More Republican Angst-And Oh Yeah, The Return Of The Romneylan

The Republicans have been meeting to try to map out a strategy to regain power, and they might well make it-if they can only figure out who they are and what they stand for. One of their slogans is "Republican For A Reason" which is on signs strewn throughout the meeting hall, and to which one of the attending delegates remarked the following-

"Republican for a reason?" says Stephen Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, pausing before a banner carrying the slogan. "I don't know what that means."

Evidently, even among those who have a vague clue as to what it means, there is a variety of opinions, and not all of them are good. To those people wanting to drag the Republican Party into the Twenty-First century, it might be helpful if you could start out by dragging a good many of them out of the nineteen sixties. Like for example the fellow that said the following-

All the Obama love in the air isn't helping their moods, either. Jim Bopp, a committeeman from the Great State of Indiana, grumbled before coming into town that "there's kind of a 'Kumbaya' feeling in the country."

Yes, there is, and yes, this is lame, but so is using a reference that makes you look like a Bull Connor apologist. It's like some churches I've been to, and though that has been a while, it has been in this decade, and believe me if you go to any Baptist Chruch long enough, you will invariably hear some preacher at some point complain about the philosophy of "If it feels good do it" which of course was an old sixties saying (and a song, by the way) that almost nobody but them ever says anymore, or for that matter remembers, if the truth were known.

So why do they do this kind of stuff? You take a good look around you sitting in the pews and it becomes pretty easy to figure out. There is always a large section of elderly folks who still never quite got over the shenanigans of the sixties, back in the day when they were thirty and forty and actually started to first feel like they had wasted their lives, that the world had certainly gone to hell in a hand basket, and here they are stuck in the son-of-a-bitch, getting carried along for the ride and not in the least bit enjoying it.

This is pretty much the state of the Republican Party today, wondering what the hell went wrong, how their leaders went astray, why they never reined them in, why they just turned a blind eye to the corruption and the hypocrisy, all the time the Democratic Party looked to be laughably trying to position themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.

Here's the bad part. They still haven't figured it out yet. The major focus of the meeting seems not to be so much about staking out party positions based on principles, but on adopting policies most likely geared to win them elections. Rush Limbaugh pointed out the obvious flaw in this line of thinking-

On the airwaves and in print, the Republicans keep blasting away, gnawing on each other's tender wounds. There's former congressman Tom Davis, once the chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, declaring in op-eds that "our party is broken" and tsk-tsking the GOP for pushing away "soccer moms" with its social policies and "NASCAR dads" with its ethical failings. And there's Rush Limbaugh giving fellow Republicans what for, and getting some grief in return.

"The Republican Party is making a big, big -- the conservative movement, too -- making a big, big mistake in planning for the future," he told Fox's Sean Hannity. "You hear things like 'Well, the Republican Party needs to identify the middle class, the Wal-Mart voters, and come up with policies for them. And then we've got to come up with policies for the Hispanics because they hate us due to illegal immigration.' "
And the ultimate insult from Limbaugh: that's the way Democrats do things

Of course there is also a major flaw in Limbaugh's thinking. The Republicans do have to adapt, and they do have to reach out to a broader cross section of America. Still, it is true they can best do that by offering concise explanations as to how conservative principles will benefit them as members of this or that community, not by trying to be the party of big government with a conservative face. That, I tell you, is a sure pathway to utter annihilation.

Voters who want big government want it for a reason. They want it because they are "liberal" or "progressive" and want the government involved to a large degree in most if not all aspects of American society, and this is mainly because they perceive some benefit to them by supporting this. It does not follow that these voters are going to support a big government party who tells them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. It actually makes so little sense it might be considered a sign of mental derangement to imagine they would.

No, the big government folks are firmly settled within the orbit of the Democratic Party. That only leaves folks who by natural inclination want government out of their lives as much as humanly possible. To them preaching big government in any form in an earlier time in some extreme cases would result in your body being pulled down from the sturdiest branch of a secluded oak tree in the wee hours of the morning. In most cases you would simply be laughed off as a deluded crank, or cursed as a communist sympathizer or fellow traveler. You would not win their vote, and in some cases might even have it cast against you as a protest.

That is in effect what has been going on. I and some others warned about the very real danger of nominating John McCain, a man who lost twenty percent of Kentucky primary voters after he had the nomination sealed. He got back a significant portion of such voters as this when he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate-including myself. Had he not picked her, or someone similar, he would have lost worse than he did. As it happened, it still wasn't enough. The same people who are now worried sick over the Republican Party's ability to win elections are to a great extent the ones actually responsible for the hateful and malicious rhetoric aimed at Palin and her family. They were incensed at McCain for bringing this knuckle-dragging cave woman into such a position of prominence within THEIR Grand Old Party.

Now that the sons-of-bitches (and some cunts) helped destroy what chances McCain and Palin had of winning, after they went out of their way to help him secure the nomination, they are at a loss as to comprehend the reason for their fall from grace with the American public.

I wouldn't really know where to begin, but I do know where to end. If you are against big government, then you can't pick and choose when it's all right to suit you. That includes such things as abortion and gay marriage. It's fine to be against those things and speak against them, but it's quite a different matter when you want the government to get involved in stopping them on the federal level. That is NOT the essence of conservatism, and the idea of making it so by pushing for constitutional amendments is actually missing the point.

There is a far better reason to involve government in such things as energy legislation, health care reform, and reducing pollution than there is to get involved with these social issues. You can make a case, for example, that the rising costs of medical care affects everyone adversely. If someone runs up a huge bill and, through inability to pay, that cost is passed on to the other consumers, it adds up to a significant percentage of the negative drag on our economy.

However you feel about abortion, it does not have that kind of effect. Overturning Roe v Wade might well be an admirable goal, and probably is. However, it does not follow that such a goal should be followed, if successful, by an equally odious extreme involving the long arm of the federal government. Simply put, Republicans need to do a better job at explaining why the states should handle these matters, and the federal government is best left out of it, either pro or con.

Mitt Romney was at the meeting, and one of the things he pointed out, with some justification, was Obama's recent reversal of an executive order which previously prevented federal funds from going to international agencies that performed or counseled abortion. But see, here again, this is just more red meat that will not move the dial past the party faithful. There needs to be more than just disgust and dismay due to religious or moral objections to a medical procedure that is in at least some cases arguably justified.

The whole picture of international aid needs to be thoroughly examined. Why should any of them receive American taxpayer money? If a case can be made that they are putting it to good use and it is helping those it is supposedly meant to help, then make that case, and if it is going into the bank accounts of tin-horn dictators, then make the case with equal voracity that it should be cut. After all, as someone has recently reiterated, foreign aid is money that is taken from the working poor of wealthier nations to line the pockets of the wealthy and corrupt rulers of poor nations.

This is what needs to be hammered home, not that some agencies are performing abortions.

Words and how they are expressed mean a lot, and in this day and age of the seven second sound bite, carelessly chosen words can be all the difference between majority and minority parties.

In the last election, Americans were called to choose a hope they could believe in. Their choice was between "Yes we can" versus "Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb Iran".

It's not always Americans fault that they sometimes make the wrong choices.