A Failure to Communicate: The GOP’s Public Relations Debacle
It’s “Merry Xmas, not” for Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and Tea Partiers, etc. Losing the November election was bad enough, but it’s gotten worse since, considerably worse.
The party, and consequentially its ideas, is in freefall.
As of last week, 57 percent approve and 42 percent disapprove of Barack Obama’s performance as president. Pretty soon he’ll be as popular as Roosevelt — or Reagan.
What is the cause of this debacle? Largely this: Republicans, conservatives… the whole list above… do not know how to talk to the broad spectrum of the American people outside their choir.
Republicans are not just bad at public relations. They’re disastrous at it.
With rare exceptions, this goes for the entire panoply of the right – from elected officials to party leaders to pundits and talk show hosts to think tank intellectuals from the most extreme conservatives to the most losey-goosey of so-called RINOs. No difference.
What we have here in the immortal words of Cool Hand Luke’s Strother Martin is a “failure to communicate.”
And this failure has occurred at the very time America has over 8 percent unemployment and is over 16 trillion in debt. Go figure. You would think a party of economic austerity, or even semi-austerity, would be more popular than ever.
Failure to communicate, indeed.
Unfortunately, fixing this public relations deficit is not going to be easy. It’s too entrenched and too long-standing. The Republican brand is tarnished, maybe even hopelessly so, certainly beyond what should be acceptable to anyone.
The kneejerk response of many is to go back to pure conservative principles — a kind of Maoist ideological purge.
If only.
Consider this: the word conservative itself may be a large part of the problem. Few young people want to identify with it, even when the ideas and values inherent in the ideology make perfect sense to them, even when they are already living by those values.
No, the problem is more complicated and made more so by what we all know — the overwhelming onslaught of propaganda and dishonesty from the academy, Hollywood and the media. We can complain about that all we want, but unless we start building our institutions, no genuine change will occur.
The good news in the current debacle is that it provides this opportunity for radical change, perhaps even serious rebranding. The left uses the terms “liberal” and “progressive” when there is nothing liberal or progressive about them. We are stuck with stodgy old “conservative” or “libertarian,” a term attractive to me in many ways, but possibly already played out and too ideologically restrictive and utopian. The Tea Party too may have outworn its usefulness, having been relentlessly attacked, even though almost always unfairly. Maybe it’s time to think of something else, something that reaches out and brings in the America we seem to have alienated.
A quote by the nineteenth century British socialist and designer William Morris has long intrigued me: “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes out not to be what they meant, other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
Morris may have been on to something. What you call something is nowhere near as important as what it is. Or, in another sense, what you call something is often a deliberate form of misdirection.
The greats of public relations have always known that. The art of public relations has been to get people to accept something, often when they don’t want it. Conservatives and Republicans don’t even have to do that. They are at an advantage in this regard. They have something the people most likely want, even though they don’t always know it. Our job is to make them know it.
But that may take some rebranding. Radical rebranding. Also a wholesale changing of the guard when it comes to our representatives at all levels — party, media, and elected officials. We need people with the skills and ability to reach out, to talk the language of America. And we need to listen to America as well. I suspect those people who voted against us and are now drifting even more toward Obama are trying to tell us something. Most of all: we’re not communicating.
Related: The Art of Persuasion
The Republican’s problem is that they have no leader. John Boehner is the highest ranking elected leader, so he is it. This is a position he clearly does not want. He wants to be Speaker of the House, a position he waited a long time in line for. That is what he wants to do. But he has no stomach for pulling all the disparate groups in the party (and outside the party) together, not that many would listen to him anyway.
The central and current core of Republican party philosophy; limited government, more freedom, lower taxes, still is the right course for the country. We will get nowhere trying to be something else.
I think we must continue to inform any who will listen why we are right and wait and hope that an articulate leader will emerge from the supply currently available.
“The Republican’s problem is that they have no leader.”
They redefined “conservatism” to be for high debt and deficits. Yet they walk around like chickens without heads in miffed indignation the world does not view them as financially responsible. Or they are not ripping off Social Security taxes to pay for their discretionary boondoggles. The worst of them are the pundit enablers believing the REpublicans are the party of irresponsibility.
You can see the crisis in their eyes. They know if “tax cuts for the rich” (their own words) go away, the deficit will decrease, dollar will go up, and good things will happen. However, their quack economics is like a substitute religion to them. They hate to see basic economics destroy that faith in practice.
But don’t worry, the economy will tank again in 2014 when Obamacare kicks in.
First hint to the man irate about the bad communication: name your young, burgeoning communication empire after your pajamas.
On the contrary, the problem with the Republican Party is that they are not able or willing to defend capitalism and the rights of individuals in a concrete manner that explains to the poor and to the working class that “capitalism” is not a zero sum game. The day after the election I wrote this blog along similar lines, and also faulting social conservatives for losing the election. See http://clarespark.com/2012/11/07/capitalism-is-on-the-line/. Most people do not study economics, and are persuades by the populism of the mass media and the schools. So they defend themselves as best they can, following the anticapitalist road.
Bart, a glaring and longstanding problem with Republicans is that the party philosophy is not and, for several generations now, has not been, one of limited government, more freedom and lower taxes. Rather, the Republican Party philosophy has been to pay lip service to the ideas of limited government, more freedom and lower taxes while in fact acting as handmaidens of the welfare state and abetting the omnipresent expansion of federal power.
Don’t believe me? Take this quick test:
1. Name the last Republican President who advocated for and presided over the elimination of even a single major federal agency. Mergers don’t count, I’m asking for one who simply disbanded a major agency permanently & returned its powers to the several states or the people.
2. Name the last Republican President who eliminated a major federal entitlement program either of the means tested variety or one for the elderly.
3. Name the last Republican President who set about to and in fact did intentionally lower federal tax revenues significantly (not rates). People lose sight of this one because they wrongly equate lower marginal rates combined with less deductions which together act to increase federal revenues with a “tax cut” when, in fact, it is actually a “tax increase”.
Hint: At least one of the above does not exist and to even make a case for the others you’ll have to begin your search prior to the Great Depression. Republicans sometimes succeed in very temporarily slowing the growth of federal power out at the margins and when they do it is such a shocking outcome that they are lionized for their deeds.
Contra point – One need only look at the most recent Republican administration to find a President who: 1) created major new federal bureaucracies; 2) created a major new entitlement program; and 3) expanded federal revenues in relation to GDP. The records of previous Republican administrations are not better.
Roger is entirely correct about the pathetic inability of Republicans to communicate effectively but he neglects entirely the idea that such may well be due to the fact that they no longer really believe the ideas they espouse. And who can blame them? America’s socialist revolution, set in motion nearly a century ago, is all but complete; the zeitgeist built on those decades of unbroken leftward momentum is such that an idea antithetical to it such as individual responsibility or limited government appears so outrageous that it need not even be considered seriously. What use messaging in that environment?
“Brinker
Bart, a glaring and longstanding problem with Republicans is that the party philosophy is not and, for several generations now, has not been, one of limited government, more freedom and lower taxes. Rather, the Republican Party philosophy has been to pay lip service to the ideas of limited government, more freedom and lower taxes while in fact acting as handmaidens of the welfare state and abetting the omnipresent expansion of federal power.”
I wish I could disagree with you. But of couse, I can’t.
My hope is that eventually we elect enough folks who actually believe in the ideals and that they wrest control from those that just talk.
For whom shall we vote then?
Consider one of the present conservative standard bearers, Paul Ryan, and his budget plan.
Far from limiting government, Ryan’s plan represents the latest Republican scheme to rescue the dying federal welfare state and impose its largest and most expensive components on us for generations to come. In no year of his plan does federal spending fall below the absolute level of the preceding year, he proposes to allow the ratchet to continue turning in the same direction it has for a century or more now. Nothing significant goes away, the character of the present soul-sucking welfare state is merely tweaked a bit to make it more palatable … and survivable.
And from reducing the obscene level of federal taxation, again, as a percentage of GDP, Ryan’s plan would attempt to stabilize the absolute level of federal taxation above the post WW II average.
Ryan’s plan might fairly be characterized as slowing the growth of government while streamlining the tax code to capture an ahistorically high level revenue relative to the size of the economy. And this is the best the Republicans have had to offer in the past couple of decades?
Whither the Republican firebrand calling for the wholesale & immediate liquidation of entire swaths of the federal government? Where is the champion of small government articulating that, “No we should not permanently enshrine federal spending at 20% of GDP as envisioned by Rep. Ryan. In fact no American should pay as much as 20% of their income to federal, state & local governments cumulatively!” And so on.
Sadly the battle is so completely lost that there seems little hope beyond merely awaiting the inevitable systemic crash and trying to pick up the pieces as best we can thereafter.
The very sad thing is that you don’t have to compromise or take over all branches of government to cut spending. You just need to have one house or the presidency. That’s all. You just simply don’t appropriate the money. You just say that we’ve reached 20% (less, even better) of GDP and we’re not going to appropriate any more money for NPR, NEA, EPA, Dept. of Ed, NASA, much of the municipal welfare in the DOD, etc.
You can’t believe how often I talk like this in front of Tea Partiers and they look at me like so much deer caught in the headlights.
The Republican party has spent its time defending tax cuts at all costs. Because of this it has driven up defecits and backed itself into a corner of “tax cuts for the rich”. The focus needs to be on spending, not taxes. If you take care of spending (which you can do unilaterally) taxes take care of themselves.
Backwards.
You’re communicating very well. In this age of internet and mass media, people know EXACTLY who you are and what you think.
You’re problem is that on a whole range of issues, you’ve taken destructive stances. If conservatism ever meant “preserve our institutions” then today’s conservatives are the opposite of that old meaning.
Remember when Obama was losing to “generic Republican” but winning against all the actual Republicans? That meant that the public still remembers an adult Republican party. But no one here at PJ Media stands for adult values.
So no, you don’t need to change your image, you need to change your values. People know exactly who you are. You need to be replaced by someone adult.
Leftwingers are the new Conservatives, Reactionaries, trying to preserve the institutions that they created since the New Deal.
Funny enough, RINOs Romney and Ryan ran on preserving Medicare and Social Security via adult reforms, but that was a losing proposition. Why buy the Democrat Lite when you can get the real thing.
The Center European Conservative parites are all parties of “Better Managers” of the Leftwing Zeitgeist Welfare State. What they really have is a 2 party system, the Far Left and the Center Left(Conservatives). However the Nationalists, UKIPians, and Christianists are surging all across Europe, because the Leftwing system is a shambles and near collapse. It will take major crisis and misery, societal violence(Jihad and the reaction on the streets). Things will change, but only when it’s absolutely clear that the old system is failed.
Have a good Christmas EV
I stopped being able to respond because Roger banned me early in the morning.
He also deleted all my comments, but due to PJ’s buggy multiple server/multiple database implementation, my comments were appearing and disappearing at random for half an hour before the servers finally synced and the delete failed.
We’ve argued this before, so Kudos for being the only one here honest enough to admit that the Republicans are threatening institutions.
Really, how can you expect the keep the votes of older voters while trying to make the government go broke?
The line that you can always lower taxes and revenue won’t go down is a transparent lie. Romney’s plan was obviously to deliberately lower revenue and then slashing Social Security and Medicare.
The idea that you can lie about what lowering taxes and raising defense spending means is a forlorn one. You can’t fool people forever.
As long as you don’t have a solid, believable plan to save “entitlements” that involves actually raising enough taxes to fund them, then you will lose elections. People don’t want to lose SS and Medicare.
You blame Democrats but you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Merry Christmas Josh.
Sometimes my comments dont appear either.
The government is broke, you can’t raise taxes enough to correct that, and the system will crash just as conservatives predicted. Our best hope at this point is to make sure more Leftists die in the wreck, and then rebuild.
Exactly right. The complete idiots on the left think that raising annual revenues by $50B in taxing the ‘rich’ will solve a $1 trillion problem. How are you going to reason with somebody so breathtakingly ignorant and intransigent in their lunacy? Forget the GOP: they no longer stand for anything but short-term privilege. Forget the Demos: they are so far gone that blowing the brains out wouldn’t change their IQ. The coming troubles are going to cleanse the Augean stables of all the horsesh*t.
According to your logic, can we raise taxes indefinitely without the revenue going down? What happens if we raise taxes beyond a certain point?
1. The big payers will have a stronger incentive to find ways to evade taxes. That would include paying the best experts to find loopholes in the tax laws, investing assets in foreign coutries, and being more willing to take risks to conceal income illegaly.
2. Big payers who can’t evade taxes might leave the country. We’ve just seen Gerard Depardieu move from France to Belgium. Think it can’t happen in America? Well, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook cofounder, renounced his American citizenship (and kept his Brazilian). He now lives in Singapore, where he invests a lot of his money. Continue on this road to socialism and you will see Asia rising from your ashes.
3. With lower profits (due to higher taxes) and higher salaries to employees (so the employees could pay more taxes too) businesses will be less able to grow, will tend more to avoid hiring and to cut existing manpower, or even shut down. Investors will be deterred from investing in new businesses. All leading to a slowdown in economic activity, a smaller growth rate and a higher unemployment rate. Sounds familiar?
4. Citizens able to keep less money in their hands will buy less, leading to the same results as (3) above – smaller profits => less business, slowdown in economic activity => higher unemployments => more welfare paid by govt => raising taxes => less business => more unemployment, and on.
5. Low income workers will have less incentive to work since they can get by on welfare without working, permanently, leading to higher unemploymet => more welfare paid by the govt => raising taxes => less business => more unemployment, and on.
All those leading to a fall in tax revenue in spite of higher tax rates. Don’t believe me? Check it out. Check actual results of tax cuts and raises in different periods in different countries. Is there a prevalent pattern?
We can agree there’s a low bar cutting taxes beyond which will cause revenue to go down. If, say, the govt takes only 1% tax, revenue is likely to go down. The more important question is what’s the highest bar beyond which raising taxes causes tax revenue to go down. If you can find the most common tax rate area on the diagrams where tax revenue reaches a peak before it goes down, somewhere there is your optimal tax rate. Going beyond that will make tax revenue go down.
Thank you for a reasoned “conservative” response to JS’s BS. It’s no wonder Roger has some of his comments deleted.
I have tried many, many times to have an adult conversation with liberals and/or dedicated Democrats. Reasonable, rational, and adult conversation is virtually impossible since they respond like children. For example, make the point that the overly generous welfare programs have in far too many instances bred destructive dependency and you will get a response that is illogical, uncaring, rambling, or a “yeah, but I’m still gonna vote for the Democrat ‘cause they care about people” or some such nonsense. As a parent I know how difficult it is to communicate with children or an adult with the political mentality of one. The latter being virtually the entirety of the left. Prove my point for us, Josh.
Exit polls indicated about 80% of the voters thought Obama “cared” about them and about 10% thought Romney did. Obama cares about me? You’ve got to be kidding. We do not need “care” we need “competance,” in pursuing appropriate policies, which I believe to be limited government and free market economics.
Since “caring” trumps “competance,” we’d better nominate someone who can fake sincerity better than our last few nominees. Oops…strike that!
What children and leftists have in common is that both don’t acknowledge that reality has some inherent limits.
