Lt. Colonel Allen West: Race, Poverty, and the Dependency Culture: PART II

west

READ PART 1

Valley Patriot publisher Tom Duggan (TD) and Greater Boston Tea Party President Christine Morabito (CM) interviewed Lt. Colonel and former Congressman Allen West (AW) during at the Nashua City Republican Committee’s annual Steak-Out in August. This is part two of that interview.

TD: When we have Tea Party rallies I often talk about using the language of the media or the language of the Liberal. Those of us on the conservative side always seem to talk about budgets, welfare fraud from …..

AW: I know exactly where you’re going. Liberals make the emotional connection. Now, this is all based upon lies, and it’s really irrational, but they do make the emotional connection. They always say “We care about you. We’re out there for the middle class. There’s a war on women and all this stuff.”

We need to be able to, as in Judo, take what they see as their perceived strength, counterbalance it, throw it against them, and take their language and use it against them. We need to make the emotional connection. I’ll give you a great example. In the Presidential election, Mitt Romney should have gone into Detroit, and this is the commercial. You show a picture of Detroit when his dad was Governor of Michigan. And you show Mitt standing in Detroit today, and you talk about the failures of their policies, what they’re doing. “If they really care about you, then why is this happening?” And then you put liberal Democrats on the defense to try to live up to their own rhetoric. And if you read “Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals”, that’s one of the rules. It’s to make the other person live up to their own principles. Well, we never do that. We never put them on the defense. They always put us on the defense. We’ve got to talk about what we’re for and not what we’re against, and that’s the biggest way that you will be able to win this.

VP-PROMO-Allen-West2bTD: How do we get Republicans to do that, because as a Republican, I get frustrated watching our candidates not do any of the things that need to be done in order to win. When we win it’s only because the other guy blows it.

AW: It’s leadership. It’s leadership. Right down the road in Boston, you’ve got the RNC Summit meeting going on. You know, what would be the grand strategic vision that comes out of that? What is going to be the message? What’s the marching orders that we can send down to the state GOP’s, to the county chairman, so we can get everyone operating on the same sheet of music, attacking them on the broad front?

That’s what is missing right now. Ronald Reagan talked about in his CPAC speech; bold colors not the pretty pastels. If we believe, that we can only win by being a lesser version of the other side, we’re never going to be successful. You cannot be a lesser Democrat than a Democrat. We don’t want people to say, “At least I know what this person (the Democrat) is standing for. I don’t know what you’re standing for. You’ve got to come and stand for something.”

You know, people always talk about the tent. Well, I lived in tents for a few years in my life, and the thing about a tent is that if you don’t stake it down, it’s going to blow away. It’s going to collapse on you. So, we need to stake our tent down with principles, and make sure it’s sturdy and it can withstand any type of adverse conditions, and people will come into it, and they’ll find shelter. But, first of all they’ve got to see that that tent is sturdy.

CM: Thinking about how powerful, black, conservatives have been treated by the Left. Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain…

AW: Condolezza Rice, Michael Steele….

CM: Right. Do you feel, as a black conservative, that you’re held to a higher scrutiny by those on the Left?

AW: We’re a bigger threat because, if all of a sudden the black community goes back and understands the basic principles of Booker T. Washington on education, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance; if all of a sudden the black community goes back and understands that we’re failing as far as 28% of our children having mothers and fathers in the home.

The great society and the war on poverty haven’t given us what it was supposed to.

It made us less of what we are. If they start to listen to voices such as what you just articulated, that’s a big problem. If all of a sudden in the national level elections, 20% to 25% of the black community does not vote with the Democrat party, that’s a torpedo on their broad side. So, when you are a conservative and you are Black, Hispanic, or female, they come after you, because they cannot have that voice out there. They cannot have that image out there. They cannot have those faces out there. And furthermore, when you eliminate conservative voices that are Black, Hispanic, female, Asian, from the equation, then they can come back and say, “See, they’re just a party of rich, old, white guys.”

That’s why they go after them. If you’re complaining about the Obama rodeo clown, then you can’t come out and call Allen West an Oreo, an Uncle Tom, a sellout, and all these things they say to label and stereotype conservative minorities. Where is your outrage about that? So, we have to be able to show the hypocrisy.

