GOP Realists vs. the True Believers
It’s not exactly firing on Fort Sumter, but it may be said that the Republican Civil War has begun in earnest as the “establishment,” or “pragmatists,” or “realists” — or whatever derisive epithet you want to apply — have thrown down the gauntlet to the righteous right and challenged their conception of political success. The notion that only the most “conservative” candidate should represent the party regardless of his or her chances of winning is under attack by GOP Whales who ultimately foot the bill for these forays into self-defeating, myopic fantasy land.
The money men, at the behest of Karl Rove, have formed the “Conservative Victory Project” — a non-profit outfit that will supposedly vet Republican primary candidates, backing the most conservative candidate who can win. Specifically targeted for defeat will be the bomb-throwers, the extremists, the weird, the wacky, and the incompetents who have blown at least four slam-dunk, sure-thing, in-the-bank races in the last two election cycles. And despite claiming that they won’t be in the “incumbent protection racket,” there is little doubt that the formation of the Conservative Victory Project is a shot across the bow to Tea Party groups who have primaried several incumbent senators who displeased the right wingers either because they committed the mortal sin of compromising with the other side or because they were thought to be insufficiently incendiary in their rhetoric against the opposition.
The major problem for the Rove-backed group is that their own record of failure in electing candidates to the Senate — especially in Wisconsin and Montana — makes their criticisms ring hollow. Rove’s American Crossroads spent more than $100 million in attack ads for eight Senate races and came away with two victories — Nebraska’s Deb Fischer and Dean Heller in Nevada. The notion that Rove and his deep-pocketed friends can do better than the Tea Party in picking winning candidates takes a hit when one considers their record.
Still, there’s a difference between a Denny Rehberg, an establishment congressman who ran against incumbent Jon Tester, and Todd Akin, whose disastrous campaign ended in a loss to the most unpopular Democratic senator in the 2012 election cycle, Claire McCaskill. Rehberg’s race was tough but winnable — something that could have been said for the other Crossroads-backed Senate candidates who lost. Akin’s race should have been a coronation. The party’s major donors want to avoid debacles like Missouri in 2014, when 20 incumbent Democratic senators have to face the voters — many in states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012. With President Obama making these incumbents’ lives difficult by pushing gun control and immigration reform, Republicans can ill-afford to field gaffe-prone candidates who suffer terminal cases of foot-in-mouth disease.
The right wing is understandably upset. Erick Erickson was in high dudgeon when he penned this rant:
American Crossroads is creating a new Super PAC to crush conservatives, destroy the tea party, and put a bunch of squishes in Republican leadership positions. Thank God they are behind this. In 2012, they spent hundreds of millions of rich donors’ money and had jack to show for it.
It is interesting though. The people who brought us No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the GM bailout, Harriet Miers, etc., etc., etc. are really hacked off that people have been rejecting them. In 2012, about the only successful Republican candidates were the ones who directly rejected the legacy of these people.
So now they will up their game. They don’t like being shut out. They blame the tea party and conservatives for their failure to win primaries. They’ll now try to match conservatives and, in the process, call themselves conservatives.
Not much exaggeration or hyperbole there, eh? Is American Crossroads really, truly, out to “crush” conservatives and “destroy the tea party”? Balderdash. The whole point of the Conservative Victory Project is to get Republicans elected. One doesn’t have to be Mr. Wizard to figure out that’s not going to happen without a massive turnout by conservatives. Erickson has to know better, but for some reason feels the necessity to portray the right wing as martyrs to the cause of “conservative” purity and dogma.
Jeff Goldstein sees even more sinister motives behind the formation of the Rove-backed group:
Seems Rove thinks he can play the left’s game against the right: define conservatism down so that centrist RINOism becomes the new “conservative right wing,” and the TEA Partiers, constitutional conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians can become the new fringe Birchers.
Of course, this has the effect of positioning the far left as moderate, but that doesn’t matter much to Mr Rove, whose hanger-on status — following a series of high profile losses and a 5-7 year history of bad party advice — is becoming legendary. And to the base, particularly troublesome.
Which is why we should simply just cut the umbilicus now and let Rove, et al., finish off the GOP
That may be the first time in history that Karl Rove has been referred to as a “centrist.” Does Mr. Goldstein really believe that Rove wants to “finish off the GOP”? That kind of hysteria is what gives the right wing the deserved reputation of being disconnected from reality. Is there anything wrong with marginalizing Tea Party people who believe that Obama is a Muslim or that he’s out to “destroy America”? Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ? Or libertarians who embrace objectivism? These people don’t have to be shunted off to the fringe. They are the fringe already. Not all Tea Partiers, constitutionalists, or libertarians share these ridiculous views, but shouldn’t an effort be made to kick the crazies to the sidelines?
Analyzing the clashing worldviews of the two sides is instructive. Neither sees the other as capable of fielding candidates that would be acceptable to a majority of voters. It’s not that the right wing wants to lose — far from it. They apparently feel that there are more important things than winning — a childlike view of politics to be sure, but such thinking animates their cause and gives energy to their advocacy. Would that it would give wisdom to their actions.
The establishment is questioning their political acumen, not their conservative bona fides. Former Indiana Senator Richard Lugar could have won his race going away. Replacing him by throwing Richard Mourdock into the Republican primary was a titanic mistake, giving a moderate Democrat, Joe Donnelly, an opening he should never have had. Mourdock turned a laugher into a toss-up overnight. But Lugar, a conservative pragmatist whose collegiality with Democrats made him suspect with the paranoids who see any collaboration with the enemy as treason, was tossed not for being insufficiently conservative for the voters of Indiana, but because he was more interested in governance than ideological purity. This is an old-fashioned notion in our hyper-partisan age to be sure, but a strategy that proved to be a winner for five terms.
One could certainly make the argument that a group like the Conservative Victory Project has no business injecting itself into the private wars of Republicans in individual states. There is symmetry to the logic that the locals know the political landscape better than any Washington-based outfit — no matter how much money they have. The congressional campaign committees usually run into trouble when they take sides in primary fights — as well they should. The question then becomes, is an intervention necessary? Have things gotten so bad, so out of hand, that those who fund GOP campaigns with their own money feel that they can get more bang for their bucks if they take a hand in choosing local or statewide candidates for office?
Neither side covered themselves in glory in 2012. And Republicans need a lot more than money and even viable candidates to take control of the Senate, maintain control of the House in 2014, and position themselves for a White House run in 2016. It is unfortunate that the formation of the Conservative Victory Project is only going to drive the wedge between the establishment and right wing activists deeper, and open the chasm between the two sides wider. At a time when unity should be paramount, it is likely that the two sides tearing at each other for the next two years will only result in hurt feelings and erect a massive barrier of mistrust.
Indeed, victory seems farther away today than it did yesterday.
Also read: Pete Sessions, and the Unbearable Disconnect of the GOP
Karl Rove is everything wrong with the Republican party. He was the one (and Bush) who pushed that Compassionate Conservative (aka Democrat Lite) stuff.
Which basically is what got us into this mess. It manages to both dramatically increase the size and scope of government, all the while giving Lefties a chance to blame the problem on conservative ideals, like smaller government and deregulation, even though nothing of the sort even remotely happened, but the complete opposite.
Rove is a complete f-ing joke.
I really don’t know why anyone takes the buffoon seriously.
Karl Rove has won two national presidential campaigns in recent history, which I suspect is two more that the author of this piece and its commentary. He is a little wonky for my taste but he commands respect and allegiance for many folks we n ned to win. Victory will require mobilization of all potential Republican voters, even moderates .
Looking back on the wreckage that was the 2012 campaign, I see several candidates who could have been better –several whom I supported, by the way, with $$$s. Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell, earnest as they were, were not ready for Senate races. Richard Murdock looked like he could win until he was baited by the media into some unfortunate remarks. But they all lost winnable races for whatever reason and it’s just silly not to ask how we can find better candidates next time around.
Rove & his rinos barely won W’s first election.
W’s 2nd election should have been a slam dunk, but us nasty right wingers drug him over the line by holding our noses after the rino wing blew the WOT dump with his liberal policies.
Rove proudly claimed that he was behind W’s ‘too proud to fight back’ strategy when it seemed to be working and then bitc’hed about the base when we dared to call ask the president to defend himself.
The Rovians brought us stellar candidates like McCain and Romney.
If you recall, when Rove came on the scene, we held both houses of congress and he managed to blow them.
Tea Party-backed conservatives like Murdock and Akin didn’t lose in November because they were “right-wing wackos” but because the GOP Establishment personified by Karl Rove threw them under the bus. The same bunch of RINOs must also take the blame for not backing Allen West in his re-election campaign and then refusing to provide support for his effort to overturn the blatant vote fraud which reversed his victory.
Conservatives are useless. Only Right-wingers can save America now. In 1790, some States did not allow anyone who would not take an oath that he supported several items of Christian dogma to vote. Now that was takin’ care of business. If you didn’t own real propertry, you couldn’t vote. If you couldn’t read English, you couldn’t vote. If you didn’t pay a poll tax, you couldn’t vote. Forget what the Founders would say — these were the Founders. So, if mass voting by Mexicans is electing anti-Americans, don’t allow Mexicans to vote. Any other problems?
Harry, Todd Akin wasn’t the Tea Party candidate. He was the experienced US congressman who defeated a businessman and a former Missouri state treasurer, both who had Tea Party support. Democrats worked to help Akin win, thinking his social conservatism made him weaker than the Tea Party insurgents. However, even Todd Akin would have likely won as a generic Republican if he simply kept his mouth shut and refused to answer any questions from hostile media.
In contrast, Deb Fischer and Ted Cruz were Tea Party candidates who won upset victories in their primaries, going on to win in the general election.
“I really don’t know why anyone takes the I really don’t know why anyone takes the buffoon seriously. ”
Maybe because the FOX News Channel propaganda machine take Rover seriously?
Why does any of the popular propaganda media machines take their own equal “buffoons” serious?
Well said and spot on.
The Republican Party has “won big” three time in my lifetime. In 1980 Ronald Reagan ran as an unabashed, Goldwater conservative. In 1994 the Republicans won both the House and the Senate led by Newt Gingrich and The Contract with America. In 2010 the Republicans won a dramatic sweep in races from dogcatcher to Senator – led by the Tea Party.
In 2012 Romney and Rove blatantly snubbed Sarah Palin and the Tea Party and the base sat on its hands.
The “establishment” Republicans are naught but courtiers, content with scraps from the royal table. It’s time for them to go. They are losers.
Palin didn’t want to run. She was still cashing in while there was money out there to be made.
What did you want them to do, grab her by the shoulders and force her to take the VP Nomination, even when she didn’t want it?
Who said anything about Palin running for the VP or any other post in 2012?
But why didn’t she have a prime-time speaking role at the convention? Why didn’t Romney or the RNC seek her support? She could have energized the base to turn out for Romney.
Because they didn’t want to be associated with her conservative ideals. They are the ones who abandoned her in 2008, who sniped at her all through that campaign and made heroes of themselves with MSNBC and HBO by attacking her after the campaign. Remember how none of them had her back when she and her family went through the most despicable, vile personal destruction in history by the left and their allies in the media, and still don’t defend her in any way even today?
Rove wants to win because he’s a RINO, and wants back into power so he and his cronies get to expand the government slightly less quickly than the socialists.
What we need are reasonable-sounding people with strong connections to the establishment as our candidates. Mitt Romney would be a good one. So would John McCain. We would never lose. Karl Rove is a genius.
And Moran is backing Rove. I guess he’s gunning for Erickson’s now-vacant “right wing blogger” slot at CNN.
I think there is a problem of perception in the current Republican Party between the party insiders (including the national GOP) and the base. This is reflected in the most recent election where the National GOP did poorly against a weakened incumbent and a somewhat disillusioned opposition; however, the state and local republican candidates continued to make gains on 2010. The data would seem to suggest that erstwhile, though not all necessarily registered, republican voters (inclusive of conservatives, moderates, independents and lapsed democrats) are finding the message they want hear “at home” but that message is not being relayed to them from the national party or its selected candidates. The national party, because of the source of its campaign funds, seems to be stuck in the previous paradigm (i.e. compassionate conservatism, socio-religious issues at the forefront, slow spending instead of cutting spending, go along to get along while the American economy tanks, etc.) whereas the voter base (especially the younger portion of the base) seems to want fiscal conservatives willing to outright cut government spending and who are willing taking the fight to Democrats on spending and debt. The socio-religious issues seem to be an after thought for these voters unless and until a candidate’s views on these issue become an embarrassment. Thereafter, the voters will turn on the candidate no matter what their spending bona fides. This suggests that, at least for the national candidates, the voters are looking for a libertarian approach to socio-religious issues or at least a national candidate willing to cede the fight to the states. Hence Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock’s respective rejections in Missouri and Indiana; 2 states with more registered Republicans than Democrats. The voters wanted to put in 2 fiscal conservatives; however, their statements on abortion and women’s rights were an embarrassment (Mourdock’s less so) that no fiscal conservatism could sufficiently overcome.
This is where the national party could prove more useful. Instead of hand-picking candidates which are often at odds with what the voters want (see Rubio/Christ, Cruz/Dewhurst) why not spend the $$ vetting the candidates before the primary, training them to deal with an openly hostile media and, if they cannot be brought into the fold, only then running a primary opponent. This is what Rahm did in 2004 and 2006: he went to purple states and districts in those states, identified a moderate message that would sell to the voters in those states and districts, identified candidates that would appealed to voters in those states and districts, put those candidates in a position to run with the full backing of the DNC in exchange for strict adherence to the approved message, and ensured compliance by immediately withdrawing support when a candidate strayed from message.
Contrast that approach with the RNC and Akin and Mourdock. The RNC’s failure to completely withdraw support from Akin and, to a lesser degree, Murdock and concede the seats allowed the demoncrats to slime Romney with their idiocy and because of our supine media, it worked. We lost the senate seats and the presidency. Of course, the voter base has to take some blame here as well and, as to the long game, its failures are proving more detrimental. For every Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock that gets nominated by the plebs over the desires of the national GOP, the press uses as evidence to tarnish fiscal conservatism outright as a political ideology of crackpots. Because of this, we have to be perfect: the base has to be perfect in its choices of candidates and the national party has to be perfect in crafting viable message and demanding that the candidates adhere thereto. I know its not fair, but until some rich Republicans start buying media outlets with the clout of the NY Times or take over Reuters to balance the message, its the world we live in.
If Akin had talked about fiscal conservatism instead of rape, he would be Senator right now.
If Mourdock had stayed on message about fiscal conservatism instead of talking about children born of rape, he would be Senator right now.
Unfortunately, we’ve got social conservative candidates who feel so strongly about these issues that they just won’t stick to the economic message.
And so, what the liberal media is doing, is using “Tea Party” as an umbrella term to cover social conservatism as well as fiscal conservatism. Over and over again, I hear media commentators taking their cue from Democrats and saying “The Tea Party’s extreme views on abortion….”
The Tea Party was never set up to work on social conservatism. And the Tea Party has to stay on message, and not have its members (some of whom are SoCons too) deviating into talking about rape or gay marriage.
Yeah! Those seats should have been won, like Mitt Romney who used moderation and niceness (except when lying about Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, etc) to beat Obama, the worst President ever. Mitt showed the way, with the strong backing of Rove and John Sununu, two very smart people (just ask them) who were so forceful they alone knew Mitt Romney was the most electable Republican, so the others had to be destroyed. We need to follow these geniuses in 2014
Roger that. But, please remember, both Murdock and Akin were baited into their comments, just like Stephanopoulos threw contraception into the Republican debate from out of nowhere hoping to get a sound bite from Rick Sanatorium that could be used against him and maybe the entire Republican field. Let’s not overlook the real origin of the problem.
It will be hard to find perfect candidates who never stray from message and avoid any mistake that can be use to discredit their campaign, no matter how tenuous the connection to any actual issue in the campaign.
No, the real origin of the problem is candidates who weren’t ready for prime time. Veteran candidates know they’re going to be baited by lefties in the media and plan in advance how to handle it. Akin and Mourdock were all ready to self-destruct; all the media had to do was pull the pin.
Sure, lack of experience is why Gov. Mitt Romeny isn’t president today.
And why long time Senator John McCain wasn’t elected president.
And why long time Sentaor Bob Dole was skunked in his presidential run.
Lack of experience certainly goes a long way in explaining why Rubio and Christy lost their elections
That’s hard to accept if you regularly listen to Missouri radio, as I do. (I’m listening to Dana Loesch right now.) Actually Akin was an establishment candidate, the kind Karl Rove would have backed. He managed to be establishment without alienating Conservatives.
The real question is, why did he get asked about abortion for rape, but McCaskill was not asked about abortion for sex selection? I wonder what trap the DNC on deadline will be springing next time?
mz,
then maybe the party needs smarter candidates, the type who do NOT get baited by questions that have nothing to do with the election. Nothing wrong with calling a BS question for what it is. Instead, Akin and Murduoch let themselves be caricatured by their own words.