For instance, low income workers (me included) can’t afford the same health care quality and quantity as high income workers. That is outrageous! I wholeheartedly agree that this situation is profoundly undesirable (particularly since it affects me
). But can we realistically expect to change it? Well, one way is that technology becomes cheaper with time, but by then there are already some new technologies low income workers can’t afford yet. So generally health care for all, including low income workers, has improved over time, but the rich always get better treatment. So the leftist answer is the redistribution of wealth – take more from the rich through higher taxes to give more to the poor through welfare benefits. The only problem with that is that we don’t live in a land of milk and honey where boundless wealth is just lying there, waiting to be equally distibuted by an uncorrupted representative central government. The wealth doesn’t just exist out there by the grace of nature (except in the case of natural resources like oil) – it is created by humans (and it isn’t boundless either). Some create more wealth, some less, some none. So you take more from those who create more wealth to give more to the less fortunate who create less wealth or none. Sounds like a plan, no? But what happens if those who create more wealth move to Singapore? They take their wealth with them and then there’s a lot less wealth left to be equally distributed. Oops.
So the leftist solution to that bump on the road is to change human nature, gradually perfecting it more and more until those creating more wealth will only be happy to give away large part of it out of benevolence, solidarity and angelic selflessness. I don’t think human nature is 100% immutable. Over time with cultural evolution people in some, probably most, cultures have become more caring, sensitive and compassionate, and less selfish, compared to that culture’s past, but does such improvement can really continue indefinitely? Will they only become less and less selfish and more more solidary, or is there a limit to this process? The facts I see on the ground strongly suggest there is a limit, there is a point beyond which people would not want to give anymore, especially if forced to by the govt or anyone else. This limit may differ between different individuals, but eventually they will all move to Singapore. And if there were no Singapore, if the entire world becomes socialist or communist, those people will have less incentive to invest their efforts to benefit the interests of others because in the end our primary motivation as humans is our own self-interest (otherwhise natural selection would have eliminated our ancestors a long time ago). So while human nature has considerable flexibility, it is still a reality that it has some inherent limits as well. Trying to turn the overwhelming majority of mere human beings into selfless angels, working tirelessly for the benefits of others, is extremely likely to fail.
Inherent limits on reality should be acknowledged, which doesn’t mean giving up on all and any attempt to change reality, but recognizing that if a certain course of action fails again and again and again, and then some more times, perhaps we should give up on this particular course of action and try something else, including the realization that not all limits of reality can be transcended just because we want them to. A realization which must lead to compromize, as painful as this necessary compromize might be to our vision of heaven on earth. Children often have difficulty coming to terms with that, and so do leftists.
The single greatest threat to the existence of democratic republics is the insistence by leftists/totalitarians/socialists/etc. that they are able to change the nature of man into a better one of THEIR imagining. That kind of arrogance has produced more state-sponsored mass murder, starvation, and misery in the last 100 years than any time in human history. This ideology is a sectarian, utopian (read: non-existent) creed that attempts to mimic what only Divine Providence can achieve. Be exceeding wary of any person, and especially politicians, that espouse such nonsense.
Maybe libertarians should explain how they are the true liberals and progressives, and when leftists protest, that gives openings for libertarians to explain how their policies actually fulfill these ideals better than leftist big-government ideas.
The Republican Party has no platform. When it appears that they are nearing one, they turn tail and run.
That’s because they know that actually standing by the platform they have will lose and lose and lose elections.
Come on, Josh. Be explicit. What exactly is the Republican platform that you refer to? And why is such a loser in your opinion? While you are at it, is the Tea Party platform of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets a “loser” and why or why not? There, I’ve just “made your day”. You ain’t just blowin’ smoke are you, pal?
Josh is stupid, obviously. He has bought the Dem talking points that all we have to do is to raise taxes $50 billion to close a $1 trillion deficit. Why are you engaging with such an idiot?
I am troll, hear me roar nonsense.
Pam, you are precisely correct. Aside from a few who are articulate and noteworthy, the leadership of the Repubs are an out-sized disaster.
And atop this pyramid of misfits lies leader Boehner, a weepy eyed, alcoholic who is not fit to lead a pack of cats and dogs. He is totally inept and spineless too.
And it is not for nothing that they too embraced, within their platform, the following foreign policy disaster – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/29/republican-national-convention-heralds-arab-spring-in-its-platform-oblivious-to-the-unfolding-arabmuslim-nightmare-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/…in other words, how exactly are they that much different than the Dems, a poison within the body politic?
Now, if the likes of Palin and Bachmann were at the helm, that would be a whole other situation, the likes of which the Dems would NEVER recover from!But the RINOS’s will never let it happen.
Now, if the likes of Palin and Bachmann were at the helm, that would be a whole other situation, the likes of which the Dems would NEVER recover from!But the RINOS’s will never let it happen.
Ha ha! With Palin and Buchmann at the helm you’d lose every election. Go ahead punk, make my day!
Just wait. Your empty-suited leader Obama is steering Democrats to an epic disaster. Once Obamacare starts to bite and his trillion dollar deficits continue Democrats will be the ones who lose lose lose elections.
Which is exactly why the idiot Boehner has completely blown it. He should have given OVomit everything he asked for and then stepped back and watched Obama’s trouser fill with his own feces. Two years from now the GOP could have swept the Senate and increased seats in the House in the wake of the most epic financial mess caused purely by Democrat policy.
Instead, Boehner has now given the Dems the perfect opportunity to shirk responsibility once again. “Bush did it!” “Boehner did it!” Get ready. It’s coming.
Please! Neither of those two are real leaders. They have their strengths, but neither organizing, consolidating, nor pulling in enough of the malleable center happen to be among them. Giving you nice hills or mounds to die on…. maybe.
If you do not consider these two to be leaders, then you are the face of those who don’t want to follow anyone. These two are both natural born leaders, Especally Palin!! You may be dissing them because you don’t like them, but you are dead wrong about them not being leaders. They are two of the BEST we have. They have been pilloried by the establishment GOP, losers that they are. But Bachmann and Palin have scruples, ideals, and are unwilling to compromise….something we sorely need. The two of them are leaders naturally, and may be the best we have.
Dwight’s a compulsive Hegelian triangulator. You’re just getting his latestand poorly crafted left-leaning “synthesis”.
If you were a bit more acquainted with Shakespearean, metaphor, you would be even more offended, but might also see more of the craft.
OK, take out a comma, but also give Ward a clue: “Die” as a Shakespearean metaphor.
Oh, I’m very well acquainted with Shakespeare, Dwighty-boy. I’m old enough to have had the sort of classical education that’s mighty hard to come by these days. So the ‘die’ allusion didn’t escape me. It was simply too crass and juvenile to merit comment.
And if you lay claim to a similar educational background, you appear to be singularly unable to profit from it.
Yeah, what we really need to do is nominate some moderate like Romney…
If you need the /sarc for that, then you must be as dumb as your opinion is.
Antonio: “He misses not much,”
Sebastian: “No, he doth but mistake the truth totally.”
LOL. You keep on swinging and missing, Dwighty; we’ll keep on laughing.
Agreed, Adina. But in can’t happen ever. The hoi polloi are an undereducated, brainwashed lot that make a majority of the population. There is no return. America is over.
And the Republicans are to blame, not the brainless mob.
You correctly call the US public a group of childish lo-info voters, then blame the GOP for this condition. Your syllogism is neither rational nor factually correct.
Not only that, but the GOP has no leader.
The reason why the GOP has no platform and no leader? Simple. As soon as somebody (such as Newt Gingrich) comes along who can effectively communicate a conservative platform, and who has the talent to serve as an effective leader, the country-club Republicans attack him and smear him and force him to drop out of the race. The upshot is that only the RINOs are left, and from that point on, we’re doomed.
I would suggest either secession or emigration. Given that I’m too old to wait for the former to happen, I’m arranging to do the latter.
This condition is exacerbated by the existence of careerist politicians more interested in building networks of power maintenance than statesmanship/patriotism. The solution is simple; term limits for Congress. If the logic is sound for POTUS, it’s sound for the legislative branch. For years now I’ve only supported candidates that espouse term limits.
It has been almost two months since the catastrophe of Hussein’s re-election and the loss of the Constitutional Republic of old occurred. Yet the Republican Party refuses to recognize the new political reality and insists on playing the same losing games and employing the same losing tactics that caused the catastrophe in the first place. I suppose it will be ever thus with the clueless jackasses in the Stupid Party. It is downright painful to see the continued marginalization of the few conservatives that remain in Republican ranks as it races to the bottom to accept every Marxocrat social and political trope as a new default position. Such monumental idiocy should open the eyes of everyone that the Republican Party is a lost cause. At this time in our country’s history, every day not spent recognizing the inevitable balkanization of the old US via the nullification and secession movement and working toward that process is a day wasted. The Republican Party has become today’s Whig Party and will now become just as irrelevant as any other historical artifact, just like the Consitutional Republic we all knew and that was lost to us last November 6th. We need a new political party that will work toward nullification and secession to reestablish a new Constitutional Republic on the ashes of the old. And the Republican Party is not that party.
Amen and amen!
Agreed and seconded! The crony politicians on Capital Hill and the miserable liberal media controlled by the Democrats are laughing at the thought of a second civil war, but it is coming. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it will be here. The good news is they are putting their heads in the sand thinking it will not happen. When they least expect it those who remember the Old Republic will raise up and wash away the scum in a sea of blood.
YES! The Party of Stupid which holds tightly to the status quo while desperately wanting to be loved by the liberal media can’t embrace Marxist positions fast enough. Until a third party forms, I’m going to sit back and watch it all burn.
The problem with the Republicans in Washington is that they no longer act as an effective opposition party. On too many important issues they are silent and invisible when they need to be on the stage and in the courts hammering the socialists with both logical and philosophical arguments on a daily basis. Instead, the arguments they do make are weak, inarticulate, drained of all passion, and too often lost. Why should they run away from the conservative label when so many of us are genuinely proud to be called constitutional conservatives? Take the issue of gun control. I take Obama at his word that he will act by executive fiat to further restrict firearms, if not move to ban them altogether. Where will the Republicans stand if there is a dictatorial attempt to overturn the 2nd amendment? The Republicans dither while the constitutional Republic is being lost and they seem not cognizant of the evil we face. They act as though they have been completely compromised, and I’m ashamed that I am forced to be associated with such a cowardly bunch in the absence of reasonable alternatives.
Umm.. we need to rebrand our conservative label because the liberal media and an army of internet trolls have so effectively smeared our name?
How about we defend our conservative ideas instead of trying to disguise them?
Wait, are we talking about the Republican Party, or conservative ideology? Ok, now I see the problem.
Skandia Recluse I agree with you it’s not the conservative ideas that are wrong, it’s those guys in Washington DC running around wearing elephant suites pretending to be Republicans that’s the problem. I think I’ve said this before on this blog, but I’ll say it again. If political courage were liquid there wouldn’t be enough in the whole of the Republican Party to fill a coffee cup.
Oh I don’t know..I would say that the Republicans had a lot of help from all those folks out there who have never run anything but their mouths…for instance I hear that they lack courage…so what does that mean? Are they supposed to be big and brave like Rush and Hannity and Malkin and Laura who rack in the money even as they help marginalize conservatives? Are they supposed to be brave like the Tea Party who put up candidates who not only could not win but who made the whole party look bad? I can remember conservatives like Buckley…they never whined. But it seems to me that conservatives are doing too much of that. They whine about the GOP…they whine about the media. But the truth is they are part of the problem themselves.
If Conservatives are going to throw the Republican party under the bus, why should anybody else vote for them? Look at these comments; this is where the problem starts.
The Democrats idolize a truly evil man who conducted his own personal War on Women, yet we throw a good man under the bus? We are at least as susceptible to the MSM as anyone else.
Isn’t the wrod “conservative” still doing better than “liberal”? The US may be one of the few countries in the world where this is so. In Hebrew the word is downright ugly; people refer right-wing, which simply means strong on defense.
And how do you get the message accross when your are gagged, and the other side is given a sound truck?
What can you say to someone who asks “When did you stop beating your wife?” The questions are stacked against us. Do you want a perfect example? Look at what just happened with the gun control wing nuts. One mass shooting and they’re all over it like vultures on a steaming carcass.
They’re not even using the same words that we use. They make up their own language so that they can babble incoherently. I mean, what IS an assault rifle? I guarantee that if you talk to half a dozen people from various state and federal agencies, you’ll get half a dozen different answers.
The issue is getting past that roadblock of deliberate ignorance. Liberal Leftists often accuse the GOP of being ignorant of climate research. Yet, the problem isn’t that we don’t know what it says, the problem is that even if we agree with it, the conclusions and recommended actions are either toxic, impractical, unethical, or pointless. That conclusion is then portrayed as ignorance and intransigence.
So how do we win this offensive? By building better journalists. Two can play the game of muck-raking. That’s why Andrew Breitbart was both loathed and respected. He beat leftist media hounds at their own game.
We get there by defending what we feel is right. And we’re winning. The NRA is growing again. In a classic case of the Barbara Streisand effect, this anti-gun administration is having a huge positive effect on gun and ammunition sales. They have done more to grow the pro-gun side than anything a conservative, right wing administration could have done.
It isn’t as bad as we might think.
How much of that approval rate comes from people living off government welfare or jobs. As for “young” people, especially the ones with no or useless skills, if things get really bad, that is their government money inflates to worthlessness, how are they going to survive.
Your attitude is exactly a major part of the problem.
Following the November election, a good part of the conservative GOP base has turned bitter, lashing out at precisely the voters you need to win over.
You can’t keep insulting people as “low information voters,” “lazy,” “moochers,” “stupid,” etc.–and ever expect any of them to consider voting for your party or its candidates.
The day is over when the GOP could win solely by turning out its base with some appeal to Independent voters. Independent voters voted for Romney but he still lost.
The election happened. Obama won, fair and square.
GET OVER IT.
Rediscover the optimism and outreach and forward-looking thinking that characterized the conservative movement 30 or 40 years ago. Rediscover “Morning in America.”
I’m tired of the anger, the bitterness, the frustration, the handwringing after the November election.
GET OVER IT.
I see no bitterness in toadold’s comment. It is a fact that dependence on govt. is a deciding factor on how people vote, and the democrats knew this from the early days of the “Great Society”. We need a cultural change, one where govt. assistance is seen as a last resort, not a right.
toadold is also correct regarding worthless college skills. One reason Germany is so successful is that their culture has a high regard for people with technical skills, while we excel at turning out huge numbers of “Sandra Flukes”, 30 something “college educated” (“young”) people whose marketable skills are… what exactly?…
Let’s take a look at the attitudes of posters right in this discussion so far, towards those who freely chose to reject Romney in this recent election:
“people living off government welfare or jobs”
“whose marketable skills are… what exactly?…” (Teaching, government, media. Precisely those institutions you claim are against us. Of course they’re against us. You discourage young conservatives from developing skills which would enable them to pursue careers there.)
“an irrational electorate”
“an immoral electorate”
“the dingbat mob”
“safeguards…the exclusion of women from the electorate”
“a non-discerning bunch of drone citizens”
” the scared, snivelling soccer moms and [female] sex addicts wanting their free pills”
These are all quotes right from posts in this discussion.
No one should want to be part of a party that regards them with such suspicion and contempt. For starters, single women are never going to join a party that regards them as “snivelling sex addicts” and looks back nostalgically to the days when women couldn’t even vote.
The GOP base has clearly turned inward. It no longer cares about attracting new entrants; it prefers to wallow in self-pity.
And they need to GET OVER IT.
NO bud, I will NOT “get over it” when what was said happens to be the absolute truth. I don’t want “new members” if that means welcoming these losers when letting any old losers in is part of the problem. What do you think a RINO is anyway? Its better to be a minority party then gain the whole world and lose your soul. The GOP is walking dead and they don’t know it. My suggestion is get off or go down with the ship.
