Sunday, January 6, 2013

The Republican Party is Like an Ugly Peeling Wallpaper, Circa 1950....


The Republican Party resembles an ugly and peeling wallpaper, circa 1950's. While the Republican pundits are scratching their heads in disbelief over election losses, they all saying essentially the same thing: we are a great party, we have a great platform, we have a great message and we have a great plan to solve our problems. In other words, the Republican Party thinks that it's perfect just the way it is and, hilariously, their only problem is falling down when it comes to getting their message out. Romney Iowa strategist David Kochel said “First of all, we’ve got to improve our mechanics and our organization,” and “We got beat on data collection. Our polling was off. I thought that we spent way too much time in a defensive posture with our messaging.", here. Kochel also admitted that money was not a problem and the RNC/GOP machine had plenty of money “We certainly raised enough money. We don’t have to fix that,”.

The RNC has even launched a study to figure out why Romney lost and named the initiative the Growth and Opportunity Project.

RNC Launches New Initiative to Grow the Party and Win
The effort, known as the Growth and Opportunity Project, will be chaired by five GOP leaders and is charged by Priebus with initially reviewing past practices and also making critical recommendations for the future in these eight key areas: 1.) campaign mechanics and ground game; 2.) messaging; 3.) fundraising; 4.) demographic partners and allies; 5.) third party groups; 6.) campaign finance issues; 7.) presidential primaries; and 8.) lessons learned from Democratic campaign tactics.

The group will reach out to hundreds of individuals including RNC Members, grassroots activists, donors, elected officials, community leaders and other important partners to gain insight and help the Republican Party form a solid path going forward. These leaders will be involved in one or more of these critical areas.

The Growth and Opportunity Project is co-chaired by five prominent Republican leaders:

Henry Barbour, National Committeeman from Mississippi
Zori Fonalledas, National Committeewoman from Puerto Rico
Glenn McCall, National Committeeman from South Carolina
Sally Bradshaw, Veteran senior strategist in Florida and national politics
Ari Fleischer, Former White House Press Secretary

They will report their findings to Chairman Priebus and make recommendations for a long-term strategy for the future.
The Republican Party will be making a big play to win over Hispanic and African American voters.  However, it's a flawed strategy that is doomed to fail.  Hispanics and African American voters who aren't already diehard Democrat loyalists are liberty activists, constitutionalists and Ron Paul supporters who have no use whatsoever for the GOP or the Democrats.

Non-conservatives and liberals think they perfectly understand the Republican Party -  the Republican Party is nothing more than a party divided by radical Tea Party types and moderate Republicans in the mold of McCain or Romney.  Liberals tend to view the election triumph of the Democrats as a sign that America has taken a hard left turn so their incessant gloating is intensely festive.  CNN chirps in, here, "Listening to Republicans try to explain what went wrong in their worse-than-expected election thumping reveals a party struggling to define itself amid continuing change in the nation it seeks to lead."

The Republican Party can no longer define itself because it doesn't stand for anything except bigger government, bigger deficits, more wars, more corporate welfare and more bankster bailouts. Still, the GOP hopelessly clings to the spectacularly false legacy of Ronald Reagan as the real conservative Republican model while it searches endlessly for the reincarnation of the ghost of Reagan.  A lot has changed since the days of Reagan.  Blindly worshiping Reagan and Nixon as a gods will not bring back those good old days when the GOP racked up impressive victories.

1972: Nixon defeats McGovern 520 electoral votes to 17 electoral votes
1980: Reagan defeats Carter 489 electoral votes to 49 electoral votes
1984: Reagan defeats Mondale 525 electoral votes to 13 electoral votes

In many ways, the Republican Party is like a 3 legged stool.with 3 constituent legs - the social conservatives, the Rockefeller Republicans and  constitutional liberty activists.

1.  The social conservatives endorse big government and endless wars.

2.  The Rockefeller Republicans endorse big government and endless wars but are very uncomfortable the social issues which they don't care about.

3.  The constitutional liberty activists oppose big government, the damn wars, the trillion dollar a year foreign policy, the Federal Reserve and they really oppose the federal government meddling in the social issues because it's not a power specifically enumerated in the constitution.