A U-6 rate of 15%, food stamp participation doubling on Obama’s watch, disability becoming the new unemployment, stagnation and malaise that would make Carter blush, and the allegedly small govt, conservative guys want to talk about rape and what god thinks about it. I can’t imagine why the party lost more than it should have.
So we need candidates who refuse to answer the only questions the press will ask them?
It really isn’t experience; it is a particular skill set that experience may or may not give you. A lot depends on where you ran from; safely Red States don’t usually have a media that is particularly hostile to Republicans. Purple states do, statewide races expose a candidate to some hostile media even in the Reddest states. A campaign for President exposes you to a media that hates all Republicans.
Any good advocate knows that s/he must and and knows how to prep a witness for cross-examination by a skilled and hostile interrogator. Give me a half hour and I can make a custodian, maintenance worker, or 18 year old front desk clerk reasonably comfortable in the witness chair. Sometimes they screw up, sometimes they freeze, but generally a little prep will get their testimony out and they’ll be fine on cross, at least as long as they’re telling the truth. Any good advocate also has the ability to ferret out lying or faking, a problem some candidates have.
GWB used to just drive me nuts when he’d charge into one of David Gregory’s leading questions. I’d be screaming “Objection, leading” at the TV! This is a Party function! The Party really should have mandatory candidate schools if you’re going to put an R behind your name. A half hour on questioning strategy, a few hours on the particular interests of major interest groups, that kind of thing. If you’re from a Southern right to work state the only thing you probably know about unions is you don’t like them. That won’t do in a federal election to the House, Senate, or the Presidency. Unless you’re in the energy industry or live in a Western state with a lot of federal land, you probably know very little about greenie interests or tactics.
Another major issue is that the typical Republican candidate is so anti-government that s/he really doesn’t know jack about what government does or how it does it. The biggest problem a newly elected Republican has is the fact that s/he is likely to be shown to the new office by a Democrat. Most Republicans take office without knowing where the light switches and restroom are and they definitely don’t know how to work the switches and levers of actual power. Then some lobbyist that raised a lot of money for him tells him that he can’t fire too many people because it would “cause too much disruption.” The only disruption it would really cause is of the lobbyists’ contact list. You could fire every political appointee in ANY government and nobody but reporters and lobbyists would miss them for at least a year. But the Stupid Party keeps on a bunch of Democrats, puts in a few friends and contributors of dubious competence, and then spends the term wondering why he’s being leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged and his numbers are in the toilet.
I could go on but it gets frustrating; read my book.
Very well put…
But sinz54, talking about gay marriage is more important than talking about a $16Trillion fed govt debt and >$100Trillion in unfunded liabilities…
But sinz54, talking about gay marriage is more important than talking about the divorce industry and no fault divorce and feminist family courts…
/evangelitard
“…shouldn’t an effort be made to kick the crazies to the sidelines?”
Perhaps you weren’t paying attention three months ago, but this has already been done. Was November too long ago for you to remember? Before you take down the “big tent” of the GOP, you need to reevaluate who it is you’re letting run it. The problem with folks like Rove is that they’re too keen on dismantling the GOP’s own party positions to compromise a’la “Mea Culpa” Boehner.
Me, and hundreds of thousands like me, will be voting our conscience from now on, even if it means we get more Obama’s and less of what we really want. After all, if we’re going to have to choose between two big-government progressives who are willing to vote for every plank of the democratic party platform, let’s at least choose the one who’s honest about his goals…or choose a third party candidate that actually supports his own party platform.
We’ll continue to get “more Obamas,” as you say, so long as “the base” continue to boycott candidates like Mitt Romney because the “aren’t conservative enough.” If I “voted my conscience,” I’d be wasting my vote on libertarian candidates who garner only single digit percentages. President Reagan said: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” This is a lesson a lot of conservatives ought to learn. Based on the polling I’ve seen, a lot of conservatives that voted in 2008 stayed home in 2012, allowing a good but far from perfect candidate to lose to an absolute abomination (Obama-nation) that is hell bent to spend this country into oblivion, increasing government while decreasing individual rights and responsibilities.
RUBBISH, Bob. You’re just another apologist for the worthless, lame, self-destructive Republicans who promoted Romney as “the only candidate electable!”…or did you conveniently *forget* that?!? PHHHT!
Name one candidate other than Romney who stood on the stage during the “debates” that appealed to you as electable. Ricky Santorum? Michele Bachmann? Newt? The “low-information” voter (dimwits) elected Obama. The MSM would have made sure that those voters were served with plenty of low-information about any of those folks to the extent that it would have been a total wipe-out not even approaching being as close as it was. Give it some realistic and serious thought. But don’t fret too much. The political, cultural, and economic landscape in 2016 will look like Hiroshima by the time the Obama disaster has run its course. Then we will find out to whom the single-mom cares to turn. I doubt if it will be anyone like Ricky Santorum or Ron Paul.
We never made the attempt to solicit the low information voters. Perhaps some of them might have made the connection between a poor, overtaxed and overregulated economy and their lack of good jobs, had we informed them. Mitt never attempted to connect with the rest of the country. No message, no sale.
Instead, we got four more years of the Obama Kool-Aid, aided by media distractions.
OK, genius, which of those that did actually run, no fantasy candidates, could have won in the swing purple states where this election was decided?
Art, do you mean like the great yankee hope Romney did not manage even 1 electoral vote in all of the NE and most of the MW….even idiot Boy Scout Ryan lost his ‘home’ state.
Then complain to the GOP for not providing candidates one can vote for in conscious, not to those of us who will no longer reward them for being democrat lite.
Can you cite that polling?
Romney got more votes than McCain did inn 2008, you know.
In 2012, Romney got 60,929,152 votes.
In 2008, McCain got 59,948,323 votes.
In 2004, Bush got 62,040,610 votes.
That means that Romney got only 1 million fewer votes than Bush, who won. So there can’t be “millions of conservatives who stayed home”–unless they stayed home in 2004 also!
I know of no evidence that the GOP base stayed home in November. Unless you’re going to argue
America’s population continues to increase about 1 percent a year. So do one percent of 62 million times eight and you get about 5 million, which takes Bush to about 67 million. So that’s the 6 million voters, who stayed home.
Also, I watched almost all of the debates. Santorum was the best. Mainly because he was more fluent on foreign policy than Romney, who I thought was second best. But still he was the best.
Would Santorum have won? See next paragraph. But my guess is that most of those 6 million voters, who didn’t show up were white people without college degrees. Santorum was openly, aggressively courting those voters. Romney (and Ryan) could not have been a worse choice to attract them.
O.k. Santorum and the social issues. Yes, he would have been vilified by the MSM. But did anyone notice that Obama also used the social issues to go after Romney? Lena Dunham, etc. Santorum probably would have done better with Catholic voters, who felt that Obama had crossed the line into bigotry.
Also, let’s remember, whatever we think of Santorum, his views were the law of the land and largely uncontested in America in, say, 1967. Ted Kennedy, MLK, George Meany, you name it.
Is America a better country since those fateful days? A hard case to make, but we’ll leave that for another day.
aren’t conservative enough
Ah yes, Teddy’s good pal the grandfather of Obamacare just wasn’t conservative enough for you absolutist, right wing freaks. Ditto Juan McCain.
I SPIT ON THIS RINO WRITER’S WORDS.
“The major problem for the Rove-backed group is that their own record of failure in electing candidates….”
Not only in the Senate, you imbecile…FORGETTING ROMNEY?!?
You make me sick. Please roll up in a corner and die.
PJMedia, what is *wrong* with you?!?
Self-styled “true conservatives” like you, Ed, are what give the Republican Party the image that the Left plays on. All they need are a few like you to work the left and smart are synonyms meme they play on. You want a Republican Party that could at most carry a few districts in the rural South and West. The yammerings of self-styled “true conservatives” are the reason that an open communist with a resume that wouldn’t get him any responsible job is now a two-term President. It is people like you that allowed them to simply cede the rural areas of the Country and firewall the suburbs. The Right cannot win National elections without the moderate vote of the professional and managerial class voters of the suburbs of the blue cities in swing states and even some predictably Red states such as Virginia, Georgia or North Carolina that have a significant urban and suburban population. These voters will not support fire eaters! Rove and GWB knew this, catered to it, and won twice. Romney knew this, tried to cater to it, and got tarred by being associated with the knuckle-draggers.
When you have to win the suburbs of the formerly industrial, formerly union mid-West, I don’t believe an investment banker and corporate takeover specialist really is the hot ticket, but he was the only candidate the Right had that could put two words that made sense side by side other than Gingrich who had been trashed by the Left during his time as Speaker and whose image was irreparable. Every one of the “true conservative” darlings demonstrated a talent only for self-immolation. I know you “true conservatives” like to blame the Romney people for Cain’s troubles, but the reality is that he was an affirmative action CEO, a “we have cool Black dudes too” candidate to many Republicans, and the evidence of his philandering was pretty clear. Bachmann is a little too far into the whackjob side of the scale to win moderate, suburban votes. I know it would surprise most of you “true conservative” guys but your wife would lie to you and vote against Santorum and his ilk. It’s hard for me to believe that Rick Perry is as stupid as he comes off on TV, but how he comes off on TV is all that counts. Oh, and we could have nominated batsh*t crazy RonPaulRonPaul, and put Obama right up there with LBJ’s landslide, maybe even better since the Lower South isn’t as reliably racist as it was in ’64.
If the Right is to win National elections, the R has to stand for Republican, not Redneck. I believe that abortion at any time is the taking of a human life, but there’s not a lot of places you can win elections by telling a woman that you want to put her and her doctor in jail if she chooses to abort an unplanned pregnancy. Likewise, you’re not going to carry many suburban districts by telling an otherwise reliably Republican voting couple that they can’t get an abortion for their sixteen year old daughter. The morality of it is something maybe the whole Country will have to discus with God, but the politics of it are settled. I strongly believe in the 2nd Amendment as do a majority of Americans, but if you have tubby bearded guys with a 45 in a thigh rig and an AR or AK slung over their shoulder carrying your campaign signs or walking alongside your campaign float in the 4th of July Parade, it’s going to cost you a lot of votes.
America is really still a center-right Country, but the emphasis is on center, not right. Unfortunately, the Republican version of a centrist has been a milquetoast. Even GWB was poised to be a milquetoast until 9-11. We haven’t had anyone who could reliably work the center since Reagan and, less effectively, Gingrich in his early days as Speaker. I’m sorry that Republican politics don’t live up to your expectations, but maybe the Country isn’t what you think it is either.
You were also one of those, like Roger L Simon, kvetching about all those “extreme” Republicans in the Primaries, and whining how “Romney is the only ELECTABLE candidate”…right?!?
And yet, you have the chutzpah to try to blame those who were right on the money about Romney being a mush-middler who couldn’t persuade enough cross-over voters (whether “independent” or Democrats).
Bite me, LOSER.
I do so love the soaring erudition of true intellectuals like Ed.
Actually, the only one I liked was Gingrich, but I wasn’t reticent to criticize you “true conservatives” for saying you’d stay home, vote third party, or even vote for the communist if your guy or gal didn’t get the nod.
And bite you? I wouldn’t pee on your head if your brain were on fire.
How faux-sophisticated, chump. I voted Gingrich in the Primary and Romney in the Flameout, like you. You *did* vote, didn’t you?!
I usually appreciate your prescient comments posted here. But in this case, I find your positions indicative of the GOPe view that has brought us to monumental and bitter defeat. Please consider this history:
The GOPe has had complete control of the party and the process ever since they gave Reagan the finger and iced out his “wild-eyed conservatives” in favor of the “compassionate conservatives” of the Bush years. The GOPe couldn’t pull off a win for GHWBush or Dole or McCain; they did it for Dubya, though, but just barely, which was pretty pathetic for Rove, “the Architect”, really, given that we were in the middle of a shooting war with a decent economy. The GOPe even managed to get majority control of all branches of government, like the Marxocrats did, but didn’t do anything remotely conservative with that power, unlike the Marxocrats, who used their power to destroy this country post-haste.
Most of the “reach-across-the-aisle” moderates were summarily skunked by the Marxocrats. But, this last time, from the primaries to the convention to election day, Rove and his minions drove every decision down to the last drop. The GOPe-sponsored Romney/Ryan ticket got everything they wanted, as has happened time and again, including all of the money (over a billion dollars) and all of the airtime (the TVs were alight with ads and the phones were ringing off the hooks). And there were no “raving conservatives” in sight. It was all moderates, all the time, as far as the eye could see. Yet the GOPe “strategery” led us down the garden path to another, and, I believe, fatal defeat for the Constitutional Republic, which is now dead and gone, perhaps forever.
One final point. Until and unless the GOPe stops characterizing people who value and respect the Constitution as “bat-shit crazy”, then there will be no hope for any possible future for the GOPe and their GOP. I still believe that if Romney had picked RAND Paul as his running mate, instead of Paul Ryan, he very likely would have won the election. And Rand Paul delivered his home state, unlike Ryan…
Without regard to how much he might “value and respect the Constitution,” RonPaulRonPaulRonPaul is as crazy as a shithouse rat, as are all too many of his acolytes.
You seem to neglect to mention that the McCain campaign was a snoozefest on the brink of running out of funds until he picked Sarah Palin. It was Palin that breathed life into that campaign and jealousy on the part of McCain/Rove set her up to be thrown to the wolves. The Leftist media attacked and still attack her because they knew she could and did fire up the GOP base. Rove & McCain couldn’t have a real conservative upstaging the DemLite candidate.
Unlike you, I know and worked with Sarah Palin; the real one, not the media generated one. That would be her media. I don’t believe Rove or McCain would throw a Presidential race just to keep St. Sarah out of the limelight. I can see how ANY staffer or consultant would hate her guts. I know lots of skillful, effective, even tempered people who’ve quit rather than deal with her or who’ve been fired for telling her something she didn’t want to hear. I also know that had he won, McCain would have been the most miserable man in the World as he spent his every hour wondering when he was going to feel that knife slip between his ribs like she’s done to everyone who ever helped or supported her.
That said, I can’t rule out that McCain threw it after the suspend the campaign ploy. That is just inexplicable unless somebody did to him what was clearly done to HRC and called in some sort of chit or made some sort of threat. Maybe it was the Ghost of the Keating Five, but something caused McCain to strike his colors but nobody told Sarah, who was having the time of her life. All the World’s a stage, and Sarah wants the best lights.
Art you’re right, I’ve never worked with Sarah Palin. Then again I’ve never worked with you either, nor have I lived near either of you. How do I know you’re not some disgruntled person that couldn’t stand working for a woman? Not saying that’s the case but merely making a point. I have no way to verify what you say about Palin, nor do I know you personally to have an idea of your integrity.
Now that I think about it though, I seem to vaguely recall other posts by you concerning Palin. The tone was also rather bitter like the one above, and while you may have good reason and be entirely justified in feeling that way it’s been my experience that people who are bitter about a job/co-worker were often part of the problem themselves. They bash others to hide their own failings. Again, I’m not stating that’s the case here as I don’t know you personally.
@Real Deal -
I never worked FOR Palin, we were roughly peers in the Murkowski Administration; she was in a patronage position that was a little higher on the salary scale, I was in an appointee position that was a lot higher on the org chart. In the summer of ’06 I knew I had a choice of making peace with the Democrat, Knowles, which would have meant going back to the merit system and doing some appointee’s job for him/her or becoming BFFs with Sarah. She wouldn’t have fired me, and wouldn’t have known how if she’d wanted to, but I’d have never been able to get along with her because she simply can’t stand to hear anything she doesn’t want to hear; she fired some awfully good people in her brief tenure simply because they told her things she didn’t want to hear. Anyway, long before she was even the nominee, I decided this simply wasn’t something I wanted to deal with and decided that July 1, 2006, was a really good day to go fishing.
I’ve worked for and with a lot of women, never had problems working for or with women qua women. Had a fair share of problems working for and with some women, but I’ve had a fair share of problems working for and with some men. Some people are just assholes and that isn’t gender specific.
I can only tell you that the Sarah Palin in Frank Bailey’s book about working for and with her is a lot more like the Sarah Palin I knew than the mythical creature in her “Rogue” book or in the writings of her sycophants. I’m not bitter, I just really dislike her at a variety of levels, not least the fact that she made much of her career out of lying about people who are friends of mine.
Art,
Astute as always, if I may:
” Rove and GWB knew this, catered to it, and won twice”
And they spent us into a ditch at a mere Sub-Sonic speed, as opposed to the Democrats Mach 1.1, all while being the most viciously heckled President in History. Its only a ‘win” if you are Karl Rove. The rest of us got fire hosed, and we’re supposed to be THANKFUL it was with slightly warmer water than the Ice-bath the Democrats had in store for us.
Demo-light pandering might squeak us in the door once in a while, like, if the weather is just right on Election Day,
but RINOS wont do anything but bleed us to death a little slower than the Commies.
18 trillion in debt vs 22 trillion….22 vs 25. Big whoop.
All it does is set a precedent, a trap, a check-mate, where you’re boxed in by the laser beams the media puts around you, and no “Republican” position can ever again go “less left” than that last spot they tagged one at. The next Major Candidate seeking office is forced to “out left” the last guy they defeated, and what will we get?