I will also not “get over it”. They refer to me as a racist (which I am not) because I want voter id and because I want charter schools. I will continue to refer to them as the party of food stamps, etc.
You’re wrong if you assume leftists don’t use the same terminology to describe Tea Party members and other conservatives. This isn’t the issue in November’s POTUS loss. The GOP doesn’t need to win over those dependent on government handouts to win elections. They have never been and will never be part of the GOP’s demographic. The GOP needs to sharpen its skills in reaching out to productive members of society who still voted for Obama despite the long-term conflict in self interest (working women, hispanics, younger workers). The margin of victory for Obama was very slim despite the electoral college tallies. Furthermore, the GOP still controls the House and 30 of 50 governorships. Far from being dead, Republicans retain significant government power despite their too often being tin eared on the PR front.
The GOP will never do a better job of being Santa Claus than the leftist party. Attempting to change message to appeal to those seeking redistribution of income is not in the party’s or conservatives interest.
Nonsense. America is at a fork in the road. 50.9% took the left fork. The other 49.1% are discussing getting off the cart. Why should the 49.1% surrender? There were no liberals at the Alamo or on the Bon Home Richard. “Surrender Sir? I have not yet began to fight!”
Why not go for the Samson option and tear down everything?
Conservatives will survive the destruction of America Liberals are creating. Liberals won’t.
Jump off that cliff. I dare you. Double Dog dare you. I have a parachute. I will watch you go splat while drifting gently to the ground.
“fair and square…” REALLY??? Are you serious??? If you believe that, then the rest of your comments could not have any substance to them. You immediately disqualify yourself. ROFLMAO!!!
Obama won by 50.86%..that is not some landslide..and a lot of those folks who voted for him did vote to keep their benefits. Just ask them, they will tell you.
Surrender is tempting. I don’t think it’s the answer. I think it’s past time for conservatives to admit that American culture has declined. This is partly a result of the hijacking of the educational system and the media. It is also the result of demographic changes by which waves of immigrants – many of them perfectly nice people – have arrived in the US without imbibing the political values that previous immigrants did. The US is an entitlement state, and the party goes on. Having spent four weeks in CA, it’s clear that the party goes on. America remains culturally drunk and self-satisfied while headed for – if not insolvency then a situation of permanent massive debt, increasing social disruption and a permanent fracture line dividing two kinds of America.
I still remember listening to Patrick Buchanan give that speech at the RNC, you know the one everyone is so ashamed of that no honest, uncensored versions exist not even on paper.
In the same speech that got an ovation for calling for a “cultural war” he said “you don’t give those people Head Start programs you send them to jail!” And in those words he said that black preschoolers belong in jail… And don’t pretend it didn’t happen, Pat got booted from the party right after that for a reason, he was an embarrassment. But he also got an ovation, he also started something.
The “culture war” has that very filthy birth.
So if there’s “a permanent fracture line dividing two kinds of America” then who’s God d*mn fault is it?
Dude, the culture war was started long ago. Pat Buchanan didnt start it. Blaming the reacitonaries, it’s what Leftwingers do.
That you ask the question shows a degree of self delusion.
The answer is simple. It is the socialists/totalitarians/sickle & hammer aficionados who hate free enterprise and private property rights who created the divide. It is they who know dependence on government by a majority of US citizens is the only way to break down the bedrock principles on which this country was based in order to transform it into their vision of utopia.
Leave it to a man from Israel to have the clearest perspective. Could not agree with you more concerning the state of our nation, Larry.
However, I don’t believe Barack Obama is nearly as popular as Roger Simon suggests in this article even now. If there is one saving grace in losing this last election, it will become more and more difficult for Barack Obama to be covered by the corrupted media.
And I predict history will show Barack Obama’s two terms as abject failure and one looked at with great regret.
Thanks, Tex. I agree that his popularity is ‘less than spun’ is how I would put it. I think Americans may eventually wake up – as during WWII. I hope so. Take care.
Any student of American history knows that politics runs in cycles as the mood of the electorate shifts and reacts to changing situations or gets scared or just tired. It is as much psychological as ideological. Just follow the trajectory of the public’s mood through LBJ, Nixon, Ford Carter, and Reagan, and then spin the wheel again for Bush Clinton Bush Obama. The earlier period was clearly more difficult and had greater swings. The second period actually has more consensus.
By the end of any recent President’s second term, the public is pretty much sick of him and the accumulated baggage. So it goes.
I can only pray, but I don’t see it. The man was a complete failure already and he was re-elected. Our government isn’t on the Hill, its on the nightly news and Two and a Half Men.
My book, Back to Basics for the Republican Party, explains the disadvantages of using the “conservative” label, with a quote from George Orwell.
You could help the party’s image by informing the public about my book. See the book review section on my
http://www.grandoldpartisan.com blog.
Thank you,
Michael Zak
Entry for mixed-metaphor du jour: Mr Simon is a near genius at bringing the horse to water but Pauline’s in peril because the damn thing won’t drink and the messenger is in danger of being shot in the foot, at least.
The traditional old drones and old crones of the GOP believe that their ‘leadership’ remains vital. Yes, they may concede, even Jove nods now and again, as is normal on Olympus, but the decline of our nation that happened on their watch, we are to believe, had nothing to do with them — injured innocents all, denizens of a precious world where butter never melts. Boehner, with his devotion to the tanning booth and cigarette lobbies, and a word-view derived from Dale Carnegie and the sale of small plastics is now no better or worse than most of his peers — but he does define them.
The rest of us prefer reality: today’s waffle-as-usual piles atop a dismal track record. With a few honorable exceptions, we see only corrupt and entrenched politicians bent on self-preservation. Twin truths: the GOP is a three-time loser (at least — depending on how you count it); and the election-losing loony religious right is today’s über-elephant, an unavoidable stumbling block to earthly progress.
These people deserve each other, dreary old farts (often before their time), become custodians of a threadbare, leaky tent reachable only through rusting turnstiles that click less and less often. Surely the conclusion is obvious. Leave them be. They are terminal losers.
Time for the rest of us — all who care about country, constitution and a better future for our grandchildren — to move on. Run don’t walk. Oh, and screw surrender.
You will have no progress then, as your vision blurred and narrow, you more influenced by the corrupted media of spin than you either recognize or care to admit. More so, you will remain in a small and irrelevant minority.
And I can prove it to you with my elected Senator, elected by an overwhelming majority of “religious loons”; or by example and performance in overwhelmingly religious states operating above all others:
Senator Tom Coburn; Texas, Utah.
Amen.
Yep.
There are quite a few Anti-Christian Cultural Leftists, who fundamentally dont understand that they have been bamboozled and hornswaggled, with regards to the Left’s cultural revolution. Theyve bought hook line and sinker the false dichotomy of Religion/Christianity vs Science for example. They dont even wise up when they see the Global Warming Scientism hoax masquerading as science based progress. They unwittingly are supporting the Revolution (albeit only half) and dont understand how the overturning, subversion and rejection of that old order helps the Left in it’s institution of a new economic order based on a new moral/cultural order.
As has been said, we have a bunch of clueless rubes running around masquerading as conservatives. They dont even understand the battlefield….how can they develop effective strategy and tactics? Surrendering isnt winning. Allowing the Left to dictate revisionist historical truth and control language leads to failure. They didnt get it right on cultural issues and wrong on economics, they got it wrong, period.
Spot on. One cannot be a cultural liberal and a fiscal, small government conservative. The Cultural revolution did not occur so much in China as it did in Europe and the USA.
Damn that crazy religious right, if only they weren’t the single largest and most important member of the right’s coalition of ideas. Hell even for turning over moderates they have a better chance than any other idea we have. 50% of the country thinks that lower taxes are good, 50% think the Constitution is worth anything, 50% of the country (at least) thinks Obama is a good president. 85% of the country believes in God. Please explain to me how dumping the religious right would possibly help the GOP. Explain to me how you possibly plan to get enough moderates and left wingers (which you won’t get no matter what you do) to make up for getting rid of at least half the party base, and the most enthusiastic half at that.
GD:
Please explain to me how dumping the _crazy_ religious right
would possibly help the GOP.
MR:
‘Crazy’ in this case means willing to use force to impose their
religious beliefs on those who do not share them, in defiance of
the separation of church and state required by the US Constitution.
Like requiring Catholic Hospitals, Catholic Schools and overtly religious corporations like Hobby Lobby to provide abortifacients against their most deeply held religious beliefs, thereby forcing abortion against their wishes and trampling the very First Amendment? You regressives had no problem with Obama and Sandra Fluke demanding so.
As far as separation of church and state? If you can find the words wall, separation, church, or state in that First Amendment, I’m in. AS to your fears of theocracy being founded, 236 years of proof that’s a crock too. But I’ll bet dollars to donuts you’re a big proponent of the rights of sharia.
The Christianophobia types always stick out like flashing red lights.
Since you’ve got exactly ZERO evidence of your assertion and you’ve misquoted/misapplied the Constitution, your comment is patently absurd and not worth the bits used to display it.
Now listen to mommy and take out the trash.
MR:
‘Crazy’ in this case means willing to use force to impose their
religious beliefs on those who do not share them, in defiance of
the separation of church and state required by the US Constitution.
That so? I take it,then, that you’re ready to go all-in with your opposition to Islam and its willingness to use force to impose sharia law on the rest of us? We await your answer with bated breath.
Is the rather sour note among the whack-a-doodles induced by the fact that you’re still here after yet another Rapture-rocket alert turned into another damp squib?
Doubt I’m alone in noticing how much trouble you zealots often have with conventional English and clear expression. You manage to sound smug, confused, ignorant and sanctimonious in the same breath as you flaunt you abilities — all the while remaining oblivious to repeated defeat. That’s quite hard to do. Worse, anyone who disagrees with you is [fill in the blank with warmed-over piety of your choice].
So keep on digging, girls. More bluster, more denial, more muddle, in fact, the more the better. Damn the torpedoes!
You are the GOP’s death knell and the chances you’ll ever know it are near zero.
What does that make you? Not part of the future, that’s for sure. Put as politely as possible, the electorate, many good Christians and Jews among ‘em, will continue to walk around you, picking up speed with every step.
All the Democrats have to do is kick you hard and repeatedly, and you’ll perform on cue.
I see our intellectual superior is replying to himself. LOL
That wasn’t Evangelicals hanging out there off the pyramids Friday, fool. That was your Dimocratic loving, Charlie Manson, Obama bag toting howling with the moonbats.
No worse that your dimwitted, confused, inane and insipid posts as you flaunt your inability to grab a clue or understand basic math. Can’t control the world, but in my part of of the last three elections, your feckless ilk became even more unpopular. One day we’ll finally learn that we don’t really need much from the federal gov’t, that regionally we’re more than capable of self support, that you’re dead weight, and we’ll take Clint’s advice and cut you loose to beg with libs as you strum your guitar.
I see our intellectual superior is replying to himself. LOL
Oh no, just carefully placing bookends to rope off a spot (one of many) where you and your kind muster to strut your stuff — you tend to hunt in packs. Think of it as a public service.
As for the rest, I’m content to leave it to others to make up their own minds; the arithmetic and options will take care of themselves.
I have a deep loathing for the manipulative and dishonest spin that propels the Democrat party, the way they disguise their intentions with misleasding talking points which are then magnified by the media until they become accepted as the truth. Do we really want to become more like them – slick fast-talking con artists working the media shell game – in order to succeed? Since Democrats seem to live almost entirely in fantasyland with their lies and Utopianism maybe our party should be re-fashioned into the Realistic party, the folks who always tell you the truth. I know this is who we are, but perhaps it should be re-packaged and promoted like a new product. A snappy logo would help – no, I’m not kidding! This would be fighting fire with fire but without compromising our principles. We should also leave the social issues alone for awhile, which just become weapons with which they clobber us.
Sorry, but NO… re-branding is a total waste of time.
Because the leftist institutions (and yes, they are leftist) in America consisting of the media, academia, entertainment and government will re-brand your re-brand before you have a chance to visit the powder room.
The problem is simple and so is the solution.
The challenge, however, is finding some courageous and articulate messengers who speak “people speak” and who will love and defend their country, their kids and their grand-kids a little bit more than their miserable little political careers.
Any statesmen wanna-bees out there…???
Your nation is calling.
Dennis Prager does it as well as anyone. The trouble is getting him a bigger platform in which to preach. If only he could become speaker of the house and defacto spokesman for the Repubs. Maybe we could encourage billionaire conservatives to buy out (hostile takeover) one the propaganda arms of the demonrats.
Instead of patting ourselves on the back for our philosophical purity WRT issues that are unlikely to arise in the next legislative period, we should really study programs being implemented in our laboratories of democracy, and explain to the public why these programs work and why they are better for them than the utopian alternatives. Then connect these issues to our underlying beliefs. We need to stop the name calling and we need to look for competence in our candidates–no more flavor of the month hysteria.
There is nothing different in your suggestion than what has been tried again and again. When you have a low-info populace more inclined to watch “Dancing With The Stars” than reading/studying anything related to the promotion of civil society, you’ve got a significant problem requiring paradigm-shifting change. The GOP hasn’t seen a paradigm shift in its tactics and messaging since The Contract With America (a brilliant bit of realpolitik) was announced in 1993. All of the GOP tactics have been essentially the same for 20 years now. Any company that responded as slowly to change would have closed long ago.
What’s needed in order to enact the requisite paradigm shifting is seismic change that requires a redistribution of power on the right from the ground up. I recommend term limits as a starting point to clear out the RINO’s and dead wood like Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and the assorted dinosaurs in the House like Boehner and his ilk. Once we’ve got term-limited politicians in office focused on legislative accomplishment instead of bed feathering and careerism, you will be surprised at the legislative innovation unleashed.
We are communicating– at this stage, there’s just no way to package “we can’t afford your handouts” to make it sound like “don’t worry, we can continue giving you hand outs.”
“Consider this: the word conservative itself may be a large part of the problem. Few young people want to identify with it, even when the ideas and values inherent in the ideology make perfect sense to them, even when they are already living by those values.”
A lib/RINO offering advice on advancing conservatism? Priceless. Simon, you and yours are the reason we’re in this position. Go away.
Sounds like you’re looking for the immaculate election, you know, the one that God will make you win without actually receiving any votes.
The reason “conservatism” has lost is because THERE ARE NO CONSERVATIVES IN POSITIONS OF POWER IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. The establishment RINOs are all of the same ilk as the dems. During the primaries last year EVERY time anyone other than the “electable” golden boy gained prominence, he/she was tarred and feathered by the rebpublican establishment, just as badly as by the MSM. Rabid cannabalism has done more damage to the conservative brand than MSNBC ever could.
More inane BS from JS. He must be one well-paid troll to hang around this long.
So you don’t agree with the premise that the word “conservative” has been allowed to be demonized into something other than what it should be?
And if you have the answer as to what we should do about it, please share.
What does the author of the piece have to do with the piece itself?
Do you only listen to “conservative” artists?
What would you do?
Mr. Simon’s point is that being a stubborn stick-in-the-mud yelling about things a lot is getting us nowhere.
I agree.
