A belated report………………

………………. on the First District county leadership meeting last Saturday in Dubuque. The 1st District meeting was very well attended, well thought out and well run. John Ortega, Carl Gilbertson and Dan Nicholson deserve much credit for the format and content of the meeting. It was great seeing Rose Kramer again, who acted as the meeting secretary. Ray and Leon attended; I was there as Organization Chairman and Bonnie Hall also attended from the Central Committee. Bill Dix and Mike Whalen were in attendance. Pat Grassley also spoke as a representative of Butler County-and correctly discussed the misallocation of Republican resources in the last cycle.

The many county chairs in attendance provided great input. Much of it, of course, echoed the sentiments expressed in the Third and Fourth Districts. My county chair ear was particularly interested in the comments from Susan Frazer (Scott); Steve Bateman (Dubuque); and the dynamic duo from Black Hawk, Steve Schmitt and Don Wood. Demographic realities dictate that the more urban counties require far more attention than Iowa Republican strategy has heretofore acknowledged, and those three counties are of great significance to any Republican resurgence in our now very blue state. We have to start matching the Democrat committment to party building the eleven most populous counties or continue to surrender large margins in the gubernatorial cycle elections.

The district leadership meetings have made four areas of complaint abundantly clear, in no particular order: (1) An complete lack of any appearance of a defining and unifying Republican message; (2) A reliance on increasingly negative attacks-at times shockingly inaccurate and misleading that only repulse the voters; (3) An over reliance on redundant telephone calls that have become a form of harassment that further alienates voters, exacerbating problems 1 and 2; (4) The lack of on going effective institutional communication and organization within the various parts of the party (the campaigns, the legislators, other elected officials, the state party and the 99 county parties).

My wife says that God always opens a window when He closes a door. We have a window to a great future if we take the right turn at this cross road.

P.S. On a sad note, Polk County lost a good public servant this week. George Paletta, Director of Elections passed away last Friday. Although George was a Democrat he was always helpful and abundantly fair in all the dealings I had with him as a Republican county chairman. What's more, George was just a plain nice guy. So today's post is in red and green in memory of George.

How to know what not to do.

How utterly appropos’ that on the same day that Iranian President Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again reiterates the Iranian intention to exterminate Israel, which I presume is just the first step in reestablishing Islamic purity in the Middle East, ex-President Jimmy Carter reminds us all of how he became the most repudiated American President in history.

President Carter has once again entered the debate on America’s Iran policy. I’m sure all of the Real Sporer’s generational contemporaries and seniors remember President Carter’s last foray into American/Iranian affairs-I think it’s still called the “Hostage Crises”-but it was so much more.

Of all the mistakes in dealing with Islamofascism the United States has made in the past thirty years, perhaps the most egregious and significant, was the indecision and cowardice displayed by President Carter in dealing with the totalitarian revolution in Iran. Let us not forget that President Carter’s failure to support the Shah’s western style authoritarian Iranian monarchy, or the parliamentary democracy of sorts that immediately succeeded the Shah, against the Islamofascist revolutionaries has produced total Islamic state that is modern Iran, just as the mullahs said they would do way back in 1978.

Let us not forget the entire Iranian state has been devoted to the spread of the nightmarish vision of genocide and global dominance through terror and economic extortion to which the Ayatollah Khomeini pledged Iran some 28 years ago-during President Carter’s Administration. Rather than confronting this monstrosity when we had overwhelming military superiority, President Carter sought to “understand” the grievances of the Iranian people against our ally, the Shah. President Carter sought “dialogue” that would allow us to “avoid bloodshed” in resolving those grievances.

Now, the world has been awash in the bloodshed produced by the Iranian Islamofascist state and the terror and oppression it has spawned and succored. Such is Jimmy Carter’s legacy to the world, the death of millions. That’s also how you lose 45 states when seeking reelection.

Negotiating with Iran and Syria is like Neville Chamberlain and the even more craven French leadership negotiating with Hitler in 1937-1939, selling out their ally Czechoslovakia . Just as Hitler made his intentions clear as early as 1922, the monster Ahmadinejad has made his intentions just as clear, and what reason is there to disbelieve him?

What could be gained by such negotiations? The “exit strategy” that Neville Chamberlain pursued with Hitler, as the Nazis swallowed entire nations, perhaps? Maybe if we just delay the confrontation until the Iranians have nukes we will have an excuse to compel either a second Exodus or a second Holocaust as Iranian policy reaches fruition, and we sell out our ally Israel.

Every American high school student should be compelled to write an essay on Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm” as a precondition of graduation. And so should President Carter.