They WILL Fold on Magazine Capacity and “ugly guns” to seem “more reasonable” to the pretty people.
They WILL Fold on Border Security so “brown” people will hate them LESS.
Except (like magic!) those things will never happen, Its Lucy and the Football like CLOCKWORK for The Stupid Party, and The Left drives the country no matter WHO gets elected.
We get nothing out of it but a Republican Party walking on eggshells who’s main goal is to stay connected to the financial largesse available for an Elite Few of Connected Strategists, while the rest of us are sold down the river of Commie-lite
We don’t need to “trick” our way into office by sounding like liberals. We need strong, confident voices who can effectively articulate WHY Conservative Values work, and why Liberal Values don’t.
Its true the fight is in the Suburbs where the “status” of labels matters most to the low-information-yuppies.
Democrats are the Designer Brand…we’ll never beat them trying to copy the style.
We will spend good money paying for Consultants and Marketing, and STILL be viewed as Wall-Mart vs Gucci. That’s great for the independent Consultants and Marketing Professionals, (the Rove’s and Krauthammer’s) but its bad for the Industry.
We need to communicate VALUE, and QUALITY and DURABILITY, and its do-able if you actually BELIEVE IN THE PRODUCT.
Rove doesn’t.
He’s only in it for himself.
He’s as toxic to our freedom as The One himself
Art, while I no doubt believe you analysis is correct, surrendering your beliefs for political gain is short-lived IMO. Liberal candidates winning vs centerists is comparable to stepping off a boat into the ocean vs stepping off one into quicksand. I know how to swim so I’d rather just get on with while I’m still young.
@Root and Rex -
I don’t think these Republicans go into the game wanting to be Democrat Lite. Some are more statist than many conservatives would like, but it may be that they’re just statist about different things than those that particular self-styled conservative likes. There is something fundamentally wrong with how we choose our candidates or how we as a Party manage our candidates and message. First, in most of the Country the Party needs the candidates more than the candidates need the Party; the Party has few useful technical resources. It can raise money, but so can a good candidate, most everything else about a Republican campaign is based on the candidate’s resources. Consequently, we often get candidates with more money than sense. Secondly, some of it is media pressure, some of it is the kinds of people we attract as candidates but Republicans are compelled to be “nice.” The typical Republican elected or appointed official hates conflict and controversy and doesn’t want anything to do with people associated with conflict and controversy. I know from personal experience that if you are involved in anything controversial, most Republicans will throw you under the bus before they lift a finger to find out what happened and why. I’ve carried a LOT of water for Republican elected and appointed officials and I’ll guarantee you that if I showed up at some Republican grip ‘n grin tonight sometime in the first five minutes I’d hear someone say, “here comes trouble.”
In my experience what most of them do is start bargaining with themselves to try to come up with a position that the Democrats and the media will accept. You almost never see a “this is what I’d do if God died and left me in charge” proposal from Republicans, you see what they’ve sat around and bargained with themselves about to try to get something they can “sell.” This shows that they fundamentally don’t understand modern lefties. I dealt with leftist public employee unions for twenty-odd years and I never “sold” them anything, but I damn well forced them to accept some things. Our “nice guys” from the Chamber and the Rotary simply don’t understand that you can’t bargain with Democrats. They’ll only make an agreement with a loaded gun to their heads and if you remove the gun, they’ll break the agreement. If you don’t know and accept this state of affairs, they’ll use you like the cabin boy on a Greek freighter.
Pot calling the kettle black?
Art Chance — “Self-styled “true conservatives” like you, Ed, are what give the Republican Party the image that the Left plays on.”
No, just calling you an idiot. And, yes, I know that is ad hominem in its purest form. Everyone here knows it is a compelling argument.
Durn Art! You’re getting sloppy in your old age. You forgot to preface your comment “No, just calling you an idiot” with the fact that you’ve spent years and years as a high level government appointee, whooped every union boss who stumbled into your cage, and God seeks your knowledge and wisdom on all earthly matters.
Art, you’ve captured my frustration with parts of conservatives. It’s think tank versus winnable politics. Governance is compromise. Think tanks can say what they want.
“Government is compromise.”
I really hate when people say that. No government is not compromise, there are some things that cannot be “compromised” like a balanced budget in what is essentially peace time. Yes Iraq an Afghanistan cost money and technically we’re “at war” but we’re nowhere near the kind of fights WWI and WWII were and the spending they required. Yet we’re spending as a percentage of GDP as much as we spent during WWI.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_spending_chart
People seem to forget that “compromise” has more than one meaning, and it too often seems that when the GOP compromises they are doing so they are compromising the principles of the people who put them in office.
You bring up ‘A’ valid point in which more people should be rationally speaking too.
We have a serious GDP and trade imbalance problem in which nearly all other economic problems emanate from.
It is simply irrational for any congress to address ‘spending’ problems and cuts without having first addressed the core problem of GDP and trade inbalance — unless none of them have ANY solutions to those problems and have given up — in which case, we’re sunk!
The ten year ‘balanced budget’ jargon is a complete farce and only plays to the ignorance of the people on economic matters. We already have a sick GDP which cannot support the government spending obligations. ANY thing such as further devaluation of the USD, inflation on the GDP, a negative shift in interest rates on the debt and above all, ANY continued trade inbalance, ALL draw down negatively on the GDP thus, the farce of claiming to present a balanced budget in these times, with the problems mentioned.
The proposed ‘spending cuts plan’ is akin to treating a broken bone with a bandaid. Even with a ‘perfect’ plan and perfect good luck, it will take a few decades to get out of and recover from this mess. NONE of the many variables of today, are even remotely the same, as other historical points of reference.
I guess this means I won’t be getting a Christmas card this year from excitable Eddy.
Yeah, I’m not saving a spot on my mantle either.
After witnessing the massive and systemic election fraud last November that delivered every single “battleground” state to the monster Hussein and the Marxocrats, it should be obvious to everyone that there will never be another legitimate national election ever again. Yet the GOP continues to fail its constitutuency by accepting such fraud without complaint or challenge. And this happens every election, each election being worse than the last, with the completely fraudulent elevation of Hussein being the pinnacle of the Marxocrats criminal attempts at disenfranchising the Republican voters and pissing on the Constitution. And this is just one more reason why the feckless and cowardly GOP has become nothing more than willing collaborators with the Marxocrats in the destruction of the Constitutional Republic. The GOP is so over…
You forgot to include the “camp followers” / “fellow travelllers” like the author.
blackelkspeaks your are exactly right. The main line Republicans never question or force the issue on an obvious case of fraud and there have been a good number. Maybe it is because the DOJ is run by Eric Holder who is like Obama, couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it. Both say What is The Constitution? Something that should be considered irrelevant in modern days. It makes me sick.
Religious Right after Reaganism
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/11/the-religious-right-after-reaganism/peter-j-leithart
Enter Embrace and love affair with Ayn Rand in the GOP
the leftist atheist appear to be more Christian with mercy and compassion for Jesus message but join with Ayn Rand in in the glory murder of 55 million little babies in mommies tummy ,the left do this because they believe they are not human but tissue, the Randites to make sure nothing interferes with the right for good pleasure sex.
All the dems now have to do to to get religious right on their side is stop abortion because to for the GOP embrace Ayn Rand the GOP religious right dirty their conscience and to on lookers people say they only want babies to be born to become homeless on the streets and the gated GOP communities protect GOP eyes from seeing evil just as it is in Brazil
more latter
In 2004 then senator Sphincter had a serious challenger in the primary in Pat Toomey and in road Bush/Rove to save sphincter. So someone please explain to me how reelecting Sphincter helped the GOP. As far as O’Donnell goes Rove had his panties in such a twist that she beat the establishment anointed candidate that he did almost everything short of making campaign appearances for O’Donnell’s opponent. The rove faction has gotten the candidate they wanted in Bob Dole, John McCain, And Mitt Romney all loosers and now this sage from the mountain top is going to help us poor little people make the proper choice in nominating candidates, I say bugger off.
Malkin’s pinky has more testicular fortitude than the author’s entire family tree:
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/02/04/kneel-before-zod-gop-control-freak-karl-rove-launches-new-effort-to-snuff-out-tea-party/
This is what Republicans need to read and understand. Right now most of them are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/05/Top-Ten-Things-Republicans-Have-Failed-to-Learn-from-Democrats
I couldn’t agree less. What a ridiculous argument. Let’s win the next battle and lose the war. America faces bankruptcy and with it the four prophesied horsemen. Vote for the man who can win,argues the cock-sucker who wrote this opp-ed, not the patriot who loves America. Why swim when drowning is so much more sensible. Rick, I hope you read the comments, because I want you to be aware that I’m making my ass available for your lips to kiss.
Jack, got some serious homo-eroticism going, huh?
Moran has some serious stupid going on. Rove’s credibility is right up there with Bernie Madoff’s, but go ahead, keep listening. Attitude is not ability.
It doesn’t (or, at least, it shouldn’t!) take a political genius to see that as long as the Bush/Rove/Fox News/ beltway establishment RINOs keep shoving Bush/Rovian/compassionate conservative/go along to get along/northeastern RINOs like Romney down our throats, the GOP will NEVER win another national election EVER AGAIN! The question is, how long will the TEA party caucus in the House and Senate put up with this nonsense?!? I’d LOVE to see them all resign from the GOP, en masse, if only for the entertainment value; the whailing and gnashing of teeth from the establishment would truly be epic!
I think the Republican Party has become a waste of time. Let it go the way of the Whigs. America needs a real Conservative Party, not Democrat-lite.
You are 100% right.
The only reason I’m a “republican” is because its the only (slightly) viable alternative to the Communists.
Independents and Libertarians are tools (fools) created and funded by the Dems to siphon-off a few more angry voters and consolodate their hold.
If there was a “viable” third party, I’d send them some money, but their aint.
Best bet is for Tea Party Energy to permeate the deeper into Republican Party, and we might need an “Accidental Discharge” or “slip on the soap” moment for some of the top-dogs in that Treasonous Rove Cabal to make that happen.
It’s not just the Tea Party nominating fatally flawed candidates. I know the establishment would love to lay Akin at the Tea Party’s door, but his kind of big-gov’t social conservatism has little to do with the small ‘L’ libertarian principles of the Tea Party – and far more to do with establishment figures like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.
Fact is, there is plenty of blame to go around. The GOP does need to find a way to get better, more electable candidates. And everyone – ‘establishment’ and ‘Tea Party’ alike – need to remember who the true enemies really are. For the most part, they have Ds after their names, not Rs.
Lost in the MO race was the TP split, some backed Steelman (Palin endorsed), others backed Brunner and some Akin, I believe Akin squeaked by because Steelman / Brunner split the vote. Also lost is the money spent by the Left to help Akin win the primary because they knew he was the weakest candidate.
Lost in the IN race was the Lugar impact, he lost the primary so he and his followers took their ball and bat and went home and trashed Mourdock. Yes, Mourdock said some stupid things but the Lugar self-inflicted GOP wound was not helpful coupled with a 3rd party candidate who took away votes.
How is it the grassroots resulted in win after win in Wisconsin, yet when establishment Thompson lost?
Rove backed Dewhurst, TP backed Cruz? Would Dewhurst fight for freedom like Cruz, no……..
True enough, and duly noted. Cruz was my guy here in Texas. However, recall that Karl Rove cut his teeth on Texas politics, managing some successful gubernatorial campaigns before he handled George Bush 43 in 2000. While I don’t know this for certain, I’d bet my allowance this week that he and Dewhurst were friendly during that period whereas Ted Cruz really came out if nowhere. Loyalty is important in politics if you ever expect to be able to call in your chips.
Akin had no Tea Party support. He was supported by McCaskill. Seriously.
If you think Huckabee and Santorum are establishment, you’re delusional. If Huckabee were part of the establishment he’d be President right now.
I should be used by now to seeing such ridiculous assertions from this particular author. …. sigh.
For the record, Sarah Steelman was the Tea Party candidate. She was even endorsed by Sarah Palin who ran an ad for her.
http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=16945586
The Tea Party simply supported Akin after he won the primary (with massive help from Democrat voters who voted in the Republican primary).
The fact Moran still pushes this bald face lie tells you everything you need you need to know about where this author is coming from.
Oh, and I’d suggest Palin has a better track record of backing winning candidates than Rove does.
Good point regarding Sarah Steelman being the original Tea Party candidate. If the Karl Roves of the GOP supported her instead of trying to divide the party, MO would have a conservative female senator.
By the way, Rick, “realists” would be the last term I’d use for scoundrels like Rove.
Have to agree about the author. I frankly was surprised to read this sort of disparaging language in PJM.
This is not the journalism that we have been celebrating in Roger’s congratulatory send off.
The author admits no bias or position, but makes direct and pointed statements indicating that one side has value while the other has none, all without justification.
Onward with the crapification of the USA. Many many many folks sense that things are going terribly wrong, yet they will have no voice? All we really need are more geniuses who claim they can win elections? To what end?
Note to Moran: the Constitution *is* holy writ.
Hear! Hear!
The Karl Rove big money types hated Reagan and did everything possible to block his nomination. They backed HW Bush in ’88 because he was committed to undoing to everything Reagan did.
I laugh when I hear these idiots called “realists”. They aren’t realistic when it comes to winning elections. They are from a more self-centered type of pragmatism – the desire to ride the big government crony-capitalism gravy train along with the Democrats.
>>GOP Realists vs. the True Believers<<
Faux-GOP Beltway Incumbent Party vs. Real Conservatives
There. Fixed the title for you.
HEH.
So true!
As usual, Moran is far more worried about appearing above the fray – the David Frum of the PJMedia. Is Moran really that different than Karl Rove, though without the money and without the clout? I read this article twice, and while nicely written it appears to be void of real content. What purpose does it serve besides to sound smug and self-righteous?
So tell us Moran. I’ve noticed you don’t provide much in the way of specifics. Ever. Whose your idea of the ideal candidate? Richard Lugar? So we should elect a feckless man because he can get elected? Is that what I am understanding from your high brow? Exactly how is that going to turn us around again?
Here’s the problem with you, Moran:
It doesn’t really matter whether Barack Obama is a Muslim. What matters is how Obama deals with ‘Muslim’ issues. I guess I’m the fringe, because while I think Barack Obama’s real religion is him – political expediency for the sake of getting reelected, holding favor to gain power – the fact is, Obama is empowering the rise of Islam and the Caliphate, both here and abroad. You dispute this?
As to whether Obama is out to destroy America, no one but the Almighty knows Barack Obama’s intentions. But once again the fact is, Obama is destroying America. Do you dispute this?
If not, then what purpose do you serve here Mr. Moran? Besides to drive traffic for PJMedia and marginalize the vast majority of the Republican Party as simply not up to your immense level?
Drat. I could have saved myself some writing time if I’d just seen your comment first.
Nah, as a long-time fan of the Mr. Buzzsaw, you’re the more gifted writer. PJMedia would do well to give you a place at the head table IMHO. They grabbed Zombie for the pictorials and the humor. They need to add your straight scoop to the humorous artistry.
Well said.
By all means, keep nominating moderate RINOs like Dole, McCain, and Romney. We all saw how “well” they did. Why is Rove so determined to use a formula that always loses? I’ll tell you why, because they are nothing but RINOs with very little difference now between themselves and the Democrats. The only real difference is that the RINOs will spend money a little more slowly than the liberals. THAT’S IT! Rove wants to ignore people like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubia and act as if they never happened. Instead of joining and advising the Tea Party and giving them ideas on how to strengthen their candidates, Rove wants to destroy the Tea Party. Why? Because the Tea Parties are a threat to the elite’s hold on the Republican Party, that’s why. And RINOs like Rove will not tolerate that. I’m really beginning to think we’re better off with a third party and let the RINOs lose on their own. If I’m going to lose an election, I’d rather lose standing for conservative principles, rather than lose by trying to out-liberal a liberal.
It’s becoming quite clear that the RINO’s are more afraid of the left than of their base, big mistake. Many of us who back the Tea Party candidates will stick together and vote for who WE think are the best to represent US, win or lose. It’s called principles, standards, and truth.
Great refutation of this article at SULTAN KNISH:
”Who Were the Geniuses Who Came Up with That One?”
http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.il/
Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ.
Wow, straw man alert!
Ricky, we view the Constitution as law. The genius of the US was a universal rule of law, providing a stable playing field and chance for individual freedom under the law. There is a way of changing the Constitution (amendments), which to my knowlege, is not typically available in holy writs. This malleability of law to suit the party in power is the source of the rot in politics.
Sorry, Ricky, we may have to agree to disagree on this one, but I have no issue with Rove’s people. I do have a problem with his myopia. Eventually the worm will turn and the populace will look for the party of laws, and conservatives will have a market. If that doesn’t occur, there is nothing worth competing for.
Dear Dagger,
>>This malleability of law to suit the party in power is the source of the rot in politics.<<
You hit the nail on the head with that line. Stated differently, arbitrariness of interpretation and enforcement of the law is at the root of tyranny.
