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By Donald Hank
 
Fill in the blanks, especially if you are a liberal or RINO, and no matter what you say, people will applaud.
 
In the Republican presidential debates, someone asked Mike Huckabee about his policy as governor of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Arkansas to allow the kids of illegal aliens to take advantage of the state tuition subsidies at the state colleges there.
 
His answer was to redefine America: "We're a better country than to punish kids for what their parents do."
 
Wait a minute, Mike.
 
First, we, along with every other country in the world, do in fact punish children for what their parents do. When parents are evicted from a home for not paying their property taxes, we don't allow the children to stay in the home in question, do we? And we don't refrain from jailing parents who commit crimes and we do send their kids to foster homes when that happens, right?
 
Second, these just aren't manly words. They sound like a little sissy boy whining to the school bully: "if you don't stop that, I'll tell the teacher on you."
 
Lyndon B. Johnson, architect of welfare, was one of the first to use such weasel words, in a successful attempt to shame the people of America into underwriting this biggest boondoggle ever. He said
"But we are not going to the American people and tell them that they never had it so good, or don't rock the boat, or let's keep what we have, or stand pat, or keep cool.
No, that is not the kind of a party you are, and that is not the kind of country this is."
John McCain recently revived this liberal tradition of redefining America during his presidential campaign. Referring to waterboarding, the now-famous form of torture, he
''After we passed the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act then obviously anybody who violated any law of the United States would have to be held responsible.
''That's not the kind of country America is''.
Senator Barbara Boxer said in October of 2006,
 "If Congress passes a law he doesn't agree with, the President issues a signing statement saying he is going to reinterpret or ignore the parts he doesn't like.
"If Americans question the war, Secretary Rumsfeld compares them to Nazi appeasers.
"That is not the kind of country we are, or the kind of leadership we deserve."
During the current presidential campaign, John Edwards, who wants to raise taxes and nationalize drug patents, said:
"the top 300,000 earners in this country now pay less in taxes than the bottom 150 Million Americans." Think about that for a minute. That is not the kind of country I want to live in and it's not the kind of America that the rest of the world needs us to be at this point in time."
Notice that real conservatives seldom try to define you this way. When they use the expression "not the kind of country," they are referring the way America once was before it became an upside-down cake.
Referring to the Clinton's declaring war in Yugoslavia, Pat Buchanan said:
What happened is Serbia was bombed for 78 days and we're right now boycotting heating oil, and people who never did a thing to this country are freezing to death in the winter. Now that's not the kind of country I grew up in, and that I revere and that I love. And I regret to say the Republican establishment were as much for it as Mr. Clinton.
Amen.
 
What is worrisome is not what the liberals and RINOs say. It's how Americans react when they say these manipulative things that attempt to redefine us.
 
Just after Huckabee said "we're a better country than to punish children…" there was loud applause from the all-Republican audience.
 
The way I see it, G.W. Bush has conditioned Americans, particularly the religious "right," to give evangelical Christian pro-life politicians carte blanche and to tell us how we should think. We shed a lot of blood asserting our independence from the British king, but it seems that lately, we have started looking for another head to crown.
 
Our Constitution says we the people are the leader. Yet we seem too timid, or perhaps too ignorant, to lead.
 
That is not the kind of country I grew up in and it's not the kind of country I am prepared to die in.
 
At least not without a fight.