TD: That goes right in line with my next question. It seems that any time someone who is a conservative says something that could be taken out of context, it’s a fire storm of racism allegations. But then when liberals say things, or do things, that are blatantly and overtly racist, there’s no one on our side calling them out. There’s no one on our side issuing press releases, going to MSNBC in the belly of the beast, and saying, “Well, wait a minute. This is a standard you set for racism three nights ago on Al Sharpton’s show. Now, I want to see you hold them to the same standard, and if you’re not going to do it, we’re going to do it. We’re going to call him a racist. We’re going to issue press releases, call for boycotts. It seems like there’s no will on our side to do that. Well there’s a very few, like you, but other than that…

AW: But, we’ve got to show that you can have courage, and you can fight through this, and that was one of the things that I looked at. All these people that came down to Florida, marching, and making all these riots and protests over the Treyvon Martin case. Yet, you just had the three black teenagers that beat up the one white teenager in Florida on the school bus, and we hear zip about that.

So I put out a Facebook post about it, because no one was really talking about the fact that this young white kid turned these guys in because they were selling drugs. And first of all, who told those three black kids that that was the person who did it? Who allowed them to get on that bus? That was not their bus. So, there is some adult culpability, but you know, when you look at what is happening in Chicago, when you look at that incident, when you look at the two black teenagers that shot a white 13-month old baby in the face in Brunswick, Georgia; we’ve got to shame them, and that’s why I said on Cavuto’s Show this past Monday. We have to call out the hypocrisy. When Joe Biden can stand up and say that Barack Obama is clean, and articulate, well, I guarantee you if a Republican said that about me, they would be up in arms. They would be apoplectic. Let’s call them out on that. Let’s get people to understand, when you hear folks talking about this whole thing about having an ID, to go and vote, that’s just the same as a poll tax and all of these things. Well, guess who established poll taxes, and literacy tests to vote? The Democrat Party. Who’s the party of the Ku Klux Klan? The Democrat Party.

TD: I cover Lawrence, Massachusetts. 80% Latino, mostly Dominican. They hold Dominican elections in the Dominican Republic for their President, but they set up polling places in the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts, because of the high Dominican population. They have to show a voter ID in the very same polling place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the Arlington School, where we are not allowed to ask them for a voter ID, when they’re voting in American elections, in the same booth, in the same school. They have to have an ID to vote in their Dominican elections or they can’t vote.

AW: Well, think about this. You could not get into the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, last August, without a picture ID. So, is that suppressing people going in to participate in their convention? Again, it comes back to the courage to be able to call people out on this.

TD: How do you stimulate the Right, because we’re not a very courageous party in the last 20 years? We were beaten down by the media, beaten down by Hollywood, beaten down by the different groups. How do you get these guys who want to do the right thing, run for Office, they’re conservative, but they’re also petrified of being called a racist, or a hate monger, or a homophobe. So they walk the line.

AW: Well, as long as people know they can put you on the defense by using the “R” word, they will use the “R” word, and until you finally test their fortitude to push through that, they’re going to continue to put you into a box. You know, that’s one of the things we want to do with our Guardian Fund, is to get people that will be out there, that aren’t worried about name calling. They’re worried about the country, and they’ll push through that, and until we get courageous leadership, you’re going to continue to see, you know, the wishy-washy, mealy-mouth woosi-fication of the Republican Party. We can’t have that. America needs us to stand up. America needs us to be America’s party. America needs us to be the loyal opposition. America needs us to show that we will be the bold visionary leaders to get this country back on the right track, so that the promises of better opportunities for each and every one of us, and for our children, our grandchildren, will be sustained.

CM: You have said that Republicans need to start playing chess instead of checkers. Could you elaborate on that?

AW: Chess is a strategic game, you’re thinking about the second and third move, before you make your first move. That’s what we need to be able to do. We don’t do that very well. You know, checkers is fun. It’s like bada bada…bam. And that’s what we get caught up in. We really need to sit down and have that bold, strategic vision that is laid out, and you have to have contingencies. There’s no doubt about that. But you know, hopefully, coming out of this RNC Summit meeting, they can say; “Here’s the plan.” Not this autopsy report that’s basically sticking a hot poker in your eye, but to say this is the direction we’re going in. These are our tent stakes, and we’re going to make a sturdy, strong tent for people to come in and find shelter from this failing economy, from this failing Affordable Care Act. We’re going to do something about energy security. We’re going to do something about national security. We’re going to restore some of these traditional values that make sure we don’t have children that are being denied the opportunity because we don’t have solid family units any more. That’s what we have to talk about, and therefore, you’ll get the American people to come to you.

TD: Tell us something nobody knows.

AW: I really love hot dogs.

TD: I was looking more for like a breaking news story, but that’ll work.