Mark is right though. It’s awfully easy for someone on PJMedia to come out and say “conservatism is tarnished, nobody does a good job defending it, etc etc” while this site is almost always parroting the RINO talking points. The issue is as much the right eating their own as it is the left attacking us, and nobody is eating as much of the right as often as this site is. Any time a conservative says anything the least bit more to the right than very slightly you can bet half the bloggers here (I’m looking at you again Rick Moran) will come out and completely destroy that person. I don’t have to look far around these parts to see “those ignorant far right types”, “the crazy religious right”, or any one of a dozen other leftist style smears directed at those who are actual conservatives instead of mushy “moderate” Republicans.
There are numerous issues with this, admittedly, good idea.
The first and biggest is that we all know that the left/the progressives/the liberals largely control the media and Hollywood. So even if Republicans/Conservatives did choose a new name or title, the left would immediately pick it up and immediately begin a campaign of terror resulting in the ignorant masses despising the new name as much as they despise the present names and titles. All the left would have to do is say “these are the same people, same ideas, just with a new name” and how do you defend against that? The left has made those who watch only a half hour of national evening news two or three times a week hate the words “Republican” “Conservative” “Tea Party” and, to a lesser degree, “Libertarian” with no prove, no real reason given, they just kept slamming away at the words. Repeat something often enough, and people begin to believe it.
With them in control of the media and Hollywood, you can pretty much much guarantee immediate bad press for whatever and however we rebrand ourselves. They have the advantage on that one. They can rebrand themselves and they have the media on their side to spread their ideas, their story, their…. lies.
Another problem is picking which issues to push. Sticking with lower taxes and smaller government is a “gimmee.” But what about the trickier ideas? Like Abortion and Religion? Twenty years ago, abortion was a Republican party litmus test. Now, with Roe v. Wade firmly in place, it’s hardly ever discussed anymore except by the left in their attempts to vilify us. While most conservatives can easily agree to lower taxes and smaller government, getting some of the more staunch, hardcore conservatives to stand on a platform without Abortion on it, might prove to be a real problem. It might be a deal breaker. Might be a party breaker. We lose either way.
What does it say about us as people if we’re willing to let a big ideal go just for political gain? And what does it say about us if we refuse to let “one little thing” go and end up being crushed under the leftist boot because of it?
Christians have always been big supporters of the Republican/Conservative brand, are we willing to leave God out of our platform, or at least minimize his involvement, in order to become more popular? And if we aren’t willing to let some of our more troublesome issues go, will rebranding, changing our names, our titles, our spokespeople, or even changing our leaders, really help very much?
I think we need to come up with a long term plan. I think we need to start a more active recruitment campaign. Get young kids more involved. I’m talking high school kids here. We need to encourage them to move into jobs that are, right now, run by liberals. We need to put them into journalism at newspapers (for as long as they last anyway), put them on TV, on the radio and on the internet.
This isn’t going to be easy because we all know that most colleges are also ruled by liberals and most of the professors are liberal as well. So we need to stay involved with these kids as they move through college. We need good leadership of republican groups in high schools and colleges. We need to make sure, even as we encourage these kids into these traditionally liberal jobs, that they hold onto their conservative ideas.
The colleges should also be another target. We should be finding kids, with conservative ideals, conservative parents, kids who want to teach and we should be encouraging them to dream big. Don’t just be a teacher, be a professor. As I mentioned above, there’s going to be pressure on them to either move left, maybe just to get the job and then more to keep the job. We use the left’s own tricks against them and wait for these young conservatives to get tenure at a university before becoming really outspoken about their ideas.
We need to level playing field again. The liberals tilted the board starting back in the sixties. We need to tilt it back and we can’t seem to do that while they, the left, run the media.
I’m not saying we should quit trying to put people in office. I think we should concentrate on taking over as many state governments as possible and we need to keep hold of as many seats in both of Congress as we can to limit the amount of damage the left can do. Once we’ve leveled the playing field, once the media is a little more fair, once the universities are not acting as massive recruitment centers for the democrat party, then we come back in full force… kind of like Obama did. Obama is a direct result of the plans and ideas that came about way back in the sixties. Hopefully, it won’t take us forty years to see our ultimate success come to fruition as it did for the left but if that’s what it takes to retake our country….
Continuing to slam away at the labor unions, especially the public labor unions, is something else we should continue. After all, they have become little more than fundraising organizations for the democrats. We need to cut their power, while we rebuild.
A majority of Republicans in the House, certainly Boehner, seem to be driven almost totally by fear – fear of being blamed – and Obama will blame them no matter what they do. Most people would say that’s a hell of a way to go through life – as Dhimmis.
The solution is easy. Let the Dumbocrats and Obummer own everything they pushed for and created. Force out Bohneer, replace him with a hardline conservative who shuts down negotiations. Obummer wanted tax increases and force the Bush tax cuts to go away. Good, let him have them. Let’s see what happens. Will tax increases bring economic growth, defend our country, our allies, fix the federal deficit, fix the inevitable bankrupting of entitlements, keep inflation and unemployment down? Will the midnight, uber-partisan, closed door voting of Obamacare fix healthcare? Since it is a tax, will it bring prosperity, lower health costs, spur hiring? If all is true, then the Dumbocrats are hero’s, if not, grab your pitchforks. We all know where these thief’s live. They are the party of protecting their rich. Getting rich themselves and their surrogates through the American People. The minute Oblamer starts whining and blaming the GOP, there should be a massive walkout during the SOTU. Time to fight back, and that means you GW Bush. Start defending yourself. Did Obama save GM or did you with TARP 1. Obama can’t think on the fly without a teleprompter and needs his daddy, Clinton to speak for him, so it’s time to fight back against that serial sexual harasser to a pulp.
How does the GOP turn an irrational electorate into a rational electorate? How does it turn an immoral electorate into a moral electorate, or an uninformed electorate into an informed electorate?
This is the nation that acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder. Major Hasan murdered 14 people at Ft. Hood 3 years ago and the court is tormenting over whether or not the murderer Hasan can sport a beard. This is a nation that sends frauds, and midgets, and fornicators, and killers, to the Senate, (Warren, Boxer, Menedez, Kennedy). And this is a nation that elected this most corrupt of men, Obama over a most righteous man, Romney.
The other night, one of the most brilliant of men, Mark Levin talked on the danger of majoritarianism, and it is a topic that is worthwhile examining. Majoritarianism is, in a few words, where the dingbat mob elects tyrants. The Founders built safeguards against that danger in the establishment of the electoral college and the election of senators by state legislatures, and the exclusion of women from the electorate. The 17th and 19th Amendments have destroyed two of those safeguards and now the malign forces are going after the electoral college. The criminal Holder is pushing mandatory voting. Oh boy.
Boxer, Menendez).
Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends at PJM!
Roger, I have been shouting at the top of my lungs for years…precisely what you write in this essay.
There OUGHT to be a rebranding. But “consevatives” and and more especially their voice piece, the mealy-mouthed Republicans don’t know how to message, don’t know how to game plan, don’t know they are in a war of attrition, don’t recognize the imminent peril, and don’t have a clue how to save the country. They have been outmaneuvered for over 40 years.
First, let me take to task every drooling fool who blames “RINO’s”. It is such an ignorant name and an even more ignorant position to take. I’m so sick of watching some bar stool imbecile puke out his bile…”duh, it’s dose “Rino’s” whooz lak of “purity” of thought dat is duh fault of why we loose all duh time”.
The low brain wattage required in order to blame your allies in a foxhole against a superior and winning enemy is simply staggering.
2)Let there be no mistake. This is a war. Leftism is the enemy. Now radical, virulent, in-your-face, full bore, One World Socialism/small c Communism.
Republicans are limp-wristed, faint-hearted, panty-waisted, lily-livered, candy-assed, trembling, cowering, piles of mush in confronting this enemy. They will no tell the people the truth and they are frozen in terror, except for when they are retreating in full stride.
If our side is unwilling to confront WHAT AND WHO the enemy is and WHAT THEY ARE UP TO, openly, truthfully, and with conviction…then nothing that is “rebranded” is going to stick.
Radical LEFTISM is the enemy. Describing it in halting, hesitant, muted and soft-pedaled terms is a fools errand. If WE don’t believe our own story, we can’t sell it to anyone else.
3)Forget trying to talk to average Americans about complicated financial concepts that require an advanced degree in statistics. Sell the impending doom. Call out the cowards and traitors who are selling THEIR children down the river, and OUR children with them.
Call out the traitors who lie with impunity. CALL THEM LIARS AND TRAITORS. And…then prove it.
Talk about treason openly.
Fight a war against an enemy like a war against an enemy.
These are NOT “well-intentioned” people who “simply have a different idea of how to run the country”. Quit treating that way. They don’t treat YOU that way. They slander you at every turn. They denigrate your intelligence, your motives, they paint you as racist, homophobic, greedy, warmongering, and interested in invading people’s bedrooms. AND THAT HAS STUCK.
The FIRST order of business is to purge all the racists, anti-Semites and ignorant fools of that ilk. NOBODY should want them. Let them rot in hell.
The second order of business is to bond ALL other non-leftists into one cohesive fighting force. (which means to rip the tongue out of the head of the next low grade imbecile who utters the term “RINO”.)
The third order of business is to tell any and every non-leftist office seeker…if he or she is too timid to take on radical leftism on our behalf, stay home on election day.
The fourth order of business is to make a loud, persistent, consistent and full frontal attack on lies, slander, treason and traitorism. CALL THINGS WHAT THEY ARE. Call a traitor a traitor. Call treason …treason. Call slander …slander. Call a lie…a lie.
Call out Hollywood. Call out the lapdog media. Not just timidly and in half-measures. PROVE THE CHARGES.
Fight like your life depended upon it. And, for the sake of your children…fight like THEIR lives depended upon it.
“The low brain wattage required in order to blame your allies in a foxhole against a superior and winning enemy is simply staggering.”
“Republicans are limp-wristed, faint-hearted, panty-waisted, lily-livered, candy-assed, trembling, cowering, piles of mush in confronting this enemy.”
“…rip the tongue out of the head of the next low grade imbecile who utters the term “RINO”.”
Are you at all self-aware, or are you too busy puking out the bile?
Purging White European Christian Culturalists isnt going to strengthen the Anti-Communist coalition. In fact doing so, is doing the Lefts dirty work, as they wage war on White European Christian civilziation. Labeling them racist oppressors.
There really isnt much to do, until the system collapses. Build parallel structures, alternative cultural productions, have organized leadership to step into the void, to provide a new order and security.
The ship is going down, there is no stopping it. The question is, who is going to rebuild from the ashes…..Muslims, Communists, Latinos, Chinese, or will White European Christians survive and re-establish themselves as going concerns with a right to exist and prosper, to promote themselves and their culture within their nation states?
I’m completely self aware. And..I’m not a coward.
We are in a war. Only a fool would want to split allies at this moment in time and only a coward would cower in the face of a sworn enemy.
Those are two fronts to battle, one of which is unnecessary.
I didn’t pick either of those fights, but I’m sick and tired of taking crap from both of them. You included.
If you don’t want to “split allies,” then why are you calling a large portion of allies names yourself? The truth is that there are a lot of us that just don’t want to be Republicans anymore as it is currently constituted and are looking for an alternative party once a viable one develops. There is a war going on in the GOP and you are too blinded to trying to keep it together to realize a divorce is on the way.
cfb: While I overwhelmingly agree with your comments, on this you are way off base. It is the RINOs that have done, indeed, everything you listed as what we are complaining about…McLame, Grhamesty, the Maine girls, Grassroots, Hagel, etc have all played lip service to us-Conservatives-while making nice to the left and the LSM.
Let’s see which GOPers will support any and all gun legislation that the left and the WON presents to us. RINOs will be all aboard on this for sure.
Even our effete and urbane talking heads go after us and the TEA Party because we don’t toe the line. First we need to get rid of the RINOs and then we can talk about rebuilding our party.
Amen and Amen. We need politicians with the courage of Ann Coulter’s convictions. We need politicians who will excoriate statism with every fiber of their being and champion liberty and free enterprise with a singularity of purpose.
We also need a new crop of politicians who are not entrenched members of the system. I’ve said it multiple times already and will say it again here; we need term limits in order to bring about the change needed. Expecting different results from the same crowd is delusional.
I think too many good people live in a virtual reality that is projected by Big Media and Academia . you cannot talk to folks living in this imaginary world . but this imaginary world will end when the almighty dollar goes bust . I think we have gone over the ‘financial cliff’ a few decades back . only now it seems a few more folks are becoming concerned .
the wealth of nations is produced from agriculture, mining, and the subsequent value-added manufacturing processes
markets ensure that the low cost producers will succeed while high cost producers will fail
our country has driven wealth production out by adding burden costs in the form of taxes and debilitating regulations onto our production processes
the only way to get it back is to reduce those burden costs and make the USA the best place in the world to do business
can the existing government afford to reduce those burden costs while the economy recovers ? or in doing that will it fail to service its debt obligations and destroy its currency ? if the latter then it is already over the cliff . we will have to let it crash and start over .
Mike, the “almighty” dollar may indeed go bust and collapse.
In fact, the chances of it not doing so (within anywhere from 6-12 years) is pretty slim… especially considering who we have to deal with for the next four years.
But to assume that we will actually be able to start over after a crash is a dangerous assumption… and one that is filling way too many of us with a false sense of security and one that is destroying the urgency to pass the word, or even to get involved.
The historical aftermaths of economic collapses are not pretty and their leadership outcomes are too often filled with prolonged periods of profound pain and suffering.
But even though Obama somehow got re-elected and it looks bad for anyone who’s really paying attention, we all need to keep asking ourselves… what are our loved ones worth?
“The historical aftermaths of economic collapses are not pretty and their leadership outcomes are too often filled with prolonged periods of profound pain and suffering.”
Bring it on! We all deserve it for our stupidity.
Why don’t you get a few impacted wisdom teeth, and a cataract or two while no electricity is available and see how you feel about things.
The comments underscore the authors main point. Not a phrase or strategy or theme or sound bite. It’s a good thing they shuttered that betting avenue regarding who will win an election. Way too easy. Dems all the way!
One reads complaints, navel watching and whining – like “gee Daddy really didn’t want to be Pres but we got him to go along” Sons of Romney. Then, there’s Baleful Bawling Boehner prancing around behind closed doors getting “b” slapped while the media sings along with Reid.
It’s really time to toss all that “for the American people” stuff out the window. You need to quit fighting on the Dem-defined battleground with no weapons and with the Wimps of Wingnuts leading the Great Retreat.
One sees little reason to think this will change. Boehner, ala Tip O’Neal, for example, should have simply said:
1. Obama and the progressives have wanted the Clinton rates for over a decade (play their soundbites).
2. Obama and the progressives wanted cuts in defense.
They have what they want. Here is our bill we just passed that goes to the Senate. Obama and Reid can modify it to their liking and we’ll sit down in committee to iron out differences. A former Senator like Obama understands this is the legislative process. Ask him when he returns from blowing another 4 million dollars of money we don’t have that would have paid 100,000 guards in the schools.
Go grow some, GOP. You’ve already had them snipped off.
You know if conservatives were actually misunderstood you could point to the misunderstanding and fix that. You could say “it was all a misunderstanding folks, we’re really on the same side”
But look at these comments. No one has a single thing to change. You’re not misunderstood, you’re just at odds with the electorate.
At odds with an entitled and amoral electorate like you, “Scholar”? That is true. But to strive to be a majority to win abject failure like Obama?
It’s all yours, “scholar.”
A couple POTUS defeats does not “at odds with the electorate” make. Given the associated commentary, the growing irony of your moniker is quite delicious.