What is killing the Republican Party is that the constitutional liberty activists will no longer hold their noses and vote Republican as they once did and this is a trend that surfaced in 2006 and was considerably magnified in 2008 when the Democrats took back the House of Representatives and won the presidency.

In fact, the liberty activists are so angry with the GOP that they are determined to guarantee its defeat by voting 3rd party for however long it takes for the liberty activists to takeover the GOP from the warmongers and fascists.  The Gary Johnson vote delivered critical swing states to Obama in 2012.

Yet, the archaic Republican Party views itself as a party that can win elections just by firing up the intolerant social conservatives, beating the war drums for perpetual bankrupting wars and sprinkling some cold dead words like 'capitalism' in the toxic mix to camouflage the crony capitalist fascist economy.  Here's how the GOP view itself and its base.



The Republican game plan has finally failed.  In fact, it's a BIG fail but instead of embracing traditional Republican conservatism and the agenda of the constitutionalists and liberty activists, the Republican Party is absolutely determined to vigorously pursue the Democratic model of romancing the Free Shit Army while growing government, slashing civil liberties and pursing endless wars - all traditional Democrat ideals that dumped America into the statist cesspool without a life jacket.

Who got America into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Balkan Wars? - all progressive liberal Democrats that were perennially obsessed with their divine right to rule over everybody and every nation.  Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton were all hardcore warmongering statists, although Clinton's appetite for war was downright squeamish compared with the overt addiction to mass human genocide of the most intensely worshiped luminaries within the Democratic Party.

Interestingly, the anti-GOP establishment website, The American Conservative, posted a piece on the anti-war and anti-foreign interventionist roots of the Republican Party.

Why Conservatives Hate War
One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice.

The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.”

Conservatives’ detestation of war has no “touchy-feely” origins. It springs from conservatism’s roots, its most fundamental beliefs and objectives. Conservatism seeks above all social and cultural continuity, and nothing endangers that more than war.

In the 20th century, war brought about social and cultural revolutions in the United States....

Russia’s involvement in World War I gave us Bolshevism. Germany’s defeat made Hitler possible. As the First World War shows, if a conflict is costly enough, the victors’ social order can suffer nearly as badly as that of the vanquished. Not only did the British Empire die in the mud of Flanders, but postwar Britain was a very different place from Edwardian Britain.

The plain fact is, conservatives loathe unpredictability. They also know that vast state expenditures and debts can destabilize a society, and no activity of the state is more expensive than war. America’s adventure in Iraq, driven in no small part by the quest for oil—which will now mostly go to China—has already cost a trillion dollars, with another trillion or two to come caring for crippled veterans. Even the peacetime cost of a large military can break a country, as it broke the Soviet Union. American conservatives used to be budget hawks, not warhawks.
Exactly how the Republican Party managed to transform itself from the party of peace and constitutionally limited government into the Big Spending Progressive War Party is open to considerable debate and speculation.   Somehow, the Republican Party became a wholly owned subsidiary of defense contractors, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, crony capitalism and the Banksters.

If the Republican Party thinks that it can romance the Democrats into voting Republican, the GOP is delusional beyond comprehension.  The DNC has a solid and historically documented monopoly on big government, endless wars and statism.

Maybe it's time to just seal the GOP's coffin because it's a party that is ideologically, socially and morally irrelevant, as well as indistinguishable from the Democratic Party.

4 comments:

  1. It is the social intolerance I object to most. The endless wars at home. The Drug War tops that list.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BTW the "American System" was designed post WW2 to prevent another WW.

    If America drops out who would you prefer to fill the power vacuum? China? Russia? Islam Inc.?

    What you propose was tried during the 30s. We got the 40s in return. But those lessons are now forgotten. We are thus headed for another WW.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I wanted a Dyson, but that is one expensive poer vacuum.

    ReplyDelete
  4. How To Destroy The Prohibition Party:

    Medical Marijuana prohibition is a crime against humanity and a violation of the religious precept - heal the sick.

    Pass it on.

    ReplyDelete