You have conveyed a powerful truth in a very brief post – much light and little heat, which is in constrast to so many of the other spiteful posts here. Don't get me wrong – I share in the frustration of many of the commenters although I tend to think that the name-calling from a few individuals is counterproductive. Clearly, this article has aroused passionate emotions in many readers (and for good reason – there is much at stake in this debate on the future of the GOP). There is a sense of urgency because the countdown to the 2014 elections is underway.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
Wallis is right: what is wrong with you PJMedia?
We do not want centrists, and yes, Rove is a centrist. Historically, Republicans have almost always been centrists. Objectively speaking, the only hardcore conservatives in the entire 20th century were Coolidge and Reagan. Conservatives are tired of having their party whore itself to the whims of its opponents in vain attempt to win favor.
Centrists continually bring up Todd Akin, whose mistake was simply misunderstanding the reason rape-based abortions are rare. Instead of simply correcting Akin – whose pro-life conviction was consistent with the party’s pro-life platform – the GOP threw him under the bus and changed the platform to prevent the question from coming up again. Instead of defending Tea Party-popular candidates like Gingrich, Bachman, and Cain from baseless allegations and bad press, we were constantly told that Romney was “inevitable.” No-one listened to me before the election when I said Romney would lose, but lose he did.
If the party cannot bother to listen to its constituents then it can go to hell. A third party will never survive a general election; I vote for secession. This country is broken beyond repair.
Thank you, GMan.
NOT TO ALL INTERESTED READERS: There is a link at the bottom right of this page called “contact us.”
It *does* work. Let PJMedia know what you think of this author.
It *does* take time (quite a few more of such articles), but they *do* seem to get the message – and take corrective action – eventually.
I will not be calling for Moran to be silenced. I believe he is wrong, but we need to know what our “friends” are telling us and understand why they are wrong.
If Karl Rove has principles beyond winning for the sake of power, I have yet to discern them.
Using your neurotic “logic,” Mark…*you* are trying to silence *me*. PHHHT.
PJMedia can use a few better writers, yes, in place of such trash.
Perhaps “neurotic” is not the correct term.
SELF-FLAGELLATING might be more fitting.
That is all.
You belong to the school of thought which whines that stopping NPR’s Federal funding is CENSORSHIP!!!1!eleventy!
Good luck with the DemoLites, sonny.
And while your at it, let AT know what you think of their editor.
*you’re
Seccession talk is going to get a lot louder when the bankruptcy-bound “blue” states come to Uncle Sam for massive bailouts (of their union pension plans) within the next few years. At that point taxpayers in the non-stupid states will begin to say, after Horace Greeley: “Erring sisters, go in peace.” Hopefully it’ll be a much more civil war this time.
The term “American Civil War” is a fallacy. It was the War of Secession, or if you’re a deep southerner The War of Northern Aggression. There was no contest for control over the US. The Constitution was freely signed by all the States forming the U.S.A. via a contract represented by the aforementioned Constitution. When the Southern States attempted to secede peacefully Lincoln provoked them into war by refusing to remove USA troops from CSA land. If it was a Civil War there’d be battlefield memorials near Boston and New York, but aside from the Gettysburg Campaign no fighting took place on Union soil.
By today’s standards Lincoln and many of his generals would be war criminals for the things they did to the people of the Confederate States. He wrecked the South and forced it back into the Union at gun point. It was not a civil war but one of conquest, the crap they teach you in public schools is not accurate.
Someone knows the true historical record. A revealing book to read is “The Real Lincoln” by Thomas DiLorenzo.
And then the mercantilists of Boston, Nooo Yawk, and Philadelphia figured out what a free trade Port of New Orleans would do to the west to east trade they’d been spending so much money, much of it from customs revenue from The South, on to build roads, canals, and railroads. The natural and more economic route for the agricultural products and natural resources of the Old Northwest and the developing Northern Plains was the Y formed by the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. There’s a reason one of the few differences between the US and CS Constitutions is the CS’ plain language prohibition against federal spending for internal improvements in the states. There’s also a reason that the first major federal campaigns were against Confederate control of the vital Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and New Orleans. Lots of Yankee officers, “Spoons” Butler foremost among them got very rich off contraband cotton and not a little exporting commodities to The Bahamas where it could be sold back to the Confederacy. The odds are pretty good that the rotten bacon the Army of Northern Virginia was eating in the Petersburg trenches came from Arkansas and Lousiana pigs.
Mark Levin takes on Rove and Steven Law, grab some coffee and listen Levin
http://www.therightscoop.com/extended-audio-mark-levin-exposes-karl-rove-steven-j-law-and-why-they-are-bad-for-gop/
Rovino and his band of thieves would be better off spending money to expose the Left’s playbook, run a third party candidate in every key race, look at all of the Senate races the GOP should have won and see how many had a 3rd party candidate who successfully peeled off enough votes to tip the election, such as OH. Read The Blueprint, “How the Democrats won Colorado (and why Republican everywhere should care)”
Rove has meddled in elections in the past, Toomey lost to Specter who then changed parties and was the 60th vote for ObamaCare.
Rick mistakenly gives credit to Rove for Deb Fischer’s win in NE, she was the (wait for it…) Tea Party pic who pulled the upset win in the primary over the establishment pic. Palin was again in on the primary backing Fischer. The grassroots rallied around Fischer for the win. Rove may have spent money in the general but the battle was in the primary as it was with Cruz (Rove backed Dewhurst).
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/Senate/2012/0515/Nebraska-s-GOP-Senate-primary-another-tea-party-surprise
All I know is that I’m going to run away from anyone Karl Rove and his faux “conservative” groups endorse and back financially. If his candidate is left on the ballot, I’ll leave the line blank.
Its curious that the Republican “big tent” isn’t big enough to include anyone who is remotely conservative. So really what they have is a liberal tent masquerading as a conservative one. And that was evident during the spend-a-thon Bush II years. And it hasn’t stopped. So what we are left with is John Boehner sayin’ that he is only one half of one third of the House. Crap-ola is carp-ola plain and simple. He isn’t gutless; only complicit.
Bush gave us Obama. To quote the greatest person ever to serve the public, “What difference does it make?”
Without conservatives, including whatever categories one wishes to subdivide them into, the GOP will garner, perhaps, on a good “electable” day, maybe 19% of the vote. Maybe as high as 30%.
The issue seems to be framed as “Will the GOP be the Tory Party of the US and run on the basis that they’re just more efficient?”
For example, go out and enlist a rabid, foaming at the mouth, work 24/7, baying at the moon, volunteers to “get out the vote” using the Rove Rustlers. You’ll recruit them by saying “Hey! We don’t swear like they do and we believe in bipartisan compromise and, gee, we’re just nicer moderates.” Good luck.
Who are “the money men.”
In many cases, their money is your money. Think about it.
Asking for candidates who will obey the law of the land, the Constitution, isn’t fringe. Wanting candidates who understand the fiscal disaster this country faces and who will take real steps toward real reform isn’t idiocy. Neither is asking for candidates who put America first and are proud of their country, who will rein in immigration and who will oppose the liberal’s social agenda because it, like the rest of their policies, will, not, work in the long run, isn’t crazy, it’s common sense.
Asking the base to support candidates who are so close to being liberal Democrats you need a microscope to spot the differences, that’s idiocy. If a candidate is open border, pro amnesty, supports unlimited spending, unlimited social programs, and sell out the country for calculated personal gain, why should they be supported just because they mouth support for guns, against abortion or pretend to be against debt and taxes?
One thing is for sure! There are certain authors even on PJMedia that are best ignored or just to be gazed at!
Thanks Moran for showing me who not to bother reading! Thank goodness there are others worth reading here.
Paging Buzzsawmonkey, at least I can get a chuckle out of his work!
Just skip to the comments.
Moran betrays his own bias in the titla of his article. The “realists” backed Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio. The Tea Party gave us numerous excellent candidates who are serving in office now. When Moran frames it as an “us vs. them” mentality, with conservatives the bad guys who need to be controlled why should anyone believe what he says?
Well said Steve!
Wow Moran! Nice of you to give “wacky, looney, right-wing nut jobs” such glowing reviews. And damn that pesky Constitution and all of us little people and our ridiculously relentless and stubborn habit of adhering to principals! I mean REALLY! WTF are we thinking?
Holy Smokes! We hear that tripe from these statists all the time and now on PJ Media as well?
I daresay stooping to the level of kissing the left’s enemy buttocks doesn’t sit well with some of us bitter clingers. We’re not to blame because you don’t have a spine.
So pucker up buttercup all you want, you may even want to ask if the enemy would like their buttocks polished to a highly fine sheen before applying your lips, but don’t ask the rest of us to do it.
Mr. Moran, this is not a small debate Mr. Rove has entered into. ON the contrary, he has fired a massive charge across the conservative bow, finally noting where he really stands. His track record is truly miserable, and certainly gives zero credence to any assertions he has made about vetting “best candidates who can win”. Excuse me. Who is he to assert who can win? His track records sucks air big time. You have missed the essence of his arrogance and ill-intentions. His group is more fired up over shutting out conservatives than they are about beating democrats. This is where I part ways with the GOP establishment. They have finally institutionalized the attempt to retain some form of power, even if they end up losing. THe list of senatorial candidates the GOP establishment backed and lost with is long and tedious. Mr. Rove wants to perpetuate that list while shutting out the Tea Party candidates and conservatives before they can gain traction. That tactic was attempted here in PA where the state GOP apparatchiks endorsed their candidates without any grass root feedback. That is what Mr. Rove is working on. Cutting those candidates off at the knees before they have a chance. For the record, I suspect his effort is as doomed as most of this campaigns were: Mr. Cruz et al have already created more space than anyone anticipated. I also suspect that is why the Senatorial committee refused to support Sen. Cruz. It will be interesting to be sure.
Rove and the GOP are a joke, we need serious leaders now more than ever!
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: You have casually compiled a laundry list of people to dismiss in the same way that the Left casually tars as “hate speech” any ideology which makes it uncomfortable, and for the same reason; you want to avoid engaging with things that make you uncomfortable. That would be bad enough, were it not that you fail to understand that Obama has succeeded by creating a coalition of minority grievance groups that he has carved out of the majority of the electorate. You seem to suggest—possibly even to believe—that the way to success for the Republicans is to jettison and marginalize its own genuinely aggrieved allies, and instead to whore after Obama’s minority-grievance foot soldiers. That defies any sort of political intelligence or logic.
In the meantime, let’s look at some of your dismissals, shall we?
It is hardly “crazy” to believe that Obama “is a Muslim,” given that he is accounted one according to the terms of Muslim law, and given that his “Christian pastor” is a former member of the Nation of Islam. Whether or not he actually is Muslim happens to be irrelevant, however—it is his overtly pro-Muslim policies, and his own statement that given a choice he “will stand with the Muslims” that are a wholly legitimate cause for concern. In the meantime, there is nothing wrong about expressing this legitimate concern in the form of coarse jokes about just how far his Islamophilia extends. No President is above coarse jokes, and this one deserves them more than most.
If you think it is “crazy” that he is out to destroy America, you haven’t visited America recently—nor taken a close look at the man’s policies.
If you think that the Constitution is not, or should not be, regarded as “akin to holy writ,” you are lacking a serious appreciation for the genius of that document, for the level of direct attack to which it is currently being subjected, and for the amount it is being disregarded and undermined, to our detriment.
There are elements of libertarianism and objectivism which are cogent and sensible; there are elements of these philosophies—as there are in all philosophies—that are loopy. To merely invoke them for the purpose of casually dismissing them is behave as an intellectual lightweight.
You have phrased your rhetorical questions in terms that would make Jim Messina proud. If you’re not yet on the OFA payroll, you might want to send this column in with your resume; they’ve got a lot of cash floating around from nicely anonymous donors. In the meantime, how’s that Obamaphone™ working for you?
Wells aid Buzz. I don’t think Rove backed establishment hacks nor loons like Akins are the answer. We need more people like Pat Toomey who are Conservative and electable.
Thanks for your observations, Buzz. You are one of the few who has made the difficult journey from the left of the political spectrum to arrive at the right. Those who do not acknowledge the implications of a post-9/11 world are willfully ignorant. Self-serving political agents like Rove are dangerous to free societies.
More to the point, a little sea chantey:
Republicans are nearly wrecked
Mark well what I do say—
Republicans are nearly wrecked
‘Cause Karl Rove’s been their “architect”
I’ll go no more a-Roving with Karl Rove’s aid
A-Roving, a-Roving
‘Cause Roving’s been my ru-i-in
I’ll go no more a-Roving with Karl Rove’s aid…
I see it like those guys that have a “garage band” if its just about the “music” then you can sit in your basement and play to your hearts content. If you want to do more than you have to make some changes.
It does no-one any good to draw a hard line in the sand then watch the Lefties get elected oevr and over and over and over again—which hurts EVERYONE and nation as whole.
Responable people can disagree but a certain amount of realpolitik is in play here. And there should be momment where people can go “Ok, don;t agree with everything that person stands for–but I agree on most of it.”
That being said, the Right is NEVER going to get anywhere being “Lefty Lite.” That is IMO, where McCaine and Romeny made their first mistakes–they felt essentially the SAME way on any number of issues as did Obama, they differed mainly in DEGREE.
You have to give people a clear and resonable choice…..IMO.
“You have to give people a clear and reasonable choice”
And it takes an unafraid candidate to say:
“thats fundamentally wrong, and here’s why”
and:
“I completely disagree what idea, this is why its wrong”
Or Unconstitutional.
Or Un-American.
Or counterproductive.
Or wasteful.
Or, Or, Or.
We need candidates who can make the arguments, because they BELIEVE in the arguments.
Candidates that have the courage tell the truth, not the “sneakiness” to “architect” a plan based on lies deceit, and a “fear of getting caught” by their postions.
If only Rove, Boehner, McConnell, and now Moran put as much energy into beating the Democrats as they do in defeating their base, we might actually make progress.
Let’s redefine fringe as: believing unemployment checks stimulate the economy, that Executive Orders have the same authority as law, that illegal immigrants benefit the country, that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and democratic, that gun control keeps Chicago safe, that bankrupting the country will make it stronger, that raising taxes causes economic growth…
I’m glad that Moran has outed himself as a coward. He isn’t up for the fight. He’s the kind of person that would have compromised with the British, with slavery, Germany, the USSR… all to avoid being associated with the fringe.
P.S. Why did Obama win? Because he got his base out. You know, the fringe.
More specifically, Obama won by suppressing the independent vote in the swing states by sliming Romney for three unanswered months to the tune of over $100 million. Brilliant tactical move that Romney couldn’t answer because he’d spent the previous six months fighting off the seven dwarfs (and Snow White), most of whom had no prayer of winning either the primary or the general. O’s relentless assault didn’t keep the Republicans at home; it kept indies (who were leaning heavily toward Romney) from voting while O’s faithful Kool Aid swillers still came to the polls. Appalling but effective. I’d have to say, though, that Rove’s negative ads didn’t to anything to change that dynamic. Of course, he was checkmated because he couldn’t say anything positive about Romney due to the campaign laws.
There’s more to it: yes, there was some NP, soft R, suppression, but I think they did a pretty good job of swaying NPs, especially NP females to Obama with the “war on women” meme. I think they did a pretty good job of getting male NPs with painting Romney as the Biz School smart guy that milked the company dry and went bankrupt causing that guy who was once a $30 -$40/hr. union guy to now be either a public employee if he’s lucky, a WalMart greeter, or unemployed. But what they did best was get out their vote. Matt Reese’s “sociodemographic targeting” was designed to use union guys with clipboards and boiler rooms with rotary dial phones to identify and get out the people who were going to vote for you. They used a lot of very slick new technology to do a very old thing and I have to give them credit for being very smart about the current environment. The Republicans have never had a good ground game but they compensated with money to use media to turn out their vote. They no longer have the money advantage and more importantly when media is so fragmented and there is so much campaign advertising, it is the same as no advertising because nobody’s message gets through. Sure, the Republicans were congratulating themselves for the reporting periods where Romney raised and spent more than Obama, but it was WASTED because it was lost in the clutter. The Ds went back to their old-school ways of turning out their vote and really just bought media to make sure Romney got lost in the clutter. Throw in the usual urban voter fraud to make sure the urban vote can overwhelm the suburban vote and you get a Democrat victory.
My plan would have defeated Obama in all the swing states, including Wisconsin. Sure it’s a little new, possibly even unconventional.
The Republican/conservative team should have its generals and armies fighting non-stop against Obama and his Dems all the way to the convention, and afterward too. Continue the campaign of ideas even after candidate Romney has been selected. Confusing to the mass electorate maybe, but also news-churning and exciting to local voters.
Keep Santorum on the road all through the midwest, attacking Obamacare, accusing it of being the harmful tax monster that it is. Santorum would be the best person to explain other methods will truly improve healthcare delivery. Santorum’s touring would also enable election of R senators in Indiana and Missouri. Rick Santorum knows how to speak where Mourdock and Akin were so unattractive. Did you not notice the nation pulled the covers over its head on Friday morning after the election, queasy sick to the stomach, muttering “Oh God, we forgot how important it was to vote against Obamacare”?
