Massachusetts State Senator, Scott Brown (R), is in, what appears to be a no contest contest for the seat as the junior United States Senator from Massachusetts. Mystified people wonder why the Republican Party has not brought out the heavy artillery in support of Senator Brown’s election. Personally, I can see many reasons why the leaders of the national party are holding back and find it more surprising that many people seem shocked by a weak Republican attack when one Senate seat could drastically alter the power balance in that most important body.

First and foremost, the Republican Party, nationally, isn’t exactly ready to go prime time and off of its medications simultaneously. The symptoms of multiple personality disorder are still abundantly clear. In New York, the conventional “republican” candidate was a person so liberal that she made Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich (D) seem somewhere to the right of Genghis Kahn. Party leaders, such as the former Speaker of the House and “Contract with America” ring leader, Newt Gingrich, supported her candidacy while a more conservatively minded hodgepodge of “tea party” people and libertarians found common ground to choose their own “conservative party” candidate.

Here in Massachusetts, Republican defines the candidate who never wins elections that really matter. It’s the only definition of “conservative” that fits all the time. Most of the time, the Republican loses because s/he represents the people who want less government and less taxation. That means that, if they hold true to their promises, they can’t offer financial give aways in exchange for votes. By definition, smaller government means less reliance on government for help and more reliance upon one’s self and one’s own abilities for success. What kind of deal is that? It’s a good deal if you believe in the values of capitalism, individual property rights and liberty.

A common problem, however, often comes to the fore to paint so-called conservatives into a box. On the one hand, the conservatives are for small government and less intrusion of government into the affairs of men. Similarly, they advocate private property rights, but fail to recognize value in upholding that advocacy when the most important property any person could own is under judicial and moral scrutiny – the human body.

If a person is to enjoy the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, one must have sole sovereignty over one’s own body and mind. To deny a person ownership of one’s own body is to assign ownership to another or to the State and by definition, that is enslavement. To insist that a woman, solely by the nature of her body’s functioning and her female physiology, carry an unwanted fetus to term from conception is no less totalitarian than forcing one into medical experiments simply because the one has a unique gene in his or her DNA that makes them Jewish, Asian, or Dafurian. Alter the gene and remove the curse; although one man’s curse is another man’s blessing.

Religionists proclaim that life begins at conception, but science is clear that should the first clump of cells be removed from its host that it cannot survive on its own. That clump of cells may define a living organism, but it is far from a human organism and is, in fact, further from equality with other parasitical life forms such as maggots, ticks and mites, in that they can and do survive outside of their hosts, can change hosts and often do, while the so-called fetus can do nothing on its own but feed. Science is used, dishonestly, by both sides, but religionists are more blatantly hypocritical in shuffling the deck of science when a change in direction of the game is called for.

Are there moral implications in the fetal debate? You bet there are, but those questions are for science and the law – not for the collective beliefs of various religions. Religion is a private practice of importance to those who belief in a particular way. It can be public as in worshiping as like-minded people in a church or mosque filled with like-minded people, but the public square must be left secular to insure that everyone, believers and non-believers, Christians and non-Christians have an equal voice when it comes to government and the infringements it may and may not impose upon people. To advocate for any other position is anathema to liberty and to the founding principles of the United States as set forth in our Constitution.

Every life is precious, but not every fetus is a living being – they are only potentialities. Just as it is wrong to take a life; it is equally a moral wrong to allow a life to suffer needlessly and to extend that suffering by stripping away hope for better days and a future of promise. Yet, this is exactly what banning research on stem cells does. It keeps people enslaved to wheel chairs, to diseases, to genetic disabilities that otherwise might be corrected with proper funding, facilities and a secular perspective on what is best for all of humanity as opposed to a limited segment with a limited perspective partially obscured by faith that works to block knowledge and not encourage enlightenment. It’s the modern-day version of the snake and the apple in the Garden of Eden. Look around! Does the world within your view look as you would imagine Eden to look?

Next we have the brothers and sisters of the Republican Party – the Libertarians! Conservative anarchists who are for ultimate freedom and abolition of authority in all forms except the forms they believe proper for themselves – so long as they have the controlling voice and vote.

So, if you were Michael Steele and you had multiple millions to spend and a mission to spend it judiciously in order to get them biggest bang for the buck (the most seats in both houses) in the 2010 elections, would you drop a bundle on Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts? Perhaps if you didn’t like being the Chairman of the Republican Party but were too shy to quit, but I don’t think Mr. Steele is either shy or in a mood to quit. Do you?

