The Politics of the Extemporaneous

     If there is one thing I deplore it is pettiness. The pettifoggery of focusing on the insignificant, even if it may contain a kernel of truth, is in my opinion dishonest and a betrayal of the truth. It seems as though the single-minded focus on the extemporaneous has become a mainstay of our politics on the Right. The Left of course has engaged in this practice for many decades, in fact their entire ideology is centered on diverting the public's attention from what is truly important to that which is much less significant. But this behavior, or more to the point, this bad behavior, has grown into a cancer on the Right which threatens to destroy the healthy tissue of our principles.
     I submit as evidentiary to my thesis the recent campaign to nominate a Republican candidate to challenge the Democrat nominee to become the next President of the United States vis-a-vis this November's election. There is myriad issues being discussed and debated in the campaign, that is a fact. But the main thrust of focus in both the Left stream and Right stream media are the issues that run contrary to the tenets of importance as they relate to choosing another president to lead this country through the next four years.
     The entire campaign of the front runner, Donald Trump, is built upon the foundation of frivolity. And that inconsequential-ality of frothy rhetoric has spilled over into the other campaigns in the Republican presidential race. It is the substantial support for Donald Trump and his methods of campaigning that has caused the other campaigns to devolve into the kind of childish behavior that many of the practitioners of such behavior have criticized. To Witt: the incessant focus by some on whether or not Ted Cruz is even eligible to run, in consideration of his Canadian birth to an American mother.
     Then there is the recent dust-up over some Cruz campaign staffers forwarding an erroneous media story about his fellow candidate Ben Carson dropping out of the race. Anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows I am no Ted Cruz fan. But I can believe in a major campaign inundated with the thunderstorm of media and information, erroneous information could be forwarded about a fellow candidate. And while Ted Cruz's staffers were guilty of not properly vetting the story they received from CNN, I do not believe it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the Carson camp.
     Conservatism has always been about accepting the truth whether or not it may support the conservative goals in the short term, because it will always support the principles of Liberty in the longer term. I am chagrined to see many of my conservative brethren boarding the train of devolution that is fueled by the extemporaneous. The petty bickering and name-calling that has become more prevalent on the Right recently is not worthy of the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr, Jack Kemp, et al. We would be wise as conservatives to once again set ourselves apart from the Left by living the values of the constitution and the intellectual temperament of the aforementioned individuals.