Another general, Newt Gingrich, is on the speech-path bringing good news of energy independence and a prosperous economy for all. He would tell the people we have a chance to spare ourselves from economic ruin, if we start reversing Leviathan now. Let me tell you a secret: when a nation has cheaper fuel, every factor of economy is stronger; there is more wealth made at less cost. When a nation has cheaper fuel than other nations have… oh good for them!
There could be more than two out there. The team can get pretty big. But Gingrich and Santorum should have criss-crossed New Jersey to Minnesota and back four months straight. Romney just needed to look prudent and presidential and show strength when saying Obama is neither.
That’s the only way Romney could have been elected: by Republican Team campaigns on the ground in towns and cities, celebrating the vision of fiscal sanity and the goodwill of an empowered citizenry.
Maybe in 2016 the Republicans will have a strong conservative who can win with an old-fashioned campaign, but I doubt it. 2016 will need the Team in the field or again too many candidates will lose on their own.
Buzzsawmonkey breaks down the flaws in the Moran assertions with much more class than I could ever achieve. Thanks Buzz, enjoy reading anything you write!
“Indeed, victory seems farther away today than it did yesterday.” I disagree. The Conservative movement is going through a battle for out future. The Old Guard sees things in economic terms. The new guard sees things in cultural terms. In the long run, if we don’t win back the culture, we lose everything else. Wresting the microphone and the movie camera from Hollywood won’t be easy, but that is where we need to start. More than everything else, ‘It’s the culture, stupid!’
Moran, a little dance there eh buddy? Some skipping from conservative to electing Republicans, slight of hand, blurring of distinctions?
What it boils down to Chump is, what’s the point of a Rove like stance and set of policies if in effect it’s leftism light? But if all that matters is one’s politcal career and earnings then crawl and follow the Democrats.
The real problem here is Karl Rove…..just read the comments. The Republicans have a problem and his name is Karl Rove. Please just go away…..forever. No one can stand the guy and for the record he did give us Tarp, No child left behind, Prescription drug, Harriet Myers, not to mention steel tariffs and farm bills. It is precisely this record that turn conservatives off…Go Away!
It didn’t immediately occure to me, but Mr. Moran seems like he may be one of those people that believe that the constitution is a “living document”. Hmmm, now, who else do we know of that thinks that?!? (Hint: he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC!) Mr. Moran has clearly demonstrated that not only is he not a conservative, I’m not even sure that he could be considered to be a RINO, at least RINOs pay lip service to the constitution being the immutable law of the land!
“Fundamental,” not “immutable.” It can be changed by a process it prescribes, but of course the process is too difficult for the “progressive” geniuses who know better and are impatient for “hope and change.”
Of course, Akin wasn’t the Tea Party candidate, but rather the winner in a multiway race with an Establishment-pushed “electable” candidate as spoiler, but what difference does that make?
Just read David Horowitz’s essay at Powerline which makes it very clear that Rove, Moran, et al, will never, ever win another national election. No matter what. Not only is this the wrong tree to back up and the wrong fight to fight and the wrong way to even discuss the issues but it underscores the spectra of why the GOP and conservatives lose, and lose, and lose.
And, with Rove and the Rovettes steering the ship, start practising saying Madame Speaker.
I agree with Buzzsawmonkey as the response cited some of the most offensive and untruthful text of the article. I would suggest Rick needs to see “Obama 2016″ as Obama is anti-colonialist and deeply hates America, Christian and western culture, and all she stands for……completing the “Dreams of his Father”!
In addition to this, Mr Moran’s conclusion: “Neither side covered themselves in glory in 2012. And Republicans need a lot more than money and even viable candidates to take control of the Senate, maintain control of the House in 2014, and position themselves for a White House run in 2016″ Republicans can get the money, as Romney proved;Rather,its about differentiation which the RINO’s don’t understand is the problem. Boehner is a joke and is playing checkers with people playing chess. The problem is we have enough Boehner and McCain’s who reach across the isle every chance to be the MSM darling. So if Lugar won, what does it give us but more Democrat policy that is said to be bi-partisan by a gang of “reasonable 13″.
Romney, while I believe may have won if not for rampant fraud in “battleground states” (more voters than population and statistically impossible 100% votes for Obama) he could not speak conservatism from the heart. He didn’t attack Obama like he attacked conservatism, Santorum or Gingrich. Unlike Reagan, he didn’t believe the conservative message in his core (Holy Writ?). He was reading from a cheat sheet rather than speaking from the heart. Reagan would win again today in a landslide.. there does not need to be a change in the platform as all the RINOs are running around saying…The Republicans need a leader, a person who is confident in conservative principles and can speak to the people in understandable language and tell them why they have been/are being lied to! Tell them what greatness can be in store for them if unshackled from the government! Let them understand it and unmask the alternative Socialism/Marxism into the light of day!Yes, ignore the media, speak the truth and educate. Who doesn’t want freedom and individual dignity?
It was time for Lugar to go. He voted for the absurd START 2 Treaty and he no longer even owned a home in Indiana. Richard Mourdock could have won that election if he hadn’t destroyed himself with a bizarre answer to an easilty forseeable question. Rather than try to defeat candidates like Mourdock, I would rather see an organization try to coach and develop them so that they are prepared for a major election. Todd Akin, like Sharon Angle before him, was a fluke who happened to squeak by in a 3 way primary with help from the Democrats. There were other conservative candidates in that race, including one endorsed by Sarah Palin. The unfortunate thing about Rove’s group is that, rather than do something constructive, it’s probably just out for money.
Mourdock could have won if Lugar had offered his active support to ensure that a Republican kept the Senate seat. Instead, he picked up his chips and went home to Establishmentland to commiserate with his Republican and Democrat “colleagues” at A-list social functions. Not in Indiana, by the way, as he hasn’t actually lived there in years!
The establishment is all about crony capitalist and big government. Is that what we free enterprise republicans really want?
How did you become a writer for this website? Yes, the Republican party was in great shape when Bush and Rove left the scene in 2009 (ha,ha). Wasn’t their approval rating at about 20%. The tea party was not responsible for Todd Akin. Sarah Palin campaigned extensively for another lady candidate in that race. I personally attended a tea party rally where Sarah spoke in support of Ted Cruz. I believe he will become a star of the tea party movement. Mr. Rove supported David Dewhurst. I was appalled at the comments made by Akin and Mourdock during their senate races.
What the Tea Party “bomb-throwers” are disgusted with is a GOP that perennially gives away the momentum to the Democrats, allowing the Left to define the debate and being too timid to speak up for itself and its own value system. The Left has no qualms about fighting tooth-and-nail for what it believes in but the GOP is lost in an endless witless cycle of trying to prove that it really hates Jim Crow. It is pretty obvious that the Big Dogs of the GOP really are what their critics accuse them of being – racist elitist Old White Boy Plutocrats – otherwise why would they work so hard to deny it?
All the GOP dinosaurs care about is keeping their powerful and lucrative elected positions and raking it in in the shadow of the Liberal Democrats; why should we give a damn about them?
The deepest problem — the one that neither Tea Partiers nor Republican insiders seem to recognize — is that political campaigns are a waste of time as long as the left does the entertaining. Low information voters know what they know not because of news, but because of the music they listen to, the movies and television that they watch, and the entertainment websites that they visit. Do you think the average Democratic voter (and for that matter, many Republican voters) have a clue how big the deficit is, why, what tax rates are like today relative to 1994?
If you want to win elections, you have to soften up the ground first by entertaining low information voters and subtly educating them. This is something that goes on year in and year out. Best of all: if you do it right, you can actually make money doing it, because most people want to be entertained. Unfortunately, the left are much better capitalists than the right: they invest money in making movies and music, and when they stick to subtle propaganda, they make big money AND incline low information voters to vote Democrat.
The Arroyo is an example of how to do this. If only there were more Republicans interested in making money and changing minds.
You have a deep understanding of the drives underlying people’s actions. Think of the 5 year old child of divorced parents. One of them of offers the kid a future, the other…candy.
Note that Moran kicks off with a dismissive referral to the “righteous right.” From the context, it’s hard not to infer that he means “self-righteous” in this case. And yet he doesn’t use it. It’s almost as if the word “righteous” does double duty for the word “self-righteous” … or as if Moran believes that there’s no such thing as the former, it only and ever being a convenient cover story for the latter. Telling, that.
“Is there anything wrong with marginalizing Tea Party people who believe that Obama is a Muslim or that he’s out to “destroy America”? Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ? Or libertarians who embrace objectivism? These people don’t have to be shunted off to the fringe. They are the fringe already. Not all Tea Partiers, constitutionalists, or libertarians share these ridiculous views, but shouldn’t an effort be made to kick the crazies to the sidelines?”
I think it’s time somebody marginalized Rick Moran.
Tell me Mr. Moran, in your view, exactly what is our nations founding document akin too? Either it is the highest law in the land… or it is not. And if it is not, just what would youplace above it?
Maybe it’s time for you to take your ball and go home.
The political center of the Republican party has always been business interests who want low taxes and low wages above all else. I guess it’s possible to have some sympathy for these folks. They’ve been holding their noses and smiling at you for years even though, like any rational human beings, left or right, they found your cultural politics and paranoid fantasies ridiculous. It couldn’t have been easy to put up with allies like you all these year, but you were so useful… Of course there was never a question of being honest about the real goals of the party. Oligarchic parties simply have to lie, after all, since the essence of their program is to benefit a minority at the expense of the majority. They have to lie especially hard to you since the secret you never seem to guess is that you aren’t in the privileged minority.
You still think the Democrats are the blue collar party? The party of the little guy? Who you gonna believe, Obama or your own eyes?
Unions are awesome! Just ask the employees who used to work for Hostess.
Taking a look at the the historical wealth disparity charts say a lot about the two parties and their historic differences in platforms. Nobody that has some age and well informed, can deny the progressives movement, long, systemic and strategic journey of successes. The term ‘strategic success’ is what even the most intellect elite miss. The long and patient progressive strategy included veiled congressional support of many long held GOP platforms of capitalism and taxation reforms. They knew precisely which issues to veil support for and which ones not while at the same time systemically pushing for ‘some’ their own ‘core’ agendas.
Today, we find private sector capitalism completely corrupted. Today, we see the nations highest wealth disparity since the 1920s when the progressives really set into gear their long term strategies. Today, we find arbitrary inflation for goods and services far beyond any other time in our history. Today, we find the working poverty and poverty classes greater in per capita numbers and than other time in history. Today, we find that private sector elected political represntatives have corrupted the nations highest insitutional goverment beyond any other time in history. Today, we see more and more of our core economies moving and outsourcing offshore. Today, we see core economic corporations bringing in record profits while unemployment remians critically high.
Now, I ask you whose long term political ‘ideological strategies’ have been the most successful? Whose political ideology gains the most from the condition and circumstance the nation finds itself in today? The ‘equality and social justice’ campr or the ‘free enterprise caplitalism’ camp?
So, while all the socalled intellectual elites ponder and intellectualize all the trivial trappings of the moment, the progressives quitely and patiently trod on, ‘setting up’ what could be the fall of Americas great experiement. I keep repeating this single fact about the progressives and their long movement — they are masters of understanding freedom and human nature.
On the otherhand, the GOP and its ‘conditioned’ followers trod on with blindness to the constant threats of human nature exposed to freedom. The GOP is consumed with free enterprise, a trickle-down theory, small government and virtually no social and economic regulatory principals. All of which are proving to benefit a few as opposed the the many.
Intellectualizing all the trivial of the moment will never get us to a reformed GOP with a meaningful platform and a once again healthy nation. Until the GOP gets serious with some ‘realistic’ resolve for the wealth disparity gap, the widening poverty classes, unsustainable low emplyment, arbitraty inflation, and a philosophy that includes ALL americans, etc., they will never sustain themselves as a leading political party. Suggesting civil war to rid the country of a few million citizens or kicking ‘old people’ of which all will someday be, to the curb, or kicking the infirmed to the curb, writing off less intelligent people as human waste deserving of sufferring, etc. is NOT problems solving! Such philosophies indicate a very vile segement of our society and a political party whose messengers will never appeal to the consciences of the masses!
So Zeke, you seem to be able to cognizantly criticize the GOP, and you have some valid points, but what can you offer in the way of fixing those issues you mention?
That a very valid point you raise and one of which I criticize so many others for. Since you presented your comment and question in a reasonable and civil manner, I will attempt to answer in short form. Over the many years, I have, as a citizen, worked with congressional legislators on various committees across the political spectrum on a vast number of issues I thought important. Areas of defense contract reform, agri subsidies, standardized government-wide accounting practices, including a veterinary regulatory unit in the FDA, corporate and individual income tax reforms, TBA excise tax reform and a host of more narrowly defined reforms involving research designated educational institutions, oil and gas royalty regulations, more localized school districts converting to indenpendent status and a list of other states level issues. I have always had the pleasure of having my propsals responded to by further questions and input by both democrats and republicans alike. Some things have come to fruition as I wished them too be, some in-part and some not at all. None of my activities were conclusively considered because of me but rather, because lots of other citizens professionally and civilly presented input. People with reasonable and rational ideas can still be represented.
Those who do nothing more than irrational complaining and perpetuate radical hate and division have little to no respect coming from me — even if some of their general point(s) I agree with.
Great comments. All of you. And I mean ALL. Since the first Tea Party gathering in 2009 I’ve worn two hats, of principle & to win elections. Romney was acceptable to me. Obama had to go. I still don’t see how it could have gone better. So I embrace all the comments to find a way forward. The Left is the focus. Our fight amongst ourselves will serve us well.
If we have Catholics who are lukewarm about defending the free exercise clause why should we be surprised that Republicans are embarrassed by conservatives such as those of us who read PJ Media. It’s obvious that the GOP is on the same-sex marriage bandwagon without any restraints on its campaign to neutralize the Church. And the GOP is just as cool toward any real restrictions on abortion. We saw this last with our governor here in Michigan. The GOP establishment in Michigan seems particularly hostile to the Tea Party. In SE Michigan (metropolitan Detroit) people literally spit on the name of the Tea Party especially in the workplace and classroom. It took brave men and women to demonstrate on the extreme left wing North Woodward corridor, the Blue Woodward Corridor to some of us. If the GOP is abandoning us where do we go? It’s like America itself. Do we stand for nothing and offer no future for the young? I talked to a young man just this Sunday who said the country was “overpopulated and it was too late.” But his next comment made me realize how demoralized our young now are: “we’re living on a dying satellite.” It’s tragic what our schools and media have done to the spirits of our young. Is this the country the GOP wants to compromise with? Where is the leadership? Sadly on the left leads by bullyng, thuggery and lies, but leadership nonetheless — and in the wrong direction. Karl Rove should be ashamed of himself. Unlike the left, it’s all about Air Force One and the Oval Office and little else. The GOP could care less about what our institutions have become and what they teach. No wonder we lost in November and will again.
Immigration ‘Reform’ Will Turn the US into a Police State By Ron Paul
http://www.thedailybell.com/28656/Ron-Paul-Immigration-Reform-Will-Turn-the-US-into-a-Police-State
one word: WHIGS.
The Tea Party must be on to something. The Left cannot stand it. Now, Karl Rove, the Evil Elf of the Clogged Carotid Aretery Right Wing, is going to “squish” it.
Let the Games begin!
You have to understand where Rich Moran is coming from, and where he has always come from. He has his own site, Right Wing Nut House that has been going for years. In the days prior to and following the first election of Buraq Hussein Obama, he was most emphatic that Obama was his president [see his 10-13-2008 IF ELECTED, OBAMA WILL BE MY PRESIDENT], and he wished him well. Things got real loud over there in the comments after that.
The nicest thing he called those who disagreed with him in a dedicated response post was “Knuckledraggers” and “people who need help in telling the difference between a fork and a spoon” [10-15-08]
From his post on 11-5-2008, the day after the election:
His faith in the patriotism of Obama and the Left has always been there.
From 11-3-08, the day before Obama’s election:
I think those of us who were fearful have been proved right. And facing the enemies of the Constitution with the same old get-along-go-along collaboration has been proved to be a totally failed tactic. Yet that is what Rove, and Moran, would have us do.
He is being consistent. As is Rove. The question is if their collaborationism is still relevant to the current situation.
Subotai Bahadur
Thanks for the history. It explains a lot.
Anyone else remember Moran making a posting here at PJMedia about the need for compromise? I’ve been trying to find it, but it appears to have disappeared.
Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.
I was wrong. It didn’t disappear. Just seems to have gone away from the line-up faster than I expected.
In America our constitutional means of governance was designed specifically for and by compromise. Thats how representatives of a representative government of the many people from the many districts in the many states, sent to congress come together and work! Those who have no regards for compromise also have no regards for the ‘constitutional’ process of governance.
And there are some things that one cannot compromise on. You don’t compromise on the lives of innocent human beings and you don’t compromise on liberty. Today, the vast majority of Democrats are slavers and accessories to murder. We don’t compromise over that.
“Today, the vast majority of Democrats are slavers and accessories to murder. We don’t compromise over that.”
