It’s the personal liberty, stupid. If they could stop being the Stupid Party, they could really clean up next year, but that’s a big “if.”
8 thoughts on “A Message To Republicans”
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It’s the personal liberty, stupid. If they could stop being the Stupid Party, they could really clean up next year, but that’s a big “if.”
Comments are closed.
A significant part of the Washington Republican establishment gleefully jumped on the tax-and-spend “Big Government Conservatism” bandwagon post-Gingrich. W could have fairly effectively opposed this but showed no glimmer of an inclination to do so – he seemed to think it was just fine. This “Dem-Light” governance was eroding our liberties and sending us to fiscal hell, slowly.
Now that we’ve switched trains to the Real Dem Express, we’re getting there a lot faster, and finally waking up a lot of people. (What wasn’t obvious last November about where a lefty Chicago pol Prez plus the Pelosi-Reid Congress would try to take us, I wonder? But I digress.)
Yes, the Republicans are going to have to come up with a lot better program than their current implicit baseline “we’ll take the country to hell too, but slower than the Dems!” before I’ll get excited about them again.
Henry Vanderbilt
Yes, the Republicans are going to have to come up with a lot better program than their current implicit baseline “we’ll take the country to hell too, but slower than the Dems!” before I’ll get excited about them again.
Henry, for what it’s worth, I agree with you 100%.
Well said, Henry!
Ditto dude. The problem is what kind of 2 by 4 do we need to get the elephant’s attention? It looks to me that the GOP powers are just licking their lips. Run another McCain clone like Romney and he’d get elected today. I don’t like the idea of having to get savaged by the present administration to go back to the slow poison of the Democrat lite statists.
The only times either party manages to avoid being The Stupid Party is when they’ve managed to become The Evil Party.
The Republican Party today differs from the Democratic Party only in the set of behaviors it seeks to control, not in the seeking of control. What is needed here is a party that seeks to govern rather than rule. By govern, I mean: defend the individual against the use of force, fraud, or coercion by any third party (including itself). A party that seeks to defend rather than rule would constitute the first real change the world has seen since 1788, when the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
“The problem is what kind of 2 by 4 do we need to get the elephant’s attention? It looks to me that the GOP powers are just licking their lips. Run another McCain clone like Romney and he’d get elected today. I don’t like the idea of having to get savaged by the present administration to go back to the slow poison of the Democrat lite statists.”
Presidents are overrated, in terms of their overall influence on the direction of the federal government. Seriously. They certainly have far more influence than any other *individual* – but somewhat less than the Congress as a whole. If you look at the history, recent Presidents have a strong tendency to do along with the Congress’s preferences on most things in order to get their way on a few of their top priorities. LBJ was the last Prez who dominated Congress for any length of time, and with luck (shudder) we won’t see his like again soon.
So, work to elect as many sound individual legislators as possible. Given a big enough Congressional bloc in favor of individual freedom and fiscal responsibility, even Bill Clinton went along far enough to do the country a lot of good. Mitt Romney would be just fine, with the right Congress.
More specifically, don’t be afraid to back real fiscal/liberty conservatives against the occasional Dem-Lite types. THAT is what will put the fear into the GOP establishment…
(The biggest tactical mistake Newt & Co made back then wasn’t the “government shutdown”, by the way, though they should have known the media would spin that against them. The key mistake they made was *voluntary* term limits, which selected out *exactly* the people we needed in the Congress while leaving the “Big Government Conservative” careerists untouched, with results we all know. But again I digress…)
Henry Vanderbilt
Each of our parties need its own figurative 40 years in Sinai. Unfortunately the Democrats are too corrupt and the Republicans are too stupid (and corrupt too). If we’re extremely lucky the voters will throw out enough incumbents to actually change things significantly and in the right direction. If we’re less lucky the Democrats will steal more elections and the Republicans will refuse to rock the boat.
The central problem is that government at all levels has become so big and influential that it’s almost impossible, absent a massive paradigm shift among the vast majority of marginally engaged voters, to create a decisive political coalition for small government. Sooner or later that shift may occur, but it may not and the odds against it may remain long.