In addition, the last time I checked, the House is still firmly in GOP hands, as are 30 of the governorships. Finally, self-identified leftists (and other assorted sickle & hammer aficionados) in the US population register only in the 20′s percentage wise while self-identified conservatives represent over 40 per cent of the population. Not exactly “at odds with the electorate” no matter how you choose to split hairs.
At odds with the electorate? You appear to have overlooked the fact that some 60 million of us did not vote for your object of worship. A rather breathtaking lapse of ‘scholarship’ don’t you think? But take another bong hit or two. Then you won’t have to think about much of anything.
Come up with a new brand then. You just passed the buck.
Unfortunately, most Americans do not want less government. They want more government services but they don’t want to pay for them. And the Republicans are a large part of that disaster by encouraging endless tax cuts accompanied by an ever expanding base of government services. This is not conservatism, it’s hypocrisy. And people can see through it. No Republican congressman is willing to cut any program that benefits his constituents, so nothing gets cut, but meanwhile the revenue base of the country continues to shrink with every tax cut. Who created the 47% class of people who don’t pay taxes? The Republicans.
Until they change their hypocrisy on taxes, as Jennifer Rubin has pointed out, they will never win anything because they are viewed as irresponsible.
Moreover, to fight the popular culture, they need to create an alternative counterculture, just like the 60′s radicals did. This counterculture quickly became the dominant culture, which is why we have the liberal ascendancy that we now have. Instead of blathering on endlessly about tax cuts, they should promote vouchers for parochial and private schools. That should be the priority of the GOP, in order to reshape the culture. Tax cuts for the rich is the death knell of the Republican Party as a mass party.
That you spout the nonsensical “tax cuts for the rich” line undermines your entire missive. That you use Jennifer Rubin as a source of information further shows your stripes. Sounds to me like you’re far more comfortable wearing a Che t-shirt than anything with Reagan on it.
Obviously, the answer is jettisoning all non-Evangelicals and telling them that they need to admit that they’re entitlement-state loving Progressives, right?
Becuase that’s been WORKING SO WELL so far, hasn’t it?
One doesn’t have to be an Evangelical to want a smaller federal government, a drastic gutting of the welfare state, and less terrible choking regulations (get rid of Dodd-Frank, slash the EPA’s bloated power, repeal Obamacare, repeal Indefinite Detention Power, cut the unaccountable Czars.)
But no, we keep hearing that we can’t have any of that unless we have the Evangelical Uprising first.
Then maybe you should work toward an Evangelical uprising so the other things can get done.
What a ridiculous comment made to a non-existent suggestion. Pure projection.
The electorate watched this president produce one of the most disgraceful performances in memory and still voted him in. We do not have as much of a messaging problem as we a non-discerning bunch of drone citizens.
Well, I don’t know how you stop this, I really don’t. When you have almost 50% of the population in this country either working for the government or getting benefits from the government (such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, or student loans), it is almost impossible to get people NOT to support the party that always promises more and bigger benefits. So we have a national debt of over $16 TRILLION? If the “low information voters” out there (and they evidently make up the majority of voters) still voted for Obama even though our economy stinks and unemployment is still high, what makes you think they really care about the national debt?
To all those people, who really cares about how broke we are, as long as the checks keep coming in. Rush Limbaugh is right. It’s hard to beat Santa in an election.
So what can we do? Not much, friends. You can try and reason with these people, but they really won’t care. As long as their rice bowl depends on them being employed by or getting a check from the government, you’ve created a socialist society just like the ones in Europe. And we can all see how well it’s working out in places like Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal.
Unfortunately, I think the only time these people WILL listen to you is if they do NOT get their checks, when we become as broke as Greece and are literally forced to fire government workers and slash benefits because we can no longer afford them. You are starting to see this happen at the state level as more and more states are going bust. When it starts happening at the Federal level, then people may start to listen. Of course, if it reaches that point, we will also have all of the violence, crime, and social unrest that Europe is going through right now. So you can “re-brand” all you want. No matter how you slice it, it’s still the same baloney to the people getting government support. And as long as the mainstream media, Hollywood, and the far left keep people dumb and living off of government handouts, I don’t think our “message” is the problem. It’s the people.
As commented to Adina above:
“The hoi polloi are an undereducated, brainwashed lot that make a majority of the population. There is no return. America is over. And the Republicans are to blame, not the brainless mob.”
You can’t undo ruin.
“I don’t think our “message” is the problem. It’s the people.”
Exactly. A representative republic such as ours was not designed for the majority that now lives in our midst. It’s no small wonder the progressives command most of the power & will continue to do so. The Pubbies might as well get accustomed to the wilderness because that is where they will dwell for God only knows how long. No gov’t structure like ours has ever lasted forever; it surprises me not at all that we are becoming the subjects of tyranny. What an irony it is that liberals worry about our country becoming a “theocracy;” nothing could be further from the truth.
I have nothing but contempt for Americans these days. Conservatives are weak and won’t take necessary actions to save the Republic and the rest of the electorate are communists who balk at getting called the lazy sex crazed loons they are.
And that’s a big reason why Americans didn’t vote Republican. And may not again.
They heard you. Loud and clear.
You’re contemptuous of them, you think they’re a bunch of lazy moochers, you think you are the “real Americans” and everybody else are drones.
“You all stink but please vote for us anyway” isn’t a good image for any party.
We got it. You’re still mad as hell at the American electorate for re-electing Obama.
And you need to GET OVER IT.
Find a way to chill out.
We’ve yet to hear you admit government dependency is a significant problem and the root of our economic and fiscal problems. If this isn’t self-evident to you, you are part of the problem too and your comments carry the weight the bits required to display them, no more.
In other words, welfare dependents are sick of being called welfare dependents.
That is, they’re angry at the plainly obvious being pointed out.
The radical left hijacked the Democrat party many years ago, then set their sights on the Republican party. Just about time for a toast to a job well done.
uh….no. The “radical left” HAD hijacked the Democratic Party by the mid-1980s, and Bill Clinton and the DNC steered it back towards the middle, with “triangulating” help from Karl Rove. Please, read a book.
All this hand wringing is irrelevant. The latest battle between Freedom and Tyranny has been lost. Tyranny won, like it always does, over the long-term.
Time to start preparing for the collapse.
After the collapse, the “rebranding” can begin, not before.,
For me the issue comes down to Centralization vs Decentralization
Centralization of government, the expansion of the federal government, means less freedom in every aspect of our lives. Whether we are talking about our schools, healthcare, agriculture, business, more decisions are now dictated from Washington. At the very least we must be able to explain why this trend can only result in loss of liberty.
Rarely will the Washingtonized GOP articulate this truth. It is not in their interest to assist in restoring more control to communities and states.
Then we must face the truth about those too-big-to-fail corporations that have practically merged with big government. These businesses have no interest in competition. As long as the GOP is viewed as their defenders, we cannot make a coherent case against centralization. We must admit that not all businesses are good businesses. Those that continue to merge with government will increasingly shape regulations that destroy competition. We absolutely must preserve a climate where competition and innovation can thrive.
The Left talk about community, but by community they mean group identification. We absolutely must be the people to restore genuine community by fighting for increased local independence. Decisions about how best to educate our children should be made at the community level. The same can be said for the many other dictates now coming from DC.
We should not expect leadership form the Washingtonized GOP. Leaders of the future must be homegrown and nurtured locally in a climate where they are taught that preserving liberty matters more than any ambitions of power.
Personally, I would not shed one tear if the GOP was disbanded today, so long as there are people who know at the core of their being that restoring liberty means reducing centralized government. What these people choose to call themselves does not matter to me. Knowing what you believe and speaking it plainly does matter.
Part of that 57% approval is simple post-election psychology. People want to feel good about the narcissistic, incompetent piece of sh*t who was just re-elected to the White House. It’s time to “come together” as a nation and “get behind” the President because the election is over.
That 57% will begin to evaporate soon after the SOTU speech.
wow. bitter much?
Given the economic realities that Obama will own lock, stock, and barrel his second term, the comment to which you refer sounds more rational than bitter to me.
Big Waffle?
It’s time to focus our efforts elsewhere. Is there a land where we could slide in an live according to our philosophy on government? Is there any raw land ripe for such settling? That’s where our efforts need to be – we should be the neo-Founders of a new America. This place is hopeless and I think deep down we all know it.
Dear Mr. Simon, I agree with most of what you write, but not this time (well, only partially). I think conservatism goes hand in hand with Christian truth. It would be fair to say that all Christians should be conservatives, I realize that not all conservatives are Christian. Earthly speaking, the messages are the same. The Bible teaches, honesty, hard work, capitalism, property ownership, small government.
Conservatism is rooted in Biblical truth. I say all of this to say this, the Bible commands Christians to be “instant, in season and out of season” (2 Tim 4:2). What that means is that Christians are called upon to be steadfast, ever willing to stand on and speak truth when convenient and when it is not convenient.
Liberals rebrand themselves every so often because their beliefs lead to misery and failure. Now, they are “progressives” or “mainstream”. You are right that the institutions that shape minds in this country and the west in general has been taken over by liberals. We have enormous obstacles, our backs are against the wall. However, we have to be the alternative. Conservatism always works, when people have enough failure, we have to be the ones they finally look to.
I’m not so sure that we don’t have some great conservative well spoken politicians. The problem is that the media keeps them under wraps. When they do get media exposure, their message is warped by the liberal presentation of that exposure.
Our talk show hosts are fantastic. Just because too many of our population are too infantile to listen for a few minutes and actually digest what they hear without getting “offended”, who can do anything about that? Ok, maybe we could develop one, a woman preferrable that could calmly take the scared, snivelling soccer moms and sex addicts wanting their free pills and abortions and whisper quietly and soothingly in their ears and tell them about the superiority of conservatism.
Republicans/conservatives now control 30 states. It will be up to these laboratories to prove that conservatism always works. When the federal government finally collapses, it will up to the states to put things back together.
Offense! There is NO offense in the Republican program.
Boehner is the quintessential milquetoast politician, chosen for this very quality, and is being cultivated as the perfect guest of the Democrat Party machine. As soon as he runs out of antacid, he’ll fold. If it weren’t for the confrontations Boehner is currently involved in, his name would be totally void in any recent news.
He acts as if the current negotiations are a nuisance to his tanning salon regimen.
His incompetent performance is worthy of dismissal from all other government positions. Why not this one?
Until someone with confidence and spunk can confront the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party (the MSM) and the Party individuals themselves, the Democrat Party shall have free reign of any course they choose.
“COMMUNICATE”??? How do you communicate with tribe of indoctrinated laggards, other than appeal to their basal instincts?
Mr. Simon, it is no longer a matter of politics, or even economics,
in the dollar-and-cents sense, but of rebuilding the US industrial
base _after_ the collapse of the world economy; With more luck than
the US deserves, the leaders of this effort may only have to start
with a nation which has fallen back to 1950, and recapitulate our
progress since then in the shortest possible time.
The men and the methods for this task will be selected in accordance
with a rule well known to the Founders: Knowledge rules ignorance.
Throughout human history almost all societies are divided in three camps. As in the passover haggadah, The Wicked, The Wise, The Simple man -or the morons-. Unfortunately in today’s America we know who Wicked is so are the Morons. The question is how The Wise or not soo Wise Conservatives/Republicans educate the Morons and explain to them what’s good for them. The low information individuals always needed a simple explanation as in the haggadah. And this is true today as it was during Biblical times. Specially in today’s sound bite society. Until the right learns and understand how express itself in short and concise matter they are condemned to lose every argument and election.
Mr.Simon, can you give any examples of Conservatives who DO communicate effectively with the broad society? Finding a model is the first step to replicating it.
Although I realize that he isn’t considered conservative enough by some, I would consider Marco Rubio as one who can communicate effectively with the masses. He has a compelling story, isn’t an elitist, is young enough to use the vernacular that appeals, isn’t self absorbed, and has a humble attitude. Mitt Romney couldn’t connect with a large bloc of voters because he failed in every one of these. I think Rubio would be a good spokesman for the conservatives…if they can get beyond him not having a “perfect” voting record. If they insist on philosophical purity, they will continue to struggle with winning national elections. Take the 90% you get with someone like Rubio and run with it.
Bill Whittle (on PJTV and Youtube)
The word “conservatism” has been tarnished, along with assists from probably otherwise decent folk like Tom Atkins and Richard Murdoch.
What is wrong with being for LIBERTY? The Democratic Party has been captured by marxists. And the antithesis of marxism is liberty. Let’s be the party for liberty. And that encompasses more than simple conservatism. If you want to be a bunch of hippies living on a commune and smoke dope, that’s fine, just leave the rest of us in peace and don’t demand a welfare state to fund your utopia.
Businesses all around are being subject to punishing regulations and taxes, highlight how that is a heavy handed state infringing on our liberty. The Minutemen in 1774 weren’t defending conservatism, they were defending liberty.
With the advantage that there already is a libertarian party . The difficulty is that the republican party would have to forsake a number of infringements on personal liberty, such as federal regulation of what you smoke . In accordance with the 10 commandments this would have to be left up to the states.
I am guessing that although there is no (old testament) biblical injunction against it, a number of evangelicals who post here are opposed to marijuana and would not accept this.
I and many I know are suffering from Outrage Exhaustion. The ship has sprung so many leaks that it appears to be hopeless. The actions needed to correct our nation’s problems are so massive and unpalatable that they cannot be implemented by politicians. Instead of optimism, most of us are becoming fatalists.
We will hit the wall. When? don’t know. What will be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back? No clue. Can it be avoided? No. What will it look like after that? Different. Let’s hope, pray and prepare as best we can for the times ahead.
I voted for Romney because I believe he is honest. I vote for the candidate with the best character. Having Barack in charge when we hit the wall is dreadful to contemplate. I hope the tricksters can delay the inevitable until he is gone.
We aren’t “conservatives”, we are the true liberals. The left are the conservatives. They look to policies nearly a century old that didn’t work so well then, and aren’t going to work in a radically new world. If you let other people label you, you’re lost.
3 things they got to fix in order from most important to least important.
1. Religion cannot dominate their positions anymore. This is where the left has you by the balls and as a younger conservative I’ll tell you that you can attract a lot more of us if you followed this plan. Every single conservative should be trained to say “I personally am against abortion but it’s up the state to decide the legality of that”. Same for gay marriage. Same for everything else. Don’t forget you guys are conservatives too and this is what you should be saying as conservatives. Also you need to have a talk with the idiots that say dumb things like “rape babies are gifts from God”.
2. The media. I’m sorry this one is tricky and even I don’t know what to do but you guys got to do something. Obama and fellow Democrats have said dumber things, accomplished less things that they claim Republicans want to do yet they still win and win easily. On top of this we have Obama’s near 8% unemployment rate. Something has to be done about the Democrats propaganda division. The reason this isn’t #1 on my list is because if you guys relax a little with your faith you will be taking a lot of ammo away from the media. Social issues dominated the news and a lot of those social issues stemmed from faith based comments.
3. Don’t go into minority pandering mode now for the love of god. In 4 years what is going to happen? You are going to run a Rubio or Jindal because you think their skin color alone will win. Don’t do this. The left knows what you are trying to do we know what you are trying to do and it is not right. By all means, if you find a qualified minority candidate then run them but don’t run someone just because they aren’t white. Besides, you guys are late to the white guilt party. The Dems won’t vote anymore purely
on race. They got their little feel good ego boost by supporting a minority, next on the list is woman then probably a gay president. This is their strategy. Don’t do this strategy. Eventually it will blow up in their faces. Do what you do best, run good candidates that run on strong American beliefs. Romney wasn’t that bad at all but the flip flopping he did killed me.
