May 8, 2009

Why the Party of No continues to suck major wang

Cluelessness, rabid bigotry and childish name-calling is no way to win over any converts, son.

The party's ideas - about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else - are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.

As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues - even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree.

The RNC is about to vote on a kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage, which gives the base even more influence - and the death spiral continues.

"We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice - the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch. "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."

-- more awesomeness here.

1 comment:

big em said...

I surely HOPE that the Republicans (at least the Neo-con brand) become a minor third-party... ala the Libertarians. However, I'm old enough to recall how there were similar predictions/sentiments back in 1964 after Goldwater lost, and -- to a lesser extent -- again in the post-Watergate/Nixon days. But, as some cynic once said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence (political type, especially) of the US public, so if history is any predictor, I'd have to say that the Repukes will be back in power again in 5 or 10 yrs - - like the proverbial bad-penny. If you look at the founding of the US in a non-traditional perspective, this country was formed by a combination of ruthless (ask the remaining native Americans, or black descendents of slaves) fortune seekers/hucksters, religious fundamentalists, military people, desperate refugees, and a few other smaller groups, out of which I believe you can see the origins of the current belief systems of the US citizens -- and they ain't all rational & benevolent!