Barbarians in the Oval Office
by Paul R. Hollrah

Most conservatives were disappointed when former Speaker Newt Gingrich teased us for more than a year… all but convincing us that he would enter the Republican presidential primaries… before offering the lame excuse that he is the only native-born American, over the age of thirty-five, who is ineligible to seek the presidency. Hogwash!

Gingrich’s announcement left conservatives without a trustworthy voice in the Republican primaries. John McCain was once a conservative, but then he joined hands with the most liberal Democrat in the U.S. Senate to co-sponsor the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill… an outright attack on First Amendment rights.

We’re told that Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Mike Huckabee are conservatives… but how can we be sure? Until now, some of the strongest words on Iraq have come from the mouth of a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, Senator Joe Lieberman.

Perhaps Pat Buchanan’s new book, Day Of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart, will give Republicans a bit of new-found motivation. Buchanan warns, “America is coming apart, decomposing, and… the likelihood of her survival as one nation… is improbable – and impossible if America continues on her current course… on a path to national suicide.” (Hmm! Why not a new secessionist nation comprised of the oil and gas producing states of the south and southwest?)

What he says is true. In support of his thesis, Buchanan points out that the U.S. Army is “breaking” and is “too small to meet America’s global commitments;” that the dollar has sunk to historic lows and is being abandoned by foreign governments; that free trade is shipping jobs and technology to China, plunging America into permanent economic dependency and unpayable foreign debt; that the greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the country; that the American culture is collapsing and the nation is being deconstructed along class and racial lines; and that unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare promise a fiscal crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

But such warnings are not new. The famed British parliamentarian T.B. Macaulay, predicted our ultimate demise in a May 23, 1857 letter to an American colleague. He said, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both…

“You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.”

He concluded by saying, “I seriously apprehend that you will… do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed-corn (deplete the National Petroleum Reserve?), and thus make the next a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine… There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.”

All sail and no anchor, indeed. From the day our Constitution was ratified it has been under constant attack by “Huns and Vandals,” the “progressives” of the political left who think they know better than the Founding Fathers. Engendered within our own institutions, they have never fully bought into the underlying principles embodied in our Constitution. Always on the lookout for some perceived unfairness in our system, they work tirelessly to subvert the genius of what the Founders produced.

To give credit where credit is due, it is liberal judges, the mainstream media, leftist college professors, liberal public interest law centers and think tanks, teachers unions, trade unions, trial lawyers, and radical environmentalists, all major elements of the Democrat Party, who have spearheaded our national deconstruction. If Macaulay and Buchanan are correct in predicting that our children will live to see the demise of the great American experiment… and I believe they will… then these are the “Huns and Vandals” who are to blame.

It matters little which of the 2008 Democrat presidential hopefuls the people might favor… Clinton, Obama, or Edwards. They are all equally dangerous and they all represent the “Huns and Vandals” of whom Macaulay wrote. But our fate is not sealed, entirely. There are things we can do to control our own destiny. For starters, the one thing we cannot do is to stay away from the polls in November 2008 and allow the “barbarians” of the left to elect one of their own to the Oval Office. We simply cannot allow that to happen.

Permission to republished granted by Paul Hollrah.
Mr. Hollrah is a native of St. Charles, Missouri. He holds a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Missouri and is a member of the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni. From 1962-70 he served as a Senior Project Engineer for Cities Service Oil Company (Citgo) and the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) in New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He is a founder and former director of the State Governmental Affairs Council, a former member of the General Committee on State Relations of the American Petroleum Institute. Mr. Hollrah took early retirement from the Sun Company in 1984. Since retiring, he has worked as an independent consultant both in the U.S. and in Russia, seeking to bring Russia’s unique technological developments to the U.S. and working on humanitarian aid projects in Moscow and Siberia.

From June 1999 to January 2002 he served as U.S. Coordinator for the US-Russian Mayor-To-Mayor Program, and in November 2000 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Congress of Small Cities of Russia. In 1998 he founded a publishing company, Patria Publishing, and has published a frontier history (1765-1885) of St. Charles County, Missouri, the jumping-off point for the Lewis & Clark Expedition. He currently writes a weekly political column for an eastern Oklahoma newspaper and for the Lincoln Heritage Institute, an Internet site for conservative political expression.