There is no reason this country shouldn’t be conservative. People on the left may not accept it, but historically it is what we are and our status in the world is thanks to it. The left is just running some dirty tricks and you need to find out how to counter them. Fighting fire with fire is not the answer.
It’s not so much about “conservative” & “liberal” anymore; it’s more about who comes home with the goodies. Right now close to half the income earners in this country pay no income taxes. The Democrat Party’s long-term strategy of hooking people with the proverbial freebies is now working to their advantage. Most people vote with the welfare of their wallets in mind. That silly little trite saying Rush Limbaugh has now made famous, “You cannot beat Santa Claus” has clout with enough voters now to put the Dems in control for many years to come. You watch.
If this is our future then I have no hope for our country. No one values hard work anymore. Everyone wants to major in silly things in college and not face the wrath of their poor decision when they get out of college. If 51% of the US is ok with this and ok with taking handouts maybe it is time to look to get out? The only shot we have now at turning the tide is total system wide collapse. I don’t want to deal with that. Look at your ancestry folks. See if you are eligible for a dual passport somewhere. I am applying to get citizenship in a former Yugoslav country myself so we’ll see how that goes.
“Religion cannot dominate their positions anymore.”
I’m conservative because I am Religious you dimwit! Lots of people are that way and to try and kick us out or have us shut up is to doom the GOP (not that I don’t already think its doomed) to not only a minority, but complete irrelevancy. Morality and Capitalism go together or I and many others don’t care to go along at all. Go ahead and vote without us and feel superior.
Do you even understand for half a second how counter-productive your statement is? At ALL?
“We don’t want anyone voting for small government if they’re not devoutly religious!”
THAT’S WHY YOU’RE LOSING EVERY G-D ELECTION!!!
You just can’t help yourself but insist that everyone who doesn’t pass your religious purity test be forced to vote for the Welfare State, no matter how much they’re absolutely disgusted by the Welfare State!
You want to know why people under 35 keep screaming that you want a theocracy?
It’s because Y-O-U insist on ostracizing any non-religious person who otherwise believes in small government and individual liberty!
Where are you being ostracized? Looks like you are reading a lot into what evangelicals are saying, that just isn’t there … or you have bought into the media caricature of evangelicals.
The theocracy of the Cult of Expert Omniscience that Progressives have aligned with, is a far greater threat to your liberty than any evangelical.
K, are you really as uninformed as your comment suggests? Seriously dude. If you can’t make a comment without issuing silly hyperbole like “losing every G-D election…” then please leave the conversation to the adults and take up something less stress inducing, like gardening.
The GOP has won, and is still winning, lots and lots of elections. Are you not aware Republicans control the House and 30 governorships? Are you not aware that a significant plurality of these office holders are open with their religious convictions? In uncertain times, people want the certainty that comes with conviction born of knowing unchanging truth. That truth comes from only one source: God. That you can not reconcile yourself with His Providence is your proverbial cross to bear, not ours.
Compromise has been the bane of the Republican party and of conservatism since Bush the Elder. Compromise is the fall back position for men and women with little resolve, of men and women with who think a quarter of a loaf is better than no loaf. Soon, in the next negotiation, the quarter of a loaf becomes an eighth of a loaf, and so on, until you have nothing but crumbs to satisfy your appetite.
If a party or group has any principles worth having, they don’t compromise these principles for a Pyrrhic ‘victory’. Nothing disturbs me so much as hearing a leader say, ‘It’s not everything we wanted, but it is something.’ But at what cost to those principles that they should hold dear.
The Democrats have no principles, therefore compromise is just another game strategy – malleable and indefinite, because they know that their opposition will eventually compromise themselves into irrelevancy. And this is what the Republicans have done over these one score years.
My advice: Maintain your core principles; the opposition will soon overplay their hand, and then the people will need a party of substance to turn to for relief from the very devil they have conjured up for themselves.
Compromise is defeat, not victory, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.
And those core principles are;
(1) BIG BUSINESS good? Main street small business bad (or at least not big enough campaign donors to matter)?
(2) Private Equity (ala Romney) good? Offshoring jobs good? Small town American factories and jobs bad?
(3) Big national banks good? Small town local bankers bad? (or thank you very much Phil Gramm for your years of service in the Senate)
(4) Big military weapons good? Or let’s buy more tanks for the Army even when the Army says we don’t need more tanks because we have no plans to use them.
(5) 401(k) good? Or let’s make America pay a commission to our Wall Street friends on every dollar they save for retirement, because if its not in a Wall Street managed 401(k) we won’t let it count for special tax treatment.
Republicans looks like they spend all of their time as errand boys for Private Equity and BIG BUSINESS. Those are not principles that win elections. Those are not principles that are good for a nation.
There you go, Harry. You’ve proved my point. Just let the lefties define your principles, and you get the gruel you posited. Shame on you, if you think these are true conservative principles. Go do your homework and quit popping out these gross bromides as if are truly reflective of conservative values.
(1) BIG BUSINESS good? Main street small business bad (or at least not big enough campaign donors to matter)? Right, Harry. And Democrats don’t eat slop at the same trough? Tell it to Obama and Schumer, for example.
(2) Private Equity (ala Romney) good? Offshoring jobs good? Small town American factories and jobs bad? Right, again, Harry. And the Democrats have had nothing to do with this? Do your homework, Harry.
(3) Big national banks good? Small town local bankers bad? (or thank you very much Phil Gramm for your years of service in the Senate). Gee, Harry, you’re hitting all the nails on the head. Blame it on Phil as he highhandedly brought on this scourge against small town America.
(4) Big military weapons good? Or let’s buy more tanks for the Army even when the Army says we don’t need more tanks because we have no plans to use them. And this is a conservative value? I think if you check your history, Harry, this admiration of the military is not strictly a conservative value, since the Murthas of the Congress seemed to have reaped much from favoring their military friends and businesses.
(5) 401(k) good? Or let’s make America pay a commission to our Wall Street friends on every dollar they save for retirement, because if its not in a Wall Street managed 401(k) we won’t let it count for special tax treatment. Oh, again, right on, Harry. Let the government control your savings and benefits; they can do a much better. I mean, just look at how good it is at savings and spending, and, bet of all, it doesn’t cost you one damn red cent.
Thanks, again, for dropping by and affirming my faith in conservative values, and for reminding me that there truly are people who transfer their own malevolent beliefs off on others. A ‘shame on you’ obviously would be wasted on a troll such as you since you have no shame.
Dear Hubbub
The sum of your response is that “Democrats do it to,” “it was not just Phil Gramm,” and “we don’t want government to control our savings”. The last point is ironic because by definition if you use a 401(k) government rules control your savings. And the Republican problem continues to be a lack of original ideas–and this bizarre notion that Republican failure can be excused by saying, “but mommy mommy the Democrats did it too.”
Let’s pick a Republican “principle” to get at this problem. Do Republicans believe in “freedom of contract”? Usually folks would say yes. Well, freedom of contract means a company could enter into an agreement with a Union whereby the company would agree to hire exclusively union members as employees. Of course “right to work laws” act to inhibit the “freedom of contract” of both companies and workers. Republicans like “right to work.” So it is not fair to say that “freedom of contract” is a principle held deeply by Republicans.
Or another example, do Republican like freedom of contract. Again I will say yes. Freedom of contract usually means that parties are free to choose their own “choice of law” and “choice of venue” clauses to govern contractual disputes. So where does the Republican party stand on writing contracts that where “Sharia law” is the “choice of law” and where “an arbitration panel of Sharia law judges shall decide all disputes”? If I recall from the last election, early leading Republican candidates such as Michelle Bachman strongly opposed the use of Sharia law anywhere in the US. Does that mean Michelle Bachman opposes freedom of contract?
We could pick other issues as well. The largest socialist program and subsidy in the US is the Interstate Highway System because it subsidizes the right of way for interstate trucking (without offering any like benefit to railroads). If Republican oppose socialism, when do they plan to take a stand against the Interstate Highway System–or alternatively when do they plan to raise fuel taxes to a level where ALL road work is supported by users? Low tax Republicans always oppose higher gas taxes–even though such opposition is actually a vote FOR socialism (vis a vis Interstate Highways).
My simple request is that the Republicans try to sort out some consistent principles and articulate a means to put them into practice. As the examples you cite back to me show, we have the Democratic crony party, and we have the Republican crony party. Not much difference either way.
” Well, freedom of contract means a company could enter into an agreement with a Union whereby the company would agree to hire exclusively union members as employees. Of course “right to work laws” act to inhibit the “freedom of contract” of both companies and workers. Republicans like “right to work.” So it is not fair to say that “freedom of contract” is a principle held deeply by Republicans.”
You don’t do facts or logic very well, but then, one wouldn’t expect a lefty to have much use for either.
There isn’t a private company in the World that left to its own choices would even recognize a union as an exclusive representative of its employees, would agree to a union hiring hall, and certainly wouldn’t agree to a union shop. Exclusive representation is a creature of goverment dictate. Union shops are a creature of government dictates because most industries other than healthcare were organized before and during WWII before Taft-Hartley allowed states to outlaw union shops. In fact, many were organized under the auspices of War Production contracts that demanded that the producer be unionized, what we’d now call a Project Labor Agreement. Of course, most of the private companies that were forced into unionization pre-Taft-Hartley are long, long gone either to bankruptcy or offshore production. The remaining “private sector” unionization is almost exclusively in the Third Sector of businesses that do business directly or exclusively with the government (aerospace and defense), rely heavily on public funding (heavy construction), or are heavily regulated or require comprehensive permitting (air transport, utilities).
There is NO freedom in the decision to enter into a contract of any sort with a union. If the union can get a majority of those voting to accept it as their representative, the employer is legally obligated to bargain in good faith and if an agreement is reached, it as a matter of law must be made in writing and is enforceable by the federal courts. There are only hiring halls and union shops in the places where unions own or formerly owned Democrat governments. In the union/Democrat states, the unions have available to them all the powers of the government to harass non-union employers and to make organized employers come to heel; that’s why most of the union states are essentially bankrupt. When I was Alaska’s head of labor relations, Swartzenegger’s guy and I were the only Republican appointee heads of LR in the Country. And, frankly, Alaska remains a union state only because union shops and hiring halls are the only way we can force companies doing business here to use Alaska labor rather than importing labor from the Lower 48. I don’t think a RTW would pass the Legislature even though it is heavily Republican but it would definitely pass by citizen’s initiative if brought up that way.
Harry, you need to revisit the original purpose of the interstate highway system. It was not a socialist diversion initiated by subversive Republicans. It was designed as a military defense. It’s primary function wasn’t to ‘subsidize… the right of way for interstate trucking’ at the expense of the railroads. That it has ended up being a continental throughway for cars and trucks was a secondary benefit at the time the project was conceived. I think you should look to Democrats to raise taxes so that all road work is paid by travellers – and wasn’t some of our tax money supposedly designated in the late ‘Stimulus’ bill pushed out by Congress. Don’t those billions of dollars count as user payments for improving our infrastructure?
I agree with you that the two parties – Democrat and Republicans – are of like nature. We haven’t had a decent conservative (for the most part) since Reagan, and, by the way, I don’t look for another one any time soon. The two Bushes were Republicans in the most narrow of meanings – RINO Light, Near Democrat, or whatever. I agree with you that we need to define our principles and stop compromising. For the day will come when the Democrats will so ruin the country – its economy, its social order, its political and military capabilities – that we will need a firm and resolute opposition party to pick up the pieces. I fear, however, that by then it will be too late to save much.
I do appreciate the exchange of ideas and view points. I apologize for my less than admirable attitude in my previous post.
Art
There are two major industries that love having unions: the NFL and the NBA. Those exclusive agreements allow both leagues to run a draft and to avoid anti-trust scrutiny. My point about freedom of contract was this: if Republicans actually believe in freedom of contract as a principle, they should not compromise that principle. So called “right to work” statutes are one clear example where that principle is compromised.
It gets more arcane, but it is fair to say that principle is compromise repeatedly in securities law. There are certain types of investments where the only people who may purchase the securities are “accredited investors.” Ordinary folks may not enter into contracts to purchase those securities. Again, this is a limitation on freedom of contract that Republicans freely embrace. Why? The upshot, by the way, is that 98% of America could not participate in the specific investments that made Mitt Romney all of his money because most Americans are not qualified to be accredited investors. Normal folks cannot invest like Mitt Romney, or Warren Buffett, or George Bush, or others because the rules about securities contracts limit those opportunities.
Which leads to my bigger point. What is the principle driving so called “free market” Republicans? Is it freedom of contract? If so, why do Republicans often freely limit contract rights. Is it something else that makes free markets? What is that?
Hubbub
It would be a delight to revisit the history of the Interstate Highway system over a beer. If I had time, maybe I could do a monograph. The “defense” reason dates back to an “experiment” that Ike ran was a Junior officer where he tried to haul goods cross country–and it took a long time. The 1950s variant of the defense rationale was also tied to the Strategic Bombing Surveys from WWII which when applied to the US suggested that US industry was even more dangerously concentrated than was German industry. The point of Interstate Highways, coupled with “urban renewal” was to let “market forces” (with a heavy push from government) re-distribute US heavy industry. That is the essence of central planning. The US government wanted to “destroy” (move the industry from) Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Gary, etc. The US government succeeded. The Interstate Highways system and air conditioning helped move industry throughout the country.
The US military is a centrally planned command economy.
Economists wrote pages of articles explaining why sending individual trucks over highways was more efficient than using trains (which in the 1950s had to navigate switches and sidings to deliver goods). Containerized shipping was the antidote to the inefficiencies of the 1950s rail system, not highways and trucking.
That was a long way of saying that I appreciate what you have to say and encourage you to keep saying it. For my part, I would like to see people think hard about principles and be ready to defend them intellectually. Good ideas sell best.
Harry
Thanks for agreeing with my point that military ‘necessity’ was a rationale for the interstate highway system. I dare say one could argue a number of points – for example, was the system designed to subvert the railroads, or was it designed to augment them in the distribution of good and services as far as the military was concerned. That it has become more than ‘military’ is beside the point we are concerned.
Too, in terms of paying for the system’s upkeep, citizens do pay taxes for that purpose – possibly not sufficient, but that is not the fault, per se, of the citizen.
I do agree that the military is a command entity and it must be by its very nature. The military, if it is to function adequately, cannot allow for the free, individual action of its members. We then would have chaos – Just think if all who contribute in this one debate were to be decision makers – Good lord, what would ever get accomplished?
I need something stronger than a beer, but I’m sure I would enjoy the conversation. Thanks again for your ideas. Something to think about.
@Harry Huntington re: NFL et al. -
MLB has long had an explicit anti-trust exemption. I suppose the unionization helps professional sports with their regulatory issues, at least in a Democrat administration but that cuts both ways. Democrats can be astoundingly vicious even towards their own constituencies if that constituency crosses them. I left in the second year of a Democrat governor’s tenure in a huff over corrupt dealings with unions, played kiss and tell over it, and went to work for the Republican controlled legislature with the Administration’s misery as my mission. By the sixth year of his two terms, the Administration was so sick of their union friends they hired me back to take out the trash; only time I’ve ever been allowed by political management to just unleash Hell on a union.
