Yesterday, U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter filed the maximum 2000 petition signatures required to seek Michigan’s 11th Congressional District seat. Rep. McCotter spent filing day the same way he spends every day – working hard for the people of Michigan. While managing the GOP’s time under the House’s Committee of the Whole, his resolution honoring the late Ernie Harwell was sent to the full House.

Thaddeus McCotter is bored. His answers for what ails the Republican Party and the reasons he gives for why it came to its current minority status on Capitol Hill are thoughtful, even insightful. But this isn’t new territory for the four-term Michigan Republican. He responds to my questions with all the enthusiasm of someone who has been asked to repeat an old story for the hundredth time.

Until I ask him about his guitar. “George Harrison once told an interviewer that he picked up his first guitar and played it until his fingers bled,” McCotter says. “His mother asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘I’m learning how to play guitar.’” Does McCotter favor electric or acoustic? “Same six strings,” he replies matter-of-factly.

Most congressional offices are filled with mementos from the district and pictures of the congressman with important government officials. Republicans tend to favor photographs of Ronald Reagan and, until about 2005, George W. Bush. McCotter’s office has dark green walls and a picture of John Lennon hanging over his desk. There’s also a guitar, of course. It resembles a young rock fan’s bedroom as much as a quiet place to write constituent letters.

Thad McCotter is chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, a leadership position from which he will play a role in shaping the GOP congressional agenda. When the tall, lanky congressman isn’t jamming with the bipartisan rock band called the Second Amendments — he is known for being able to play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” behind his back– he is being received like a rock star on a growing number of offbeat television and radio talk shows.

Dennis Miller is a McCotter fan — or likes “the cut of his jib,” as he puts it — and so is Greg Gutfeld, since the congressman’s dry sense of humor is a good fit for Red Eye, Gutfeld’s late-night show on Fox. Shortly after Barack Obama took office, Gutfeld asked McCotter the familiar question about whether the GOP was in “disarray.” His reply was typical McCotter, with carefully wielded pop culture references sending his co-panelists into guffaws as he dutifully pressed his party’s case.

Despite the fact that the DHS has “no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” the RE memo specifically smears returning veterans and a host of other sovereign citizens who may hold conservative views; and generally smears conservatism by equating it with “Right-wing extremism.”

We live amid a chaotic age.

As with the Age of Industrialization’s dawning, this Age of Globalization’s advent is a time of promise and peril, wherein many Americans’ cherished way of life is being “creatively destroyed” by a tsunami of merciless changes seemingly beyond control.  The very concept of a sovereign nation-state is besieged by the discordant forces of disorder – and without order, there is no justice or freedom for the people.

Our camaraderie stems from our shared suffering as conservatives. Conservatism being the negation of ideology, our existence threatens the Left’s dogmatic ideologues, who revile, repress and retaliate against us: Congressional Republicans are targeted for political extinction; and Big Hollywood’s cloistered conservatives are targeted for professional ostracism.

Of course, there is an important distinction. Congressional Republicans voluntarily incurred Leftist attacks by entering politics. Republican oriented artists, however, have been involuntarily subjected to Big Hollywood’s new version of the old “blacklist’: the “C-List” of conservatives who are marked for censorship and career ruin for deviating from Left-wing orthodoxy.