That is nothing more than radicalized delusion! Accusing your neighbors up and down the street and within your community, who are democrats, of accessories to “slavers and murder” is far outside the realm of reality. What a pity!
I am fine with Moran posting on PJM, because he is upfront about his positions. He calls himself as a moderate, and he writes from that perspective. This is an editorial fropm that perspective. As long as he is honest, I am fine with him posting here. It lets us know how the other side thinks. It prevents PJM from being an echo chamber.
I read all the comments, and I would like to note one thing. I noticed a couple people deascribe the Republican field as dwarves, as unelectable. This is just not so. This was the most educated slate of candidates ever put forth. Any one of them could have won… except Romney. Romney represented the conventional wisdom, the failed politics of old, the desire to win the votes of the Liberals, rather than the votes of Conservatives. He was running as the representative of the wrong Party.
Could Santorum or Bachmann or Pawlenty or Perry have won? Certainly. Well, as long as the establishment types did not do everything they could to undermine them. The abse would have turned out the vote for any of them. Romney was the establishment guy from the start. He had their support and their money. The Conservative vote was split too many ways. The money and support were split. So, Romney won the nomination… and lost the general. He lost, because he, like the other moderates, really hate the voters of his own Party.
Consrvaitvess are 3/4 of the Republican Party. That is who we are. You have to win our votes, not the votes of the other side. You’ll win many of our votes, because the alternative is so awful, but many of us will refuse to vote for someone like Romney or McCain. I didn’t. I voted for Johnson. I said all along I would never vote for Romney, and many echoed this view. Instead of telling us how wrong we were, you should have taken heed and realized the inmplications of losing so many people like me. It should have brouhgt you up short.
“But you got Obama re-elected!” No, you did, by foisting another establishment guy upon us. I do not care if it is Obama or Romney. Obama or Obama-lite, the end is the same.
Mr. Moran, everything you and Rove know of politics is wrong, as is demonstrated by the results. You moderates are neither hot nor cold, so I spew you from my mouth. Moderate does not win. Passion and conviction win. You stand for something, or you stand for nothing. People do not get out the vote for nothing. They do it for something.
“A man does not get himself killed for a half-pence a day. You have to speak to his soul in order to electrify him.” – Napoleon I
Many of us refuse to vote for “realist Republicans” who make common cause with the other side. Maybe you guys should focus on getting Republican votes, rather than Democratic votes. I guarantee you, the Dems focus on getting Dem votes, and that’s why they won. They turned out their base. Republicans didn’t. Establishment Republicans revile their own Party’s base. That’s why they lose.
If you hate us so much, if you think of us as fringe loons, perhaps you should go be a Democrat. They revile us, too. You’ll fit right in, and you get invited to all the swell parties, rather than the hoedowns.
Marc — Can you kindly direct me to the supporting data for your comment:
“Consrvaitvess are 3/4 of the Republican Party.”
The term ‘conservative’ is today, a very tainted term and commodity since the old evangelical ReligiousRight/MoralMajority rose up again, hijacking the term conservative. So far as I know, not even any GOP polling data identifies the two camps claiming title to the term conservative — and the dems progressives just love that little fact right along with the evangelical movement — for different motives of course!
“Conservatives are 3/4 of the Republican Party. That is who we are. You have to win our votes, not the votes of the other side.”
Debatable. A lot of Moderates or RINOs have already left the party; there is a growing middle ground that rejects both the far left and the far right. Mathematically speaking you’ll need someone with wider appeal to win nationally, and you will instead take pains to ensure that such a person does not win a primary, or as in Romney’s case, you’ll withhold your vote once he does.
The only thing hard to comprehend here is why the author even bothered.
Probably not within my few remaining years, but I can see that possibly, the Independent Party, will become systemically more powerful and more represented as a major party. The overwhelming majority of Americans always remain in the camps of center right or center left. As either partys extremes gain power the center becomes more populated and eventually regains their dominance. Right now we’re in a time when the two partys extremes are in a bare knuckle fight for dominance. It won’t last very long.
One huge problem Republicans have with low information voters is that we seem to cut and run whenever one of our own gets into trouble while the Democrats always circle the wagons, not matter how bad it gets. Such voters care little about policy details but they do value loyalty. I fail to see how paying heed to those among us who are among the first to wave the white flags while enhance the appeal of the movement.
I posted earlier on Santorum and white votes without a college degree. I see talk about same sex marriage, the Tea Party etc.
Would someone care to opine on affirmative action?
Why for crying out loud can’t the Republican Party say something about affirmative action? Even if just like Santorum, who used, I presume, “manufacturing” as a quasi code word?
50 years of discriminating against white men is enough, i.e. it’s wrong. Moreover, many of these much maligned white men are married. That’s not more than 50 percent of the electorate?
Kow-towing on affirmative action, in my view, is a huge lost opportunity. In NYC, Koch was against affirmative action. Giuliani was against affirmative action. If it can work in NYC, it sure as hell can work in Ohio.
Get your act together.
Blow it out your rear, Karl!
Bring it on!
For how many years was Rove evil among Leftists? Does he set up a multi-million dollar PAC to fight back against them now that he can?
Nope. He seeks to become a vetting machine for Republican candidates and we can only imagine the kind of payoffs he can get if he succeeds at that. Romney was not a moderate Republican when it came to running an election. He took out the Tea Party instead of using them to go door to door day in and day out during the election. That was a winnable election but it turns out it wasn’t winning on the establishment’s terms so a loss was acceptable. They aren’t bummed about losing. They hate the fact that there is a new sheriff in town.
Keep putting up these wishy-washy candidates who don’t have any core convictions and the republicans will continue to fade into Whig oblivion.
Have the democrats been running centrists? The may lie and say the are centrists while they are running. However, once in office these people show who they truly are. Hard-left Marxists.
The democrats have been slowly and steadily marching this country to the left for the last 100 years and the pace has now accelerated. All the while, these so-called “compassionate conservatives” (a misnomer if there ever was one) keep blowing elections because they have no core convictions to rest upon.
Sure, they play up to the true conservatives in the primaries. However, once in office, if they get there, they are nearly as bad as the democrats (i.e. Pres. G.W. Bush running up ~$5T in debt over 8 years, trampling on the constitution with the Patriot Act, establishing TSA and DHS, the list goes on).
The perversion of the old (and flawed) Buckley rule of supporting the “most right, viable candidate who could win” will continue to fail so long as these establishment “compassionate conservatives” get to determine who is “viable” and who is not.
I am so sick of the Karl Rove types who trash conservatives who won their primaries (i.e. O’Donnell, Mourdock) instead of getting behind them to help get them elected.
I’ll take a deep breath now. Rant over.
I don’t think WFBuckley’s thinking was wrong.
It all depends on who kows – or just “claims to know” – the right criteria to get elected.
Reference: Reagan. At the time, the Establishment GOP all said he was unelectable.
PFFFT!
32 years later…Reference: Romney. At the time, the Establishment GOP all said he was “inevitable!”.
PFFFT!
DEATH TO THE GOP.
Long live the Tea/Conservative Party.
Karl Rove and his ilk are what has run a lot of conservatives like me away from the Republican Party to begin with. Electing a Rino to win the House or Senate doesn’t solve the problem. “Moderate” Republicans are almost as guilty as Democrats for ruining our economy. They are as guilty for spending tax payers money as fast as they can on dumb projects as are the Democrats.
Perhaps I am a dinosaur, but I do feel that the U.S. Constitution needs no “interpretation”. My college degree isn’t from Harvard, but I’m still pretty good at reading and understanding plain English, and the last time I looked the U.S. Constitution was written in plain English.
Apparently Mr. Rove has the same view of the real conservative voters as does our “beloved” president, who was quoted as saying that we are bitter and holding on to our guns and religion.
Can we please stop mentioning Todd Akin as if he were the choice of the Tea Party, or the true conservatives in Missouri? Todd Akin was an establishment Republican, promoted and kept in office by the Republican party. He won the primary because Democrats, including Claire McCaskill, supported him precisely because they knew he was easy to pick off. If he was such a bad candidate (and he was), then why had the Republican party supported him in previous elections for so many years?
Akin is the poster boy for NOT letting the establishment Republicans tell conservatives who to nominate and elect. They always pick a go-along-to-get-along guy, who frequently hasn’t been vetted properly, and who has no values or philosophy, and therefore just waves the party flag. These guys are always easy to beat, and they always get caught saying stupid, uninformed things.
There were several good, conservative choices in Missouri. Unfortunately, the Tea Party wasn’t organized enough to get any of them nominated, the Republican Party didn’t support them, and the Democrats played the political game better.
Rove certainly plays the game well, but you have to decide if you just want to elect Republicans, or if you want to elect good candidates who share a conservative philosophy. Rove doesn’t care about the philosophy, and it shows, in choices like George Allen in Virginia. Allen’s Democrat opponent, Tim Kaine, was actually able to run to the right on Allen on several issues, based on Allen’s abysmal voting record. These are the guys Rove supports.
Sad. But do, please, stop mentioning Todd Akin as a Tea Party loss. The Republican party owns Akin — always did; still do.
Akin was the Tea Partys endorsed candidate! Pretty hard to defend such, as not being a fact. There a long list of Tea Party endorsed equals that are, likewise undefensable fact.
That is simply not true. There were 3 candidates, 2 fiscal conservatives, one social conservative.
Tea Party backed one (not Akin), Sarah Palin backed another (not Akin), and Claire McCaskil and the Democrats backed Akin because they knew he’d be easy to beat, even before his stupid remarks..
Don’t recall the tea party rejecting him inside the 20 yard line. Seems I recall Gingrich going to Akins aide even after the vile comments were made public. Where I live the tea party people even sent a good amount of funds for his campaign inside the 20.
Exactly correct, Jeremy, and right on target. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you are wasting your electronic breath with Zeke. You can always tell a Tea Party patriot hater, but you can’t tell him/her much!
“You can always tell a Tea Party patriot hater, but you can’t tell him/her much!”
You betcha! The Tea Partys evangelical ReligiousRight/MoralMajority movement is a bunch of little wannabe dictators who have NO regard for the constitutions First Amendment and want to try using the government to enact their particular brand of Christianity beliefs as the law of the land. Can’t get much more unamerican than that if you truly believe in the constitution.
Zeke, you are talented, and energetic, but you are not honest.
Tea Party isn’t religious, and certainly not evangelical. And you know it.
@ FORTIBUS85
Well lets see! Been 1,100 social bills attempted for enactment by the tea partys 2010 state victories gov/legislature. Just this week, we now hear of IA, MI and TN or KY trying to enact more social bills to require vaginal probes and or unreasonable monogram type procedure and forcing the patient to listen to a supposed heart beat with lectures. IA, I beleieve, is trying to enact a social law that makes it homicide to have an abortion for ANY purpose(s).
Repubs would be taken a lot more seriously if they acted like conservatives in principle instead of from convenience. When you are the party of the type govt expansion that occurred under Bush, most of it with a GOP-controlled Congress AND the support of the right-leaning punditry, it’s hard to take you seriously when you proclaim fiscal religion because Obama took the ways of his predecessor and ratcheted them up.
Limited govt means just that; it sure as hell does not mean adding one more Cabinet-level agency and all the other trimmings of the Bush era. It also does not mean standing by in tacit approval as this administration engages in perpetual droning and also believes that targeting Americans for assassination is a good thing.
The left will line up behind anything Obama does, even if it contradicts something he previously said, but it is conscience-free. What is the GOP’s excuse? The alleged Party of Ideas is a slightly-watered down version of the Party of Big Govt; the only difference is the areas of your life in which the Repubs seek to insert themselves.
We have a debt problem. Pretending it all belongs to Obama is delusional. Demanding cuts is essential, even if it means that some House members won’t get invited to the cool cocktail parties. Small govt is not some punchline tossed out amid a red meat buffet of irresponsible “they” are and how “pure” we are. It involves some heavy lifting and last I checked, no one was forced to for Congress. Don’t preach to me about conservative principles; show me conservative action on the things that genuinely matter to most Americans.
The GOP and term “conservatives’ are mortally tainted brands! The Tea Partys evangelical Religious Right/MoralMajority loons have destroyed the very foundations of the GOP and ‘real’ fiscal conservatism. Until suchj time as theres proof-in-the-pudding the evangelical movement has been purged from the GOP and real fiscal conservatives the GOP is damaged goods going forward.
I am done with RINO’s. The Republican Party and Karl Rove gave us GWB and a STD. Maybe the Tea Party will become a credible third Party or maybe not, but the RINO’s can go to H**l.
Allow me to extend your list 25 years:
GHWBush
Dole
GWBush
Romney
The GOP will be just fine when they get around to corralling all the old 80s Religious Right/Moral Majoity loons and put them in a rubber room!
Until such time, the GOP is mortally tainted by the Tea Partys Religious Right/Moral Majority loons. The test will be through the Tea party gained states from the 2010 election cycle. They continue trying to enact social issues beyond the some 1,100 to date, the GOP remains hopelessly damaged.
Zeke..try winning elections without that part of the party. And people wonder why some stayed home this last election!
Lets see! Since their last failed rising in the 80s, how many GOP presidents have we had closing out the 20th century? But more important is how many of them have succeed in winning a majority of GOP congressional seats since their last uprising of the 80s? The evangelical religious right/moral majority folks are a minority sliver in the greater scheme of politics and even moreso relative to the entire national electorate, much less that of the GOP.
I’ll rejoin the original fiscal, constitutional tea party movement, if and when, they isolate themselves from the tea party evangelical movement and rebrand themselves as anything but the now tainted ‘conservative’ tag.
Zeke..try winning elections without that part of the party. And people wonder why some stayed home this last election!
If only!!!
The far right crazies are 20% of the GOP. Not a majority. If that segment stayed home (oh please dear deity let these clowns stay home! please!) then a reasonable right wing candidate picks up the same number of centrists who would otherwise vote republican but currently don’t due to the crazies.
This is simple math. The problem is that the batshit crazy 20% hangs here and imagine themselves representative of right wing voters, not quite grasping the notion of ‘moderate voter’ whatsoever.
Romney lost due to the batshit taint. Everybody who can maintain objectivity knows this. Certainly Rove gets it.
Let me see, McCain called me a racist when he ran because I didn’t agree with his immigration policy. Since 2009 the Republican elite have called me every name under the sun. After 2012 election, they yelled from the rafters, we must get rid of the conservatives! Well, I left a long time ago. The hardest battle conservatives must fight is the battle for the Republican soul. But I refuse to support someone who calls me names and does not represent my views by at 70%.
‘That may be the first time in history that Karl Rove has been referred to as a “centrist.”’
This statement is false. Rove, from his 1st associations with the GOP, even in college, was aligned with the Rockefeller wing. Yes, he was. I was there.
So please don’t give us this line about him being just a pragmatic conservative. The only purchase that has is the result of the left’s demonization of GWB.
What most of us who grew to adulthood during the Great Rutting Period of the past forty-plus years do not like to admit is that the “social conservatives” are largely, though not entirely, correct.
The social-conservative message, however, does not sell well outside of perhaps a quarter to a third of the electorate, because during the forty-plus years of the Great Rutting Period that message has been systematically attacked in the schools, in entertainment, and in the popular press. Trying to sell the social-conservative viewpoint to the electorate at this point is akin to trying to re-veneer the top surface of an otherwise-rotted and worm-eaten table; doomed to failure and pointless.
Having ceded the culture to the forces of libertinism, even the limited conservatism of financial responsibility is a tough sell, ill-received—for the very terms of debate and discussion have been determined by the adversary. That will not change until concerted efforts are made to recapture the culture across the board; but in the meantime, the call to financial responsibility provides a redoubt to defend, within which to plan, and from which to counterattack.
You are, each and every one, missing the point. The so-called “RINOs” or “Establishment Republicans” went to the came from the same background(s), went to the same private or “selective” public high schools, went to the Ivy League or its West Coast affiliates, went to the hoity-toity law and graduate schools .. you get it yet? … They are members of the same socio-economic class that produces Democrats. They, just like the Democrats, believe that we – the every-day working-class Americans of any color or ethnicity – are just too stupid to rule ourselves and, furthermore they (the RINOs/Establishment GOP) just know that they and those who are like them in background and education are the ones Chosen to lead the rest of the nation, to make up for our inability to wipe our own … sorry … noses. You don’t believe me, do you? Really? What was the first thing that the GOP Establishment and the Democrats said about Governor Palin when she was picked as the Vice Presidential nominee? “She didn’t go to one of our schools. She when to ‘Podunk U’ in the state of Boonieland.” I know that they didn’t use those words, but you know as well as I do that’s what their true objection was. Come on! Bush 43 couldn’t have made it into any of those schools except his daddy was Bush 41. Great politician; crappy President for the GOP, but we didn’t hear about his bush-league (sorry; it just came out) college education. Why? Because he was just like his Democrat opponents: same background, same schools … get it now? But Palin got hammered about it. It isn’t really about ideology, it’s about who gets to rule the nation: we the people or those wonderful, intelligent, wise, moral folks who gave us Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian massacres, the Philadelphia ‘burn the block down to execute a misdemeanor warrant’, Detroit, Newark, San Francisco on down to about San Mateo (getting whiter every year, but still Democratic), black-on-black crime rates that ought to have all of them cringing … do I need to go on? It is about who – which social group – gets to rule and how much they can steal and cheat and lie and kill and still get away with it. “Oh, just right-wing radical crap!” Really? Teddy Kennedy and his pregnant girlfriend he left to drown; too many to name, but all the hot shots whose sexual fantasies seem to overcome their common sense every year; nominees for high Federal offices (Treasury Secretary; forgot, already?) who ‘forgot’ to pay their taxes (four or five of them in a row, iirc); “The Benghazi attacks on the embassy were caused by a video that upset Muslims” .. “ah … maybe not, but we never said that.” Hereditary Senators (Gore, Murkowski and Quayle just off the top of my head). Now do you think maybe? Liberals vs Conservatives; Socialists vs Capitalists; free market vs controlled market: all smoke, all “Squirrel!”, all distractions. The true game is who gets to rule and it won’t ever be the people in the U.S., never again, because you all are buffaloed by the smoke and b.s.
