Monday, January 18, 2010

 

Mote in GOP eye, HUGE--Beam in Democrats eye, what beam?

It started with E. J. Dionne failing to see that the Democrats have lost huge swaths of Independents' ecstatic support, so visible just 15 months ago, because they quit pretending and were acting, right out in the open, just like Democrats. Now it is Kevin Drum shinnying up to E.J.'s coat-tails to echo that mistake and blame what he calls the Republican noise machine. Sheesh.

See to the liberal elites, Republicans don't actually have the power of human speech; they don't have principled differences in world views worth discussing--they just make an indecipherable noise, like bad refrigerator compressors.

Sorry E.J., and Kevin, we Republicans only have a few critical tools, talk radio and the internet, to be precise. We lack the firepower to pull the wool over independents' eyes. There is indeed Fox News but it is merely a cable station, which pulls in excellent cable ratings, but they are a drop in the bucket compared to the alphabet broadcast news, who collectively draw ten million viewers for each million watching O'Reilly.

Deep in the embracing womb of Mother Jones' distorting alternate reality, Kevin Jones senses that something bad is happening to his party and supporters, but he can't see that it is simply a wholesale rejection of the Democrats' policies and agendas by a large majority of the Americans who vote. It must be something someone else is doing to them. Everyone loves Obama and his cohorts. Can't be them.

When we saw the Republicans, during the middle of George Bush's 8 years, acting like Democrats lite, we groaned and protested, in vain, and now that we've been swept out of office for our sins, we look back and blame the Republicans who lost their way and spent and borrowed like drunken sailors Democrats, who expanded the federal government at the cost of economic and personal freedom. We insist that our new candidates don't repeat these mistakes. We see where we went wrong; we don't blame other people, at least not exclusively.

It's a vision beyond Mr. Dionne and Mr. Drum, apparently.

Labels:


Comments:
Rog,

I suppose we all have our fringes. I continue to find it disheartening that fringe seems in complete control of the GOP.

The de facto spokesmen for the party are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. In what appears to be an orgy of cannibalism, perfectly reasonable candidates like Gov. Crist are castigated and challenged on the primary level b/c he "is not conservative enough."

As you have noted, independent voters determine who will win an election. So long as the GOP is controlled by ultra conservatives (I think of them as right wing loonies) it will not win a national election. It would have been an interesting race between McCain-Lieberman and Obama Biden.

When Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain's running mate, the GOP's base was energized. The majority of the rest of us were horrified and the results speak for themselves.

You correctly note that MLK was a Republican. But that was in another land. Edward Brooke, the last (until today maybe) Republican senator from MA was elected by 58-42% landslide.

My question is: Would either of these gentlemen be Republicans today? Alas, I see the GOP's tent shrinking not expanding.

I tend to vote for the lesser of two evils. It always seems that the lesser is a Democrat.

T
 
T, for us, 'not conservative enough' equals 'like Geroge Bush (either)' If you're into what party would they be in now?, play with these names: JFK, Scoop Jackson, DP Moynihan.
Palin helped McCain. It would have been like Goldwater, Carter or Mondale if he'd picked Joe Lieberman (and I like Lieberman.)
As Jerry Garcia said, choosing the lesser to two evils is still choosing evil.
 
As long as the Democratic party is both controlled by, and understood by a significant portion of independents to be controlled by, raving socialists, it will not win a national election.

(Question begging, ad hominem attacks, excluded middle fallacies, and arguments by assertion work equally well for both sides.)
 
The thing is Doug, a majority of independent voters like a balance of power. Everyone speaking of raving socialists tends to be a tea partier or an aficionado of talk radio.

T
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?