You act as if the whole body of US law and regulation was enacted by Republicans. Maybe that just stems from the lefty tendency to view their birth as the moment of creation so if you’re under forty perhaps you believe Republicans have always been in control until Comrade Obama delivered the masses from oppression. In reality, Republicans have controlled one or both bodies of Congress for less than twenty years since 1932. The Republican Congress elected in the “Had Enough” campaign of 1948 tried to rein in some of the excesses of the New Deal and the WWII militarization and socialization of the economy, notably enacting the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, Section 8a of which enabled states to choose to prohibit compulsory union membership. The first Republican President since Hoover, Eisenhower, worked with a Democrat Congress to attempt to rein in union corruption by enacting the Landrum-Griffin Amendments to the Labor-Management Relations Act, as the NLRA was re-named by Taft-Hartley. Other than that, Democrat Congresses made the laws and while they had disagreements with Eisenhower, Eisenhower was essentially a statist technocrat with little discernable ideology other than anti-communism – and he wasn’t real agressive on that even. The Democrat Congresses chug along doing pretty much as they pleased through Kennedy and Johnson, though, Johnson, thoroughly a creature of Democrat Congresses, needed Republican help to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and other parts of his Great Society agenda as well. Nixon, was much like Eisenhower – he had been his VP, a statist technocrat, maybe a little more socially conservative than Eisenhower but maybe just pragmatic. He and the Democrat Congresses struggled and they finally got him but only with Republican help. Republican Ford inherited the thoroughly radical “Watergate” Congress with the first fruits of “Get Clean for Gene” and the McGovernite radicalization thrown in. People forget that Carter was the conservative choice for Democrats in ’76 and he was never really accepted by the much more liberal Democrat Congress. Enter Reagan, the first modern Republican but nothing like the conservative he’s now made out to be. Reagan basically attained his defense buildup and challenge to the USSR by allowing the Democrat Congress to do as they pleased in other areas. Reagan only had two years of Republican control of either body and that control was tenuous as many of the Republicans of that day were very much in the “Rockefeller Republican” statist mold. Bush I was a Northeastern statist who governed with Democrat Congresses who largely had their way with him though, like Reagan, Bush was deeply anti-communist and maintained the pressure on the USSR leading to its demise on his watch. Comes now Comrade Clinton and his gun moll Hillary, the real radical. They tried to bring on the Revolution they’d planned while smoking dope in college dorms in the ’60s in their first two years in office and instead brought about the Gingrich counter-revolution and the first modern somewhat conservative Congresses in modern history, though still with a lot of statist Republicans in the TR to Rockefeller tradition. The Gingrich – Clinton conflicts led to the only roll backs of ANY leftist programs since Landrum – Griffin in the Welfare Reform legislation after Clinton decided he’d rather remain President and play with interns than be a revolutionary leader. That fact cost Hillary the Presidency in 2008; the Democrat Party as now constituted is a communist party except in name they weren’t about to nominate somebody who participated in counter-revolution. There’s a reason Obamacare was the only thing on Comrade Obama’s agenda even though the economy was spiralling; that was the job he was installed to do and to show that ditching Hillary advanced the Revolution. The Republican Congresses under Clinton and Bush II became more and more statist as they tried to blunt Democrat pressure and criticism. Bush’s whole “compassionate conservatism” meme was his attempt to say that he wasn’t one of those “mean” conservatives that the Democrats and MSM constantly talked about.
So, in sum, there has never been an actual Republican government of the US since ’32. Republican Presidents have in the main attempted to govern with a Democrat Congress. In the brief moment from 2000 – 2006 that there was a Republican Congress and President, the Democrats still had enough power in Congress and in the res publica through their media running dogs to force their agenda on the Republicans or force the Republicans to abandon rollbacks, e.g. Fannie, Freddie. It is really only the Democrat willingness to blatantly lie with the help of their media accomplices that gave them the Congress in ’06 and convince the mindnumbed masses that the best economy anywhere in the history of the World under GWB from ’02 or ’03, depending on where you were, until the Soros engineered crash in ’08 was the “worst economy since the Great Depression.” Now we do, indeed, have the worst economy since the Great Depression and the Goddamned Democrats and their media accomplices have convinced the mindless masses that there’s about to be two chickens in every pot. Is it really obvious that I detest you people?
Sorry Harry, your trolling isn’t going to work this time any better than your previous incarnations.
The policy proscriptions you’ve described, and want to assign to the GOP, are very much those espoused by the left since the Carter administration. Especially concerning businesses, the GOP has supported and advanced policies designed to support and encourage small businesses forever. That multinational corporations enjoy the spillover is idiosyncratic. Nothing describes Obama’s economic policies better than its embrace of GM, Wall Street (more Wall Street donations were given to Obama in ’08 and ’12 by a large margin than either McCain or Romney) and large pharmaceutical companies; fascism by any other name.
The term conservative, though I am one, always bothered me. Since Reagan I’ve thought that somewhere along the polarity reversed and conservatives became the more progressive of the lot and liberals the more inclined to preserve the existing order (entitlements).
I say, let’s call ourselves liberals, in the 19th century sense of the term. We are the party of the liber, or free men and women. We stand for the protection of individual liberty.
They stole our identity and trashed it. Let’s take it back and make it respectable again.
The Republican problem is not a failure to communicate; it is a failure of ideas. Conservatives need to re-read Richard Weaver’s book “Ideas Have Consequences.” There is no coherent Conservative or Republican philosophy today. And in those cases where “ideas” can be pinned on Conservatives, those ideas are bad.
Easy examples:
(1) The number one economic problem today is the “offshoring” of jobs and the economic uncertainty created by “outsourcing.” Both of those problems derive directly from the fact that Conservatives (or at least Republicans) have been in bed with the National Chamber of Commerce for years and BIG BUSINESS and Republicans embrace “free trade.”
Free trade was never a Republican ideal. Teddy Roosevelt ran on a platform with high tariffs. This is not the forum to debate the details. Suffice to say, so long as Republicans embrace “free trade” the party will die. There is no communication plan to save Republicans from this disaster.
(2) BIG BUSINESS. Republicans need to remember that Teddy Roosevelt ran as a “trust buster” because he knew that some “big business” was bad for main street America. The number one example might be Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart comes into a small town and the next thing you now the hardware store closed, the paint store closed, the local grocer closed, the local clothing store closed. All of the local small businesses that were pillars of the community die.
Is that good? Some people pay lower prices. Many local people lose thriving businesses. Other local people lose factory jobs because Wal-Mart sells goods made in China, not goods made in small town America.
TR would have stopped Wal-Mart cold. The Republican fetish with the “free market” seduced Republican movers and shakers to drink the “low price” “good for consumers” cool aide. Low prices (on Chinese goods) are not good when all of your small town stores close and your workers are unemployed. Republicans need to learn that most BIG BUSINESS is not good for main street. BIG BUSINESS is the friend of the large regulatory state.
There are other examples as well. Suffice to say, Ike was right when he warned about the Military Industrial Complex.
There is more, but you can get the point. There is nothing for Republicans and Conservatives to communicate until they re-discover a coherent philosophy. Republicans need to look back. TR is a place to start.
1)Local jobs are not an unmitigated good . There is a reason that we don’t seek medical help only from members of our own family, lucrative though that may be for designated family members. Should your town get its sewer covers cast locally for $200 each or from india for $5? You seem to be arguing for some sort of community protectionism. If Walmart offers better goods and services for less money and employs community residents aren’t the consumers of the community better off ?
2) BIG BUSINESS is the friend of the large regulatory state.
And the large regulatory state is the friend of sufficiently generous big businesses. . Which party is for less regulation and which party thinks there cannot be enough?
Calling it a branding issue only highlights the problem. It is asking to fix a symptom not the cause. The Democrats are a true kleptocracy, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. They are the A-team. The Republicans only try to be enough of brand X to give them some power to find their own constituencies to enrich themselves by. The conservative has no real representation and the Democratic suck-up gets only crumbs but he doesn’t have a mind that cares about more than crumbs..
The truth is the Democrats only enrich a few at the expense of the many and use the gullible and the lowest common denominator among us to get numbers. The conservative failure is not creating a support network among conservatives in which we help each other succeed. We do not make clear the alternatives by living it. The Soviet Union out propaganda’ed us in the Cold War. The Communists own our media and universities.
Why did we win then? We had the higher standard of living without an intrusive police state. They gave their citizens poverty and paranoia. Therefore the Soviet Union lost. Want to fight communists with rebranding and propaganda? Good luck. You will lose everytime. Want to create a group of people (not just a political party) that allows people to succeed and on their own terms you will win. My guess is their own marketing specialists telling the RNC they are a few easy memes away from victory and charging them a fortune for that so-called advice even as we speak. Expect more of the same from the Republicans. Until we put the Republicans on the ash heap and change the rules by which we engage the kleptocracy we’ll being having this conversation. At least until we all expire.
It’s FEAR. Fear to criticize the greatest problem in America. We have allowed several generations of a large and growing segment of our population to arise that are, due to their own fault, uneducated, unskilled, and unemployable. Their only means of survival are government hand-outs and crime. They are responsible the largest incidents of out-of-wedlock births. They are becoming a huge voting block of people who do not work to live but vote to live. They are the black community. There, I’ve said it. I’ll be accused of racism, but I am not guilty of telling the truth, and telling the truth has become a rare commodity in the US today, especially among politicians and their media supporters. The Jesse Jackson’s, Al Sharpton’s, and other race hustlers, including many members of Congress will loudly denounce any such statements, but what have they, the NAACP, the Urban League, or any other black groups done to advance the life of the black community in the last 50 years? I don’t know how to reverse this, it will probably take generations, but it will never be resolved without leaders on both sides who have the courage face the issue head on and identify the problem without fear of mendacious criticism.
I haven’t read all of the comments. If I am redundant, so be it.
We need to do this at the National Party level. Coke and Pepsi run ad campaigns selling, literally, fizzy water (aside: I use Soda Stream, so even they are at risk)and so should we. It would cost a couple of hundred million a year, but simply run a sales campaign. Buy a super bowl spot, invent a hip jingle, put us and yes, rename us.
Fixate on three or four basic, simple ideas and SELL.
Advertisers will tell you that it is about ‘impressions’.
Hire the best… say the same ones selling something extremely well… insure that the account execs assigned are on our team in real life… monitor the effort well and stay on message and on target.
Sell the facts, the truth as well as the fizz.
Finally… MINIMIZE THE NUMBER OF PARTY PEOPLE RUNNING THE EFFORT. PUT A HARD NOSED MARKETING EXEC TYPE IN CHARGE.
Oops. Pushed send to soon. Here is the key. BUY SPOTS ON THE LIBERAL MAINLINE SHOWS, the ones that sneer at us.
ta
the author thinks the problem is branding? not the crap ideas? not the crap politics? not the relentless obstruction and obfuscation? not the dearth pragmatism?
I think the REAL problem is that you understand none of the above.
Sad. So sad. You are, of course, the very person who can be molded. The proof is the level to which you have already bought crap… At least our crap has some food value.
If you could only see it, you just proved his point for him.
The real REAL problem is that there are currently too many people just as stupid as you in this Country.
ooooo… you told me real good! What else you got, Einstein? Gonna tell me God created the Earth in six days? Maybe rapes never result in pregnancy? Corporations are people? C’mon, man – if this whole thing is about intelligence the Republicans need to pack it up now.
Real well, Ms. Manners.
thanks, Tex – but the wrong adverb was on purpose (as well as the usage of “gonna” and “c’mon”)
What I really like, stupid lefty punk, is that you stupid lefty punks think we on the right think like that. You’ve confused your ideology and your credentials for intelligence and education; you’re as mind-numbed as an Iraqi tank commander or a Soviet fighter pilot. If central command gets wiped out, you’re helpless because you can’t think, you can only recite talking points.
have you, any of the other commenters here, or bloggers here pushed back on any of the GOPs BS I referred to? Maybe if you did we could all move forward with real solutions through honest debate. I accuse you of 3rd degree projection with that last comment. The subject of Mr Simon’s article is GOP messaging. He thinks the problem is the words or the way they are said. I strongly disagree – I think the problem is the ideas behind the words.
Lonnie, you may strongly disagree with Roger Simon, but I suggest you go elsewhere with your polemicist attitude. Go back to your favorite learning center and learn to present your own views and risk hearing a criticism of them. You are a Media Matters troll, no?
Wow, Mr. Wild, aren’t we competing for the angry troll prize! Imagine blathering on about creationism on the blog of a well known agnostic. “Crap ideas”? As if ANY American political party is where you look for big ideas. If that’s what you’re interested in, read Aristotle. The Republican PArty has one very simple unifying idea these days – spend less government money. And it’s a pretty good one too, since if we don’t, we’re headed for bankruptcy. And, yes, Mr. Simon is correct. They don’t express that idea well and clearly enough.
The right needs to examine itself. Where did you go wrong? By saying one thing and doing the opposite.
Until you figure that out, you’re toast.
Where did you go wrong? By always attacking anyone – ANYONE- who disagrees with you on the least of things. Until you stop doing that, you’re toast.
Where did you go wrong? By making every issue and sub-topic in our society and culture a part of your platform. iow, there’s no more room for individual freedom or personal liberty in your ideology. (see previous point.)
Where did you go wrong? By claiming that you hate the very thought of a ‘living’ constitution…while accepting the malleability of almost everything written in the damn thing and working around its provisons every time you can get away with it. (Don’t tell me what the left is doing. The topic is about what the right is doing wrong.) The Constituton says what it means and means what it says. …and to hell with anyone who tells you differently, I don’t care if its the Supremes, The White House, the Congress, Reagan, Plain or anyone else you can think of. Otherwise it’s just another g-ddamned piece of paper.
Where did you go wrong? By looking for a ‘Leader.’ By looking for a ‘Savior.’ By looking for a ‘Hero.’ By looking for another Reagan, when you wouldn’t let Reagan get past a primary, if he ran today.
That last point is one the left is guilty of, as well. WE don’t need a King. We don’t need a Great Communicator to present our case for us. We don’t need a politician to play puppet while we put words in his mouth, for that matter, Then, dumping him when he doesn’t do things exactly our way, exactly the way we want them done, exactly when we want them doine. Yes, the right wants both a Great Leader and someone they can control. They want both King and puppet..but a puppet that only they control.
We, The People, are in charge. Period.
The Constitution says what it means and means what it says. Period.
That means you have to sort yourself out, before you start sorting out other people’s problems …and stop pointing fingers at everyone but yourselves.
What do you really believe as a political philosophy? Have you even thought about it? …or have you just been spouting phrases and slogans and positions that someone else promotes?
Do you believe in freedom or control? Your own words and deeds, over the last decade in particular, reveal that you prefer control over freedom. Your words and deeds, particularly over the last decade, reveal that you operate under the assumption of a living constitution, instead of holding to a constructonist view.
Your actual and real communication problem is that you’ve become hypocrites.
Until you recognize that fact, you’re not going to solve any of the other problems you keep going on about.
Down with the “Republican Party”!
Long live the “Freedom Party”! – the party of individual freedom!
The word “republican” is associated with Boehner. What a loser!
Meanwhile; The Democrat Party Media is busy publishing interactive maps for anyone to peruse. These are especially helpful if you’re in the market for stealing guns to sell to fellow criminals:
http://www.lohud.com/interactive/article/20121223/NEWS01/121221011/Map-Where-gun-permits-your-neighborhood-?nclick_check=1
If this isn’t a prime example of totally irresponsible, and negligent journalism, those descriptive terms have been eradicated from the English language.