What most of us who grew to adulthood during the Great Rutting Period of the past forty-plus years do not like to admit is that the “social conservatives” are largely, though not entirely, correct.
No, most of us think nothing of the sort; in fact, most of us knew that the social conservatives were wrong at the time. Most of us voted Reagan **despite** the me-too idiocy of the religious right, and 30 years later we see these contemptible pieces of merde trying to claim Reagan as the THEIRS. I would laugh my head off at this absurd contention, but sadly, here you are arguing the same thing as if it were fact itself. How it is that we can all live through a reality and some elect to see it in retrospect with rose coloured specs is amazing.
The social conservatives have never, not once, been right about a damn thing.
Really? Truly so? Why not tell us all what they were/are wrong about, and why? Details, please—not mere knee-jerk rejectionism.
Please.
The social conservatives were against the pill, advocated keeping women in their place, were against abortion, against Elvis, against long hair, against legalising pot smoking (the list is endless), and today continue their proud legacy with their continuing wars on women and gays. Their mothers and fathers lost continued wars on teaching of evolution, school prayer, school corporal punishment, and dominance of their religion in the public square. Their grandparents were the wonderful folks behind prohibition and lost on evolution. Their more remote ancestors railed against the enlightenment and Galileo.
The social cons have NEVER — not once — won. On anything. They have never been right.
You mistake “winning” for “being right.” Silly error.
Your laundry list is pretty silly, too. To hear you tell it, the world began in the 1950s and 1960s, and before that, nobody knew anything. Yet it was under a school system that would have been, by your standards, hopelessly ignorant, that the people were educated who built the atom bomb from nothing in a couple of years, and who later sent us to the moon. Under the “advanced,” “socially liberal” school system we have now, we graduate people from college who are less educated than people who graduated high school in the 1930s.
We have a horrific human toll from casual abortion; we have people who are bred to seek sensation instead of stable family life; we have people who prate about “science” yet are so ignorant of it that they believe the nonsense of “global warming” and “green energy.” We have a people so ignorant of their own founding documents as to believe that who one sleeps with is a basis on which to claim “civil rights,” and are in the process of savaging those documents to create them.
We even have people like yourself who are so benighted as to believe that what someone thinks about evolution has any importance whatsoever to the social fabric. Here’s a clue; most of the people who built this country, in commerce and in labor in politics, had no clue about evolution—and the country did just fine. That’s not to say evolution should be mixed up with religion, of course—merely that evolution is nowhere near as important as a number of people in whom the process of emerging from the lower apes is far from complete seem to think. I should, perhaps, also mention in passing that Prohibition was a “progressive” initiative, not a social-conservative one, pushed by the feminists of that day.
There is no “war on women”—save from the soi-disant “progressives.” The social conservatives, men and women both, respect women far more than “progressive” women respect themselves or anyone else. There is no “war on gays”—quite the contrary; the tiny minority which is the homosexual community is at war with the larger society, seeking special privilege and suppression of free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
Apparently, you think that the “progressive” social movements which have brought us sexual license, runaway rates of horrific sexually-transmitted disease, broken families, casual disregard for human life, decreased personal commitment, ignorant children, financial ruin from the local to the national level, wildly increased drug abuse (both legal and illegal), and rampant murder rates, represent great leaps forward in human endeavor.
How revolting.
There is no “war on gays”—quite the contrary; the tiny minority which is the homosexual community is at war with the larger society, seeking special privilege and suppression of free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
This line typifies your backwards looking rant. The so-con anti-gay stuff starts with a lot of religious fundie types protesting with signs that talk about ‘Adam and Steve,’ is underlined by so-con posters here quoting biblical verses excusing their prejudices, posters claiming gays are perverse, and then pegs the idiocymeter with absurd claims to the effect that being gay is a choice. What we have here is unvarnished prejudice and ignorance fueled by fundie beliefs.
There is no serious opposition to gay marriage in the science community, that is to say, the only educated group of people who would be able to understand human culture well enough to mount a serious academic argument. (Because they’re all leftists wanting to destroy the fabric of america, undoubtedly.)
There is no group “at war with the larger society.” That is a LIE. The larger society tends to be ambivalent. Gay initiatives passed in the 4 states they were tried in this election cycle. If anything the war on gays is TRUTH. In MN the religious fundie right (that would be you) tried putting on a ballot measure to squelch gays. It lost. That’s an attack ON gays, not BY gays. “At war with the larger society” is merely your absurdly inverted interpretation; it’s all in your head. But hey, you’re a creative guy, aren’t you? You’re certainly creating your own reality.
In a few years gay marriage will be the law everywhere, and rightfully so. America is getting better. Not worse. Encouraging freedom and suppressing the fundamentalist attempts to restrict it will reverberate throughout the world. It will be these things that will eventually help take down even more restrictive fundamentalist regimes like the Taliban. America’s cultural WMDs include rock and roll, jeans, coca cola, and freedom for gays. We’re tolerant, and we’re the strongest nation on the planet. Yeah, it’s connected.
As a republican I support freedom, including the idea that people are free to fall in love and marry whom they wish. That they are opposite or same sex is not an issue. Nor is it my business. Or yours. Freedom is messy. You don’t seem to like the idea of freedom. You’re no patriot. You’re not any part of a solution. You are, in fact, the very picture of the problem.
Do we sometimes have to weather leftist morons like Obama? Yep. Thank you for that. You and your so-con war on everybody crap courtesy of your spokesvolk like Akin got Obama elected by repulsing just enough voters to swing the election.
Soon enough Obama will be gone. And if I have *my* way, so will you. It is then when the adults — the forward thinkers — can get working on the task of writing the next chapter of America’s success. We don’t need you.
They always insist on ignoring the constitutional INDIVIDUAL freedoms when it doesn’t fit their cause(s). Especially, both components of the constitutions Frist Amendment. Those freedoms weren’t extended to a government or to some special religious collective of people — they were extended to EVERY INDIVIDUAL citizen. Something seriously wrong with a persons ‘wiring’ who thinks the world should conform to only their vision of anything. Even their own Jesus confirmed that every individual shall have the freedom of free agency. I guess the ‘religious’ of today hasn’t much regards for Jesus either, let alone the constitution.
Tell that to the businesses being sued or fined because they refuse to have anything to do with so-called same-sex weddings.
Maybe it has more to do with constitutionally protected equal rights for ALL individual citizens of America?
The federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act will eventually pass and at least 20 states have laws in place already as does the federal government protect gays in hiring and in the workplace. Pretty much a dead-horse religious issue eventually.
“randomengineer” writes the following risible material:
The amount of boneheaded bigotry, stereotyping, and outright ignorance contained in these few lines is breathtaking.
Starting from the bottom, what is this “science community” of which you speak? “Science” has nothing to do with the modern political homosexual “identity” which is busily demanding “rights.” That identity has its origins in pseudoscientific constructs of a “third sex” which was invented in the 19th century. It is of an age, and of a piece, with its contemporary pseudosciences, such as phrenology and psychoanalysis.
The only genuinely “scientific” effort towards looking at homosexual behavior was done by Kinsey, whose work indicated that for the vast majority of people the decision to engage in homosexual behavior was indeed a choice. Later revelations of Kinsey’s own behavior cast doubt on the validity of his research—though seeing how often the “scientific” establishment has trimmed its sails to the prevailing winds in this area suggests that the efforts to discredit him had a strong political component, as his findings regarding choice are at odds with the political objectives of the gay-rights movement; one cannot demand “rights” on the basis of a choice.
More to the point, “science” has nothing to do with moral determinations of any sort—and the configuration of marriage is a moral and political determination. Thus, the invocation of “science” is utterly irrelevant here, regardless of how innate homosexual desire may ultimately be found to be. The decision to grant legal protection to homosexual partnerships, or not, is a moral and political question, not a “scientific” one, as is the determination of whether or not to do so as “domestic partnerships” or by contorting the definition of “marriage” to include a wholly new form of it.
That the gay-rights movement is of leftist origin is historically incontrovertible, as is the fact that the movement, in its modern incarnation, was built upon the principle that marriage, and what the movement now calls “heteronormativity,” must be destroyed. The movement is currently engaged in attacking “heteronormativity” in every scholastic system in the United States, from youthful sex education in the public schools through gender studies programs in the universities, without a shred of genuine science at its foundation. In the process, it has switched from open calls for the destruction of marriage to insistent demands that marriage be fundamentally altered—after having so eroded the free-speech protections of the First Amendment that any countervailing opinion is summarily dismissed as “hate speech.”
Many people recognize the breadth and the perniciousness of this massive intellectual fraud; that some of them express their opposition crudely with “Adam and Steve” language is unfortunate, but the crudeness of their opposition in no way validates the fraud they are protesting. In the meantime, it is humorous to see your own crude stereotyping; you accuse me, without any evidence, of being “a religious fundie type,” when I have in no way invoked religious belief in this discussion. Worse, you say this:
I have no idea whether or not you are a “republican,” as you claim; but you clearly do not believe in freedom for those who do not share your fact-free views. Rather, you support oppression of and derision towards those who do not share them. Freedom is, indeed, messy; it requires that even bigots like yourself exhibit tolerance, just as it requires those of us who are disgusted by your bigotry to tolerate your freedom to express your ugly notions.
References to “science” or “the scientific community” and such are just lefty code for “all the smart people like me think this and if you don’t you’re a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging dolt.” It is used the same way that teachers and educrats use “all the research shows.” Randomloser here thinks he’s some sort of brilliant libertarian type but he’s really just another dolt that has confused indoctrination with education and fits in nicely with all the other lefty useful idiots we see here.
In short, Art, what you’re saying is that the reflexive invocations of “science” by people like randomengineer are the more-sophisticated version of the “hate speech” dismissal—a way for those who have no genuine counterargument to dismiss rather than engage ideas they do not like.
No science? Seriously? 12 seconds with google shows —
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/33
Have a look at the cites. Start there. Then, using scholar.google, you can see any number of papers, studies, investigations, etc… none of which seem to be headed with “top secret nefarious marxist plans to destroy the family.” Nor does the search function at scholar.google turn up much using similar terms.
My, but you’re a sloppy reader. All you have to do is go through that article you linked to and look at the towering pile of qualifiers; “provocative theory,” “it is believed,” etc., etc., etc. Everybody’s been theorizing about this nonsense for years, and they still have not a shred of actual hard-science data—just some speculations based on visibly half-assed correlative data.
That you wish to disregard rather than research the Leftist roots of the gay-rights movement, starting with the Fabian socialists of the 19th century, going on to the Communist affiliations of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Stalinism of the founders of the “homophile movement” in the US following the Second World War, and the overt Maoist and SDS ties of the post-Stonewall gay-rights movement, speaks to your own laziness and intellectual dishonesty.
Randomloser, academia today is dominated by guys who stayed in college to get a PhD in the ’60s, early ’70s so they could keep a 2S deferment and not get their precious pink ass shot off in Vietnam. They don’t educate, they indoctrinate. You’ve mistaken the credential certifying your indoctrination for the historical diploma certifying that you were worthy of citizenship. In other words, you a merely a useful idiot, a tool of the left, and no educated person gives a tinker’s damn about you or your opinion.
OK, if I’m understanding buzzsawmonkey’s point, a slew of scientific studies now looking at brain chemistries and other physiological differences are “qualified” and not yet conclusive… therefore imputing conclusive proof of a plot by 19th century socialists. After all being gay was pathology known in the DSM until the leftist lobby got it removed. Got it.
And then from art chance we have the revelation that academics are pinkos. Check. It aparently did not occur to art to inquire and discover that I’m fairly old and have worked with a number of academics in my career. None of whom were draft dodging pinkos. Some were democrats, oh my. But sadly no draft dodging pinkos.
Meanwhile here we have a fun article re how democrats need to little more than play the “kook” card:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/02/eric_cantor_rebranding_the_republican_party_barack_obama_and_the_democrats.html
And yes obviously by implication I find both of my interlocutors to be the very kook type this article refers to.
And art, as for my opinion: gay marriage will be the norm in a few years, and all you have is your increasingly ineffective and pathetic sputtering. There’s few things sadder than aging authoritarians.
randomengineer burbles:
Randomengineer seems not to be able to comprehend that just as the invention of “homosexual identity” was a 19th-century leftist political construct based entirely on pseudoscience, it remains a political construct based entirely on pseudoscience even as the researchers scurry around desperately attempting to try and retroactively justify it.
In the meantime, even if some reasonably plausible Great Determining Cause for homosexual behavior is ultimately found, that does not alter the past and present fact that the gay-rights movement has been, and remains, a leftist movement based in pseudoscience which is engaged in destroying the political fabric for its own ends. The movement is not the behavior, and it is certainly not all the people who engage in the behavior.
The movement, however, should be careful what it wishes for; it might get it. While the movement for the most part abandoned using the term “sexual preference” some years back when it realized that it could not justify its bogus claims to “civil rights” based on mere preference, it will find that discovery of a Great Determining Cause will not be the boon it imagines. As the number of people who choose to engage wholly in homosexual behavior are a small minority, any discovery of a biological Great Determining Cause will of necessity be a physiological abnormality; this will inevitably bolster the claims of those who would like nothing better than to regard homosexual behavior as a “disease,” which is something the gay-rights movement has been struggling for years to overcome—but which will resurrect discussions of “cures” and “treatment.”
Worse, if that Great Determining Cause is shown to not be inevitable, as discovery of an “alcoholic gene” a few years ago did not determine that one would become an alcoholic, but merely increased the probability that one might become one, then engaging in homosexual behavior becomes, once again, a mere choice, despite the presence of the now-scientifically-verified Great Determining Cause. And the movement once again loses.
So, let the researchers scurry about in search of their post hoc determinations. It does not alter the pseudoscientific foundation of the “homosexual identity”; it does not alter the subversive history of the gay-rights movement, or its politically destructive activity in the present day. And whatever the researchers’ findings may ultimately prove to be, they will not aid those who would make a god of “science” in their goal of replacing morality with the laboratory.
Your screed is five (5) paragraphs of meandering nonsense that can be summed up as being “homosexuality is a choice.”
This of course is completely, utterly wrong.
The gays will win this one. What are you going to sputter about then?
Not only is homosexual behavior a choice, the movement itself used to say so—and still does, when it feels it can gain political advantage by doing so. They also say so by their actions; you may recall reading how, a year or so ago, a “gay softball league” up around Seattle refused to let bisexuals participate because they “weren’t gay enough.” Apparently, there is a quota of gay behavior that is necessary before you can be considered a member of the club, or something.
The movement, of course, includes “bisexuals” as part of the LGBT—it is the “B” there, you will recall. It does this to swell its demographic, to be able to claim that anyone who has ever taken a walk on the wild side is part of their movement. Yet it is common among gays to privately express the view that anyone claiming “bisexuality” as being “insufficiently committed”—as lying to themselves and to others. The movement wants to eat its cake and have it, too; it wants the people who clearly demonstrate that homosexual behavior is a choice, but want to still claim that it is not.
Then, of course, there are the people who leave the “gay” subculture for the larger culture. I’ve known several. The people who divorce their wives and leave their children for the “gay lifestyle” are supposedly “getting in touch with their true feelings,” and their stories are widely retailed. You don’t hear as much about the people who get in touch with their true feelings by leaving that lifestyle behind and getting married, because it doesn’t fit the political narrative. But they’re out there, too.
Homosexual desire, whatever its many still-unknown causes may be, may not be a “choice.” Homosexual behavior, like all behavior, is always a choice.
Really doesn’t make any difference what the science may or may not be relative to gay lifestyles. The opposition to gays is simple one of hypocrisy and nothing more.
For example! The fringe evangelical conservatives demand the government stay out of everybodys bedrooms and life and on many other subject matter — something to do with the freedoms and rights spoken too in the constitution.
The gay rights movement suprisingly enough, espouse the same mantra which would lead one to believe both are in sinc with each other.
