This Is War

The nation's top conservative leaders will gather Wednesday at Collingwood in Alexandria, Va.—a property that was once the site of George Washington’s River Farm—to sign a document organizers are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. It is designed to signal that a united and resurgent conservative movement is declaring philosophical war against the big government and moral relativism advanced by the nation’s liberal cultural, academic and political establishments.

The statement emphatically says no to the type of "change" pushed by political leaders who ignore the Constitution's limits on government power.

“In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics,” says an excerpt from the statement. “The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

“Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new,” says the statement. “But where would this lead--forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?”

“The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles,” it says.

The full document will be posted online at www.themountvernonstatement.com after 3 p.m. Wednesday.

The statement was drafted under the auspices of the Conservative Action Project, a coalition led by Edwin Meese, who served as a top White House adviser and then attorney general to President Ronald Reagan.

“It’s a document that we hope is going to serve as a compass for the movement so that when we have a debate such as, for example, on socialized health care, there should not be a degree to which government participates in national health care but whether government has the authority, the right to interfere in this issue,” Media Research President Brent Bozell told CNSNews.com. “If it doesn’t have the specifically enumerated right and responsibility spelled out in the Constitution, then the federal government should not be involved period.”

Lots more here..