Party is stealing elections.  They have done it for two centuries.  They used Jim Crow to steal elections.  They used Tammany Hall in the 19^th century.  They used, and still use, big-city machines to steal the vote in the 20^th century.  Now they are using false registration, ballot stuffing and count-rigging in tight contests.  The Dems are there ahead of us and they are not going to share the ground. The judges will not support us.  It will not be easy, but it is necessary to assure that the country is getting a fair count.

We need to get our message out.  We don't have to be obnoxious, but we have to stop trimming in polite society, as we all do.  We need to make our case.  It turns out that all the misrepresentations of the Dems have been absorbed as reality: if you are a Republican you are on the wrong side of history.  We need to tell our story. 

For instance, why did it take until the 1960's for the final Civil Rights law to be passed?  Because it took that long for the Dems to throw in the towel on segregation.  They blocked anti-lynching laws in the 1920's and 1930's, they threw blacks off the land in the New Deal, but by the 1950s, the Republicans were able to enforce Brown v. Board of Education (Little Rock) and pass two civil rights laws. 

With the movement led by the Rev. Dr. King, the Dems could finally not ignore the developing political power of the African-American community.  So in their own interest of maintaining access to power, they threw in the towel on blocking the advancement of the black community.  It wasn't principle; they didn't do it until their power was challenged.  

And then they came up with welfare as a career to sidetrack black progress.  The African-American family survived 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow, but was destroyed by 40 years of liberalism 

That is only one story we need to tell.  Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried.  The 20^th century is littered with it.  When the wealth is redistributed, without exception it is goes to the redistributors, not to the people.  The nomenklatura in a socialist economy is about 10% of the population.  Everyone else stands in line to shop at bare shelves.

Who would have thought that in our declining years, defending this hill would fall to us? It will be fun.  And we will make history.