OOOOPPPPS!! Not quite! The evangical conservatives pull out a new rule book to play by: Stay out of our bedrooms and out of our lives BUT we demand you stay in the bedrooms of gay people and in their lives to enforce our evangelical moral codes upon them.
Hmmmm!
“Balderdash. The whole point of the Conservative Victory Project is to get Republicans elected. One doesn’t have to be Mr. Wizard to figure out that’s not going to happen without a massive turnout by conservatives.”
And therein lies the problem. The point is to get Republicans elected, not conservatives. And any wizard can tell you that ‘pragmatism’ generated lower voter turnout in ’12 than the conservative message did in ’10.
And this:
” Is there anything wrong with marginalizing Tea Party people who believe that Obama is a Muslim or that he’s out to “destroy America”? Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ? Or libertarians who embrace objectivism? These people don’t have to be shunted off to the fringe. They are the fringe already. Not all Tea Partiers, constitutionalists, or libertarians share these ridiculous views, but shouldn’t an effort be made to kick the crazies to the sidelines?”
If I thought this diatribe worthy I could cut out quite a chunk of the page addressing it, so I’ll only deal with ONE piece of this tripe:
“…Constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ?”
I’m sorry, but I can’t restrain myself. Among those who understand all of the conditions, thousands of years of human history actually, that led to our founding; among all of us who understand the pinnacle achievement of The U.S. Constitution, the absolute human realities of which it is reflective; it is disheartening in the extreme that space should be given to a hack, such as Mr. Moran, to spew the kind of contextless excretia that dot the media landscape like so many turds on the sidewalk.
I don’t trust Rove. He is not a conservative. He is a Rovian. More Dem than GOP.
This move by Rove is to save his job and his alone. I won’t support him or the Young Republicans because Rove runs them too.
The GOP establishment (Rove, et. al.) = “Vichy Republicans”
That may be the first time in history that Karl Rove has been referred to as a “centrist.”
He’s too far to the left, and too much a tool of the left, to be a centrist.
“Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ?”
It’s better than a holy writ. If Rick Moron does not understand this, he understands nothing.
Good point, Cat! Don’t forget that when last we heard from Rick Moran, before the election, he was lecturing conservatives about their “duty” to support Mittens as the only “electable” candidate to run against the great and powerful Obama.
Now he has resurfaced with another misinterpretation of our “duty”. This Rove gambit is not the opening shot in a war between Tea Party patriots and RINO squishes; it is the beginning of a struggle between the Ruling Class (Republican, Democrat, mainstream media and unelected advisors) and the Country Class (the rest of us) for the constitutional republic left to us by our founders. Or, as Mark Levin so aptly put it: liberty or tyranny!
Carl Rove is what is wrong with the Rep party. He made efforts to stop the elections of several Tea Party people, and one of those was against the idiot Harry Reid. She might not have been the best candidate, but his seriously condeming her didn’t help her campaign. He may have had his time, but it is long since occurred. I don’t think he has any business talking or commenting about the Rep party or pretty much anything. I no longer hold him in regard and he needs to retire and tinker with railroads or something. He is the kind of guy that turns off most educated Reps and Independents. He is acid to our young people. Tell him to shut up and go home, he no longer has a clue.
I get so tired of people bad mouthing Bush, even my spouse does it on occasion and it really pizzes me off. Bush was kinda moderate on social issues like abortion, which I appreciate. He stood with us on 9/11 which was probably the worst time of any president of this country. He did mount a retaliation for 9/11 and this country was peeing their pants until that happened, and most people in this country were behind it. Toby Keith did “Red White and Blue” and it got standing ovations everywhere he went. And our people cheered when we took down Iraq. But then it turns out there was bad info and they didn’t do or whatever……..Not that Sadam didn’t deserved to be made into kitty-liter for other reasons…..
The second thing he did was he wasn’t so great at fiscal issues, and I am not supportive on this one, somewhat on a couple. Well, he brought in the Rx program for the seniors. Which meant of course that a tremendous hit was happening for social security. And it was a HUGE hit. But there thousands of our seniors who didn’t have to choose between groceries and medicene, And that includes my parents. So that was probably a good decision. I think they could have done it better, but that was what happened. At least he had the gonads to do it.
Bush was a good president. It wasn’t perfect, he made mistakes,, but he certainly looked out for our troops and the American people,, and all you people just forget,,,,
Looked out for our troops? With his Muslim Democracy projects, you must be kidding.
“Muslim Democracy” was exactly the right thing to do, and the only other option that could work is nuking the bulk of them. Waiting for them to grow up on their own will take too long, and surrendering is not an option.
Before we consider that second option, we have a moral obligation to try the first.
Bush’s view of Islam was that of a dangerous crackpot. Don’t be surprise if after Obama leave office in 4 years, he and George W. Bush get together to promote Islam together.
“Islam brings hope and comfort to millions of people in my country, and to more than a billion people worldwide. Ramadan is also an occasion to remember that Islam gave birth to a rich civilization of learning that has benefited mankind. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to people. It inspires them to lead lives based on honesty, and justice, and compassion. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate. Mohammad’s word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements. The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur’an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace.”
George W. Bush !!!
“Bush’s view of …promote Islam together.”
Hey blowhard, I’ll take that bet. $500.00 says you’re stupid.
What are your terms?
Don’t scream “Balderdash”
Rove and CO aren’t trusted because of the record and the company they keep.
Plain and simple..
And if they don’t like that, then they can take it up with guys like Charlie Crist.
Nobody else wants to hear it.
When I was younger I was naive enough to be a Democrat and saw the childish thinking referred to in these posts up close. People so beholden to ideology that winning elections and gaining the reins power necessary to affect change became secondary. Liberals couldn’t believe that the party they had dominated since the early 1930s was regularly destroying them at presidential election time. Even though they kept nominating people like Carter, Mondale and Dukakis. Some of the senatorial and House candidates were real howlers too.
Now that I am old enough and wise enough to be a Republican, I see the same attitudes on display. Ideological purity at all costs, no matter the consequences. Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin should be five names that scare the daylights out of us and make us understand the political realities we face. Angle was running against a monumentally unpopular Democrati poobah. Buck should have aced things in Colorado, but ended up sounding like Joe Arpaio in a state full of Latino voters. O’Donnell simply seemed to be lacking in any qualification for election to our upper chamber;out of touch with reality, not very bright and a little emotionally unstable at times. Mourdock and Akin displayed the kind of naivete around the liberal MSM that makes me wonder if they had been living under rocks over the past several years. IN and MO were sure things. BHO got trounced in both states. Yet the GOP Senate candidates lost by wide margins. If these five ready for primetime players had not gotten in the way of better candidates running for those seats, we might well have an evenly divided Senate now and much greater leverage. As it stands, we are in the minority, 55-45.
Putting together winning campaigns is of utmost importance. Hate Rove or love him, he sees reality. His failures in 2012 had much to do with demographics and turnout levels. You have to give the Obama campaign props for what they accomplished last year. They not only kept minority turnout up in the right places to repeat most of the 2008 flip states, but targeted advertising helped to dampen enthusiasm for Romney in places like rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. Elections are numbers games.
The GOP is going to have to get better at estimating turnout and improving their own GOTV efforts. Most of all, candidates on the state and national levels have to attract a wider range of the electorate. Appealing strictly to the base is a recipe for continued losses. Reagan won by making the American dream about all Americans. He touted free enterprise much more than budget cuts. He talked about what we can do, not what we couldn’t.
Though I greatly admire Mitt Romney, it seems obvious that Americans generally take better to candidates with a blue-collar appeal. If Rick Santorum weren’t so outside the mainstream on social issues, I think he would be an excellent candidate.Rubio is the closest guy I see right now to filling that bill next time out, but only time will tell. GWB won because he seemed like he could be your beer-drinking buddy. He was a man’s man. Though of patrician birth, he was decidedly more Texas than Eastern Establishment. Had Rick Perry not turned out to be so apparently intellectually challenged and lacked the manufactured racist bit about his family’s hunting lodge, he might well have pulled a lot of voters out that Romney didn’t. Americans seem to want competence, approachability and star power in candidates for president. GWB had all that in 2000 and the luck of facing the execrable John Kerry in 2004. BHO got elected for many reasons that belie the above description. He certainly wasn’t approachable and his record was so thin that competence, or lack thereof, was an unknown quantity. Unless Dems can manufacture another candidate who can ride identity politics past what any other candidate would need to possess, the Dems might be in trouble in the next presidential cycle.
Mourdock and Akin displayed the kind of naivete around the liberal MSM that makes me wonder if they had been living under rocks over the past several years.
They are not the problem. It’s the platform itself. When a political party includes a platform plank that doesn’t play outside a few redneck enclaves, the only thing required of the opposition is to mention it to repulse enough of the electorate to make a difference. That clowns like this put a big bow on top of the gift doesn’t imply that they *invented* the gift, which is precisely what your analysis suggests. It’s the GIFT that’s the problem, not the bow.
#82 k-ron
You are ignoring the factor of massive Democrat campaign fraud, and the facts that the Institutional Republicans by inclination refuse to fight Democrats on that or any other point of difference, along with the Federal Court Consent Decree that they signed barring them from any efforts to fight vote fraud.
http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/rnc-v-dnc.pdf
For a third of a century, up until January 2, 2013, I was an active Republican here in Colorado, usually a delegate to the State convention, involved in a lot of campaigns over the years, and I have run a presidential campaign in my county. I think I can claim some insight into Republican politics.
I cannot speak as to Sharron Angle or Todd Akin. However, I watched the state party refuse to support Ken Buck from the get-go because he was a TEA Party Conservative. It is hard to win a statewide election when your own party wants you to lose. And they did. They were quite content to have Democrat Michael Bennet win rather than a TEA Party Republican. I watched it.
Christine O’Donnell may not have been the best candidate, but Mike Castle was a Democrat in all but name who voted with the Democrats on every critical vote. He had to go. Once again, the national party would rather lose than have a TEA Party candidate win. Literally during O’Donnell’s acceptance speech on winning the primary; the head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Senator John Cornyn announced that the national party would not help or fund her campaign. He was forced to later, but did the minimum, and way too late.
The subject of this piece, Karl Rove, spent every day of the next week after the primary going on every news show on every network attacking O’Donnell; who was the duly nominated Republican candidate. He worked to limit donations to her campaign. He could not have done that without the approval of the RNC, if he wanted to ever work for the Republicans again. Once again, the Institutional Republicans would prefer that the Democrat win rather than a TEA Party Republican. From what I heard, after losing the Primary, Lugar worked to make sure that the State Party did not support Mourdock. I have no personal knowledge of that particular state, but it is in character.
Rove has not been winning seats for Republicans. He has been working to make sure that if Conservatives get nominated, that the Democrats win. I don’t think any observer believes that Rove has had an epiphany. His PAC’s have the same goal, attacking Conservatives and driving them out of the party if they will not submit to the Democrats like the Institutionals do. In my case, and probably a few others, he will get what he wanted. I’m out, and hoping for America to develop a SECOND Party. But I realize that it will not be in time before things collapse. Maybe afterwards, we can rebuild. But we surely cannot slow or stop the collapse with the Institutional Republicans acting as an “opposition” that refuses to oppose.
Subotai Bahadur
I don’t see the problem as bomb throwing, demon spewing right wingers in the tea party. The Tea Party which outside the ideas of financial responsibility, and constitutional adherence simply doesn’t exist .. ALLOWED ignorant incompetent morons to FOOL THEM. Christine O’Donnell, Akin and Mourdock, the gal opposite Reid, all displayed not foot in mouth disease but heartfelt IGNORANCE which was evidence of INCOMPETENCE. Who would support an ignoramus who in middle age is short of SIMPLE SCIENTIFIC FACT? I stopped contributing to Mr. DeMint’s org when he kept supporting clearly academically and common sense wise incompetent people who NEVER would be anything short of a PUBLIC and objective results disaster in the office they wanted. Even Ms Palin, who I respect greatly, turned out 4 years after her run with McCain to be short of that self starting thirst for whatever knowledge for the job and a bigger voice was necessary. She failed to go after whatever knowledge she was short of. Sorry but that’s how I see it. Aptitude to capture SOME of the public’s inner drive for individual freedoms and responsible behavior is not enough today.
Rove and his group HAVE ALREADY FAILED.
But an Akin etc who meets the need for checking off certain boxes, ESPECIALLY THE SOCIAL ONES (which are anything but what Mr, Goldwater would have identified as conservative), will lose even bigger. These people are just plain too stupid to know they are stupid. Compare Akin to a Rubio, Jindal, Christie and you see what is lacking and what is needed.
Rove is finished, but if the Tea Party cannot bring forth people like Rubio, Daniels, and Christie and instead we see Akins and Mourdocks, they will be EVEN WORSE, and that will be all she wrote.
Point of information, Dem opponent McCaskill gave Akin more support than the TEA party did.
Rove etc, did ***not*** put Akin up. He ran to the right in the primaries. Rove’s people were right about him. But that does not mean they really have a clue. They may know what will NOT work, but they also don’t know what will. They are expert at close wedge issues, and have no clue about getting the vote out. To get the vote out you need a motivated voting populace first. We need a mind meld of Palin and Krauthammer candidate set and a fleet of bus drivers nationwide with a mobile enabled phone database for election day.
Unfortunately, IMHO, Akin ran to the SOCIAL RIGHT. McCaskill might be an Obama ‘light’ but that does not make her stupid.
“Rove etc, did ***not*** put Akin up.”
I’m real sure I’ve never said anything to the contrary. I am pointing out Akin was not the TEA party favorite, and that he was aided in the primary by McCaskill, who wanted a weak opponent.
And what is the solution for a vapid moron like Elizabeth Warren getting elected? I would’ve voted for a grain of sand or carpet stain over her.
Now PJmedia is engaged in censorship.
Awesome job in advocating a “Free America”.
I posted 2 comments yesterday, with a civil tone and that comply with PJmedia’s requirements, but that were in disagreement with Rick Moran. Both of them are gone today.
Thanks for putting my comments back (reply to #18 and comment #55).
They were not there this morning.
Seems that complaining does work, sometimes.
Some of the ‘kiddies’ over on the Tattler despise the constitutions first amendment and routinely ban or remove comments of those who exerice their right to disagree. However, most of the more mature ‘principle’ writers of PJM are not so much inclined and Mr. Moran is certainly one who lets people voice their opinions and exercise their first amendment right.
“Or constitutional conservatives who believe our founding document is akin to holy writ?”
The educated conservative stands in awe of the beauty and wisdom of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and other documents related to the founding of the greatest experiment in liberty the world has ever known. If nothing else, they are stark reminders of how educated we once were, and how intelligent people can put arguments into prose that is almost poetic in its beautiful use of language. These men were to politics what Beethoven, Bach and the rest were to music. Timeless. Centuries old, yet forever fresh when heard again.
Our inside the Beltway establishment (and supporters like Mr. Moran) may think they are wise, but sadly they do not know how little they really know. The day is coming when we look back at history, like the people of dark ages Rome did, and see the remnants of the great civilization that preceded them. Unfortunately for us and our descendants, liberty is not an object like the Colosseum that will remain standing as a reminder and as a cautionary note to future generations. Liberty is an idea which we have to keep alive until society is ready for it once again.
“The educated conservative stands in awe of the beauty and wisdom of the Constitution..”
If that is true, then why is it that some who have the power, and most who don’t have the power, deny, or wish they could deny some people of their first amendment rights, simply, and for no other reason than, they do not fall into lock-step with their opinions?
If that is true, how is it, some try to deny the individual religious freedoms and practices protected by the first amendment, wishing instead, for some or all of their own particular religious brand to become the law of the land?
Just curious how some who profess to be the nations real and only constitutionalists, explain these kinds of constitutional infractions on their behalf.
If nothing else, they are stark reminders of how educated we once were, and how intelligent people can put arguments into prose that is almost poetic in its beautiful use of language.
Care to elaborate on the contributions of the iroquois here?
The GOP is broken and Rove is trying to fix it. Of course, the flat earth society continues to try to pull the entire dysfunctional mess further to the right, only there is nowhere left to go but off the road. It is time that the elephant in the room is finally uncloaked. The GOP is fundamentally a contradiction from the start.
A Grand Old LIE! The GOP Dichotomy
http://gravitysailor.com/government-politics/gop-dichotomy-2/
The Admiral
There is no reason for this split. The interests of social conservatives and the Republican establishment coincide – it is a question of finding candidates who can properly articulate conservative principles and apply them to solving the problems in front of us.
We can’t solve our economic and fiscal crisis without solving our social problems first. The decline of marriage, rampant spawning of illegitimate children, divorce, the hookup culture, genderless “marriage” all have economic effects and they aren’t good ones. If Rove is smart, he will rope in the “right wing” (for lack of a better term) and work with them to identify and groom candidates. Republicans can’t win without social conservatives and so Rove should realize that working with them is imperative. On the other hand, candidates like the “I am not a witch woman” from Delaware can’t win either, so both sides have a genuine interest in getting “the most conservative candidate who can win.” It’s a practical matter.
And please don’t forget those of us who are social conservatives, but not religious conservatives.