The Republicans are still in trouble. They will remain in trouble until they define themselves in a way that fits the clichéd view of fair and just held by most people. They must be able to articulate, clearly and fully, without ambiguity, what they mean by:

SMALLER GOVERNMENT – What is the proper role of government? Is it providing for the national defense? Is it for adjudicating disputes where individual rights conflict with people in pursuit of their happiness? Is it for maintaining a legislative, executive and judicial branch to write laws, to administer government in accordance with those laws and to enforce the laws as written, impartially and without prejudice? Or is government proper in expanding its role to oversee other aspects of day-to-day life normally left to people and to States? How much power should a State have over a town?

FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE – having defined the proper role of government, what functions require raising revenue and spending to execute those functions fully, fairly and justly while preserving the right of individuals to keep as much of their earned property as they can and to use it as they please to the greatest extent they can so long as they avoid infringing on the rights of others? If government justly limits accretion of wealth and private property, what limits do they propose, and under what principles in support of individual liberty within the framework of the Constitution do they make such a proposal?

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS/PROPERTY RIGHTS As discussed, but feel free to drag this line of conversation out to the extent that you wish.

Listen to Scott Brown’s advertisement above again and see if he addresses or clarifies his position on any of these base issues with any degree of specificity. Listen to his speech where he morphs from JFK to himself and ask yourself the same questions. Is he a Republican or is he just another Democrat dressed as a Republican?

Next, go and listen to Martha Coakley’s speeches and listen for her positions. She is clearly pro choice, but to what extent? Is she for late-term abortion at a point where it can be proven by science that the majority of fetuses removed from the womb at that particular point can and do survive without heroic measures? Or, is she for a cutoff at any particular point in cellular maturity?

Scott Brown’s answer to the abortion question was just as vague as clichéd, in that he “believes that Rowe v Wade is the law of the land”. What does that mean in his mind, or as he would vote for or against Supreme Court Justices?

Although polls have him within single digits of Coakley, Scott Brown will lose big. That is clear in my mind. Could his loss be less severe with help from the National Party? I don’t think so, precisely because he is too weak on core beliefs to convince himself as to what is right and wrong. Therefore, in my view, he can never convince others to believe in him sufficiently enough to want to follow him more so than to just damage his opponent. Support from the mainstream Republican Party (Newt Gingrich and John McCain et.al.) just lends more credence to the view that Republicans are Democrat lite. Who wants the imitation when the real deal is available?

The more significant factor, though, is that with the emergence of “Tea Parties”; the infection of core conservative principles by the altruism and pragmatism of anarchistic Libertarians who want a society of philosophically vacuous nihilists, and the dependence of fiscal and small governement Constitutionalist on support from various religious collectivists, who like the liberals, what a “nanny state” but on their terms, is just too much to overcome. It is rare to find consensus among Christians, Jews and Moslems on any issue. Add in Buddhists and other religions and the chance of consensus drops almost exponentially. A case in point:

Brit Hume, a senior anchor at Fox News, in speaking about the Tiger Woods sex scandal seemed to believe that Tiger’s Buddhist religion may be responsible for his going astray and that until he adopts a more Christian perspective, he will never be forgiven by his family and the public, nor will he have the ability to forgive himself for his “transgressions” against society.

That’s not too far afield from Ann Coulter’s statement to Donny Deutsch that Jews are Christians who need a bit more “perfecting“. And Republicans expect the religious right (or the extreme wings of the various sects) to unite and work harmoniously in support of “conservative” candidates? It is my view that this reliance in particular is what killed the “conservative movement” under Ronald Regan that really amounted to no more than a temporary constipation in the political life cycle of rule by nanny state Democrats.

The fact that John McCain is supportive of Senator Brown speaks volumes as to how much closer to the values of Democrats, like minded “Republicans” are, philosophically speaking. Positions seem to come and go with the tides these days and the more the philosophic soul of the nation is eroded by pragmatism and altruism, the more quickly the concept of individual liberty is dragged out to sea as mere sediment of a brief moment in time. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, America is descending into the netherworld of history to be appreciated only in the rear view at a time when hope for a better way of life once again springs out of the darkness toward a new age of enlightenment based up science and the true nature of man qua man.