Roger, the ideas do not fail. The corporate and government run media fail ALL Americans! Propaganda and the not free press are the issue. The freedom movement is for freedom and truth using history as our guide! We will keep on keeping on as we have been. The establishment folks think we are persuaded with their words and propaganda, and we are not.
Rand Paul “I Will Work With Harry Reid To Let Him Pass His Big Old Tax Hike”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC3Cand6ySI
Since FDR, maybe even since Wilson, EVERYTHING has been a federal case; the whole damned Country has looked to Washington for everything from fixing the potholes on up. The Founders never meant the President to be anything more than an administrator of not particularly important functions except in time of war; they surer’n Hell never meant for him to be “The Leader of the Free World.”
“Republican” has been demonized as thoroughly as Reagan and then Rush demonized “liberal,” but only in terms of the popular culture in the case of Republican. Since popular culture has demonized Republican, a lot of the yute vote is not available to us, but then if you’re going to be the party of grown-ups, you can’t expect the kids to agree with you anyway; they’ll grow up and come around, most of them anyway.
There really aren’t any votes for Republicans/conservatives/traditionalists or even grownups in the BoWash corridor or in the Left Coast Ecotopia and there’ll likely never be in our lifetimes. There aren’t any votes for grownup, responsible people in the doughnut cities and the barrios. Blacks have been out of slavery for 150 years and most of them are still expecting Massa to buy their new shoes. Hispanics in the main have no tradition of a democratic and upwardly mobile society and few have any real expectation of either; they just take what they can get from the rulers, what they’ve always done. So, why do we bother with trying to politically satisfy the BoWash, Ecotopia, and Blacks and Hispanics?
We control 30 of the 50 states and could control most of the former Rust Belt if we develop some rational policies on unionization, trade, and religion – yes, religion. We have to figure out how to oppose big, communist controlled public employee and industrial unions without being susceptible to being honestly labelled anti-worker. We need to abandon the myth of free trade and find some way to have fair trade. We’ve slavishly supported the biz school and Wall Street notions of free trade and out-sourcing and it has cost us the entire working-class “Reagan Democrat” vote and for our trouble Wall Street abandoned the Republican Party for a communist because he promised each of them they’d be the one the communists wouldn’t eat. Face it, “big business” doesn’t want free enterprise, it wants a government guaranteed monopoly and a subsidy; Wall Street and much of the Fortune 500 are the enemies of Main Street, and Main Street and the small city and town suburbs are where the Republican votes are. And finally, we need to reach a rapprochement with the so-called Religious Right. Frankly, I don’t think one can promise to advance the agendae of the Religious Right or the Social Conservatives and get elected outside the rural South and some of the Intermountain West. The rapprochement must be based on the understanding that while we can do little FOR them we will not do anything TO them. We need the suburban vote in the midwest and plains states and we especially need the votes of suburban women there and as long as we have old white men saying stupid crap about abortion, we’re not going to get that vote. While it is true that a majority of the Country does not believe that there should be unrestricted access to abortion at any time and for any reason, there is nothing like a majority that beleives that it should be so restricted that a woman should have to carry an unexpected pregnancy to term or, especially, that if a couple’s sixteen year old daughter gets pregnant, she should have to have that baby. I, too, believe that abortion is the taking of an innocent life, but if either of my daughters had become pregnant while still my dependents, they’d have been on the next plane to Seattle and I’d have had the moral conversation with God.
And finally, we need to learn how to actually run Republican governments and make the states we control into models of the less government, more freedom paradigm we espouse, not just be a different crowd running a Democrat built government giving stealing privileges to our buddies rather than theirs, unfortunately that’s what all too many Republican governors and legislatures do. The Democrats built the federal government and had over half a century of almost untrammelled power over it to make their ways of stealing legal. If Randy Cunningham had been a Democrat he’d have just set up some front non-profits, used his ear-marking power to appropriate all sorts of money to them, hired a good government accountant to make sure his share got raked off and he’d now be a multi-millionaire senator instead of a convicted felon. Republicans have to steal to do well be doing good and since the press is always looking at Republicans because they’re bad people, they get caught when they steal. Democrats are good people, good people don’t do bad things, so there is no reason for the press to look at what they do.
State and local goverments emulate the structure of the federal government, an entity built by Democrats to serve Democrat constituencies and employ the maximum number of Democrat clients. A Republican governor of even a small state couldn’t find enough loyal and competent Republicans to staff the appointive managerial positions in a state government if his/her life depended on it. Republican controlled governments need to be restructured so that Republicans can run them effectively without relying on holdover Democrats in the managerial positions. It should be iron clad dogma that when a Republican takes over a government from the Democrats s/he fires EVERYONE s/he has an arguable legal right to fire and does it as his/her hand is coming off The Bible. People will tell you that can’t be done because it would be too disruptive; that’s BS. The hardest thing you could ever try to do would be to stop a government from running; it may not run well but it will keep running. The only thing that would get disrupted is the contact lists of the lobbyists and reporters and the Democrat sleeper cells inside the government. I could go on but this would become a book and I’ve already written that one.
Nothing will change until we learn how to confront the Left and media and do indeed confront them — in every cultural format and opportunity. We’re institutionally fearful and hapless in the face of this challenge. As such, we’re creating for ourselves a politically genetic marker of imbecility — as in the Roman sense of being actually unable to fight. The Left knows it, and is grinding down with the intent of annihilation. At the rate they’re going they may achieve it within the next three years. Any attempted “rebranding” without this understanding and effort would be a non-starter. In fact, I would suggest that it is only through our definition of and confrontation with the Left that we can recover our brand, our ideological identity and virility, and that this would mark the renascence of the Right.
I don’t think the Republican Party has a failure to communicate, their problem is their fear of the Main Stream Media. They fear being called the vast right wing conspiracy in a world that the MSM thinks that “apple pie” and “mom” are right wing radicalism. The Republican leadership cowers at the thought of being called right of center in the political spectrum. Progressivism has been eroding our form of government for over a hundred years and without backbone in conservatism they will win.
Yes. And it’s not a complicated challenge. We define ourselves and them in the fight. The fight is everything. As Breitbart said, they picked it. Walk out the door in America and you run into it. But we’re not engaging it. Engage it. No PR consultants required. As Edna Mode says in The Incredibles, “Fight! Win!”
Republicans are not just bad at public relations. They’re disastrous at it.
Exactly. But there is a question in many of the preceding comments both left and right – how much of that is PR, and how much is an equally bad failure to THINK? Yes “branding” but branding of WHAT? Did Romney really have any substance that he failed to communicate? Did he have any substance that better (and still honest) communications would have sold better?
I’m with Harry @ 44. Republicans need both content and context. White-shoe RINOs may be just as obsolete as the leftwad MSM makes the “Republican” brand. But Tea Partiers need a proactive core. Can you be both “conservative” and “proactive”? Yes. As Harry says, the TR model is appropriate. It’s being hard-headed and doing the math honestly. Is that so bad? It is certainly the polar opposite of today’s Democrats.
And as Bobby Jindal was quoted as saying, you have to try for 100% of the vote, you don’t write off 47% or even imagine you need to reeducate them. You need to ENGAGE them, which is a much more achievable goal. And the first step is you TALK to them, not about them.
I didn’t even see the obligatory pictures of Romney going to all the ethnic fairs and eating tacos and baclava and fried chicken, OK we weren’t going to see him drinking beer with anyone. His campaign was a PR insult to the American electorate, and they reacted accordingly. But yes, in the broadest sense, it was a matter of PR.
And content.
It seems like I have read this diatribe elsewhere, Josh. It wasn’t any better the first time I read it. Isn’t it time for you to go back to school?
Roger,
Look at the comments, especially from the trolls like “Joshua Scholar”. That is the true face of the enemy. And enemies they are. Not “well intentioned” or “misguided”. Leftism is a religion, more wide-spread than any other. And it’s just as much a religion of death as Islam. The sad fact is that many humans are born to be parasites and are filled with envy and hatred of those that are productive, the natural prey of the parasite. You will never communicate effectively with such as those. It’s their nature to live off others. They know what conservatives stand for, and that’s the problem. They will never give up their “right” to feed off the rest of us. Never.
Unfortunately we now rear our children on a diet of Leftist nonsense and misinformation. Many who might otherwise be independent individuals are programmed to be parasites. For many it’s just “Yeah, whatever.”, but for many others its “Yes, we can!” feed off the productive.
At this stage no amount of better communication is going to solve the problem created by decades of propaganda and brain-washing. I’d like to believe in Santa Claus, but it’s not going to happen.
Be prepared to fight or die or live as a slave-host to the parasites.
I would sugest that that whole Mad Max approach is part of the GOPS messaging problem.
-Vote for us, or die under the hands of the liberal deathsquads!
- What liberal deathsquads?
- Ayeeee, youre one of them!!
Kind of like the Progressives’ “vote for us or live in a fundamentalist theocracy” rhetoric?
Noam Chomsky: “Every four years, the multi-national corporations of the world get together, and put someone in the White House.”
You people hate this guy, but in your hearts, you know he speaks the truth.
So Barak Obama is the choice of the multi-national corporations of the world ?
General Electric, General Motors, Google, Apple, NBC, Disney, the entire entertainment industry, and countless wealthy “non-profit” foundations come to mind, eh?
I’m afraid nothing will change until people are desperate. Look at Michigan. Their backward labor laws were only changed this year, six decades after more forward-looking states adopted Right to Work. Detroit is practically a Third World basket case, and it’s been that way for years, but their politicians kept promising and people kept falling for it. The same thing is happening now on a national scale.
” …six decades after more forward-looking states adopted Right to Work”
When I think of The South in the 1940s and ’50s, “forward looking” isn’t what comes to mind.
It must be purely a coincidence that the auto industry is succeeding there and failing in Detroit.
I don’t know that the AMERICAN automobile industry is succeeding there. The big problems the Big-3 have are from their days as a monopoly when they didn’t care what their labor costs were so long as the other guy had the same costs, thus, the pattern bargaining with the UAW. The import/transplant makers didn’t bring in a cost paradigm under which a third of the cost of a new car was the pension and HI of a guy who last worked putting the third lugnut on the RR wheel of a ’57 Edsel.
I represented the employer for many years in collective bargaining; I’m not a union guy, but I know the business well enough to know that it isn’t nearly as simple as many on the Right make it out to be. And, having been born and raised there, I do know The South pretty well. The old ruling class in The South has never accepted the notion of paying anyone for work. They still long for the days of the gentleman who never got his hands dirty nor his neck red because others had to do manual labor out in the sun.
Until the GOP quits trying to be just like filthy Democrats, and stops embracing morons like the author of this RINO crap, AND quits chasing the 24% ‘ethnic’ vote like a horny teenage boy chasing that one girl in school he’ll never have, while 53% of eligible voters don’t even feel it in their interest to see whose running for president, the GOP will continue to lose presidential elections.
I agree that something is seriously wrong, particularly considering the cabal of liars and thugs who seem to win the “discussions”.
But hey, they call us liars all the time…why don’t our “leaders” reciprocate?
We know for an absolute fact that negative advertising sells. But nobody on our side except the blogs wants to tear down the power-mad narcissists on the other side. When a corrupt thug like Obama, about whom the public knows virtually nothing, can rise up to the position of power he has, it cries out for some truth-telling. So what if it offends fools and idiots. The public needs to know.
Basically, the conservative message is that we need to return to the principles that made the country great. The message on the other side is that everything has turned to shit BECAUSE of conservatives. It’s a blatant lie.
They have to be called out. We need people who are willing to state the flat truth, which is that progressivism has caused virtually every problem that exists in the country and that the end-point of progressivism is the USSR.
When the only elected official willing to say it is one guy, Allen West, of course the other side is going to gang up on him and discredit him. If 300 people are saying it, it’s not so easy.
And what’s the alternative? “kinder, gentler conservatism”? The republican way of withdrawing into a shell whenever the NY Times publishes one of its fables? Developing our own media (an idea I like, but it will take decades)? Let it burn (an idea I also like, but not many are willing to pay the short-term price)?
Polls continually indicate the majority of the country holds conservative principles. Then they vote for communists and radicals. Somebody has to SAY SOMETHING. Romney sure didn’t. McCain didn’t. Bush didn’t. Boner doesn’t. Mitchell doesn’t. They are cowards, all of them. We need 300 people who will stand up for the truth. Failing that, tyranny. Guaranteed.
Very true. WRT the “rectification of names” I have tried to do my bit, by always placing “liberal” in scare quotes when I mean it in the modern American sense. But I have been wondering about “conservative” in the American sense, too: is it a label that US “conservatives” chose for themselves, or was it imposed on them by “liberals”?
I suspect the latter, but in any case it is an inconvenient label, not only because it evokes images of inherited privilege, racism, and bigotry: also because once you start defining yourself “conservative”, you feel compelled to take a stance against the French Revolution, as though there are no more pressing concerns. The plain fact is that the Obama Democrats have come to resemble the Ancien Régime more than the revolutionaries. (Though they are the heirs of revolutionary ideologues like Alinsky, Ayers, Dohrn.)
What is going on in the Western world today is better described by Hayek and perhaps Tocqueville than by Burke and Orwell, in my opinion. (This could change.)
As for the Republican Party, I take the cynical view that parties are nothing more than bureaucratic machines with the purpose of winning elections. Like all bureaucracies, parties are infiltrated by self-serving time servers. Those of us with no political ambitions should have no party loyalty, engage in primaries if possible and just choose the lesser evil on election day. (The only exception that comes to mind is refusing to vote for reelection of a disappointing office holder, when the alternative is not much worse.)
As for the libertarians, my impression is that too many of them, from Rothbardians on “the right” to “liberaltarians” on “the left”, are way too eager to blame America first.
I wouldn’t give up on the Tea Party: if an EU or US state goes bankrupt (and you know which states I mean) it might end up dominating the debate, becoming the new consensus.
All great revolutions and revolutionaries become quite conservative once they are in power. Look at our most recent example – The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The revolutionary zeal disappeared relatively quickly – Lenin, like the Czars before him, became quite concerned with maintaining the status quo once he achieved his aim. The dichotomy never dawned on him or those of his successors: Clamp down at home, but spread revolution abroad.
Agreed. My point was simply that an Animal-Farm revolution (like the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions) shouldn’t be a concern right now. What is happening is a more gradual takeover of our liberties, as described by Hayek, Tocqueville, and Parkinson’s Law.
The “liberals” take their ideology from the Jacobins? perhaps third- or fourth-hand, but who cares? the ideology is little more than a rationalization for their power grab.
Good post on the first, but I do take one exception. Frankly, I find the parallels to the lead up of the French Revolution and the American present quite alarming.
I think I could make a pretty good case, the leftist American “thinkers” and power brokers remind me a great deal of secular, modern ideological “total war” the Robespierres fought through their “enlightenment.”
One only needs to have watched one night of broadcasts of MSNBC right before the election or read the NY Times for a week to see the parallels IMO.
Right, except that it is a revolution “from above,” or one imposed by the state, not one “from below” that overthrows and replaces the state. However, either way, the goal is totalitarianism.
Granted – and I should have noted as much.
Following up on Astarloa’s comment, another way of putting it is that there is more of a similarity to the Weimar Republic than to France in 1788…which is why I recommended Hayek above Burke. Hayek did learn from Burke, of course.
PS: I should have said: an Animal-Farm revolution should not be a concern *in the West*:
I very much fear that some Arab countries are in the middle of Animal-Farm revolutions.
From dictionary.com “conservative: as a modern political tradition, conservatism traces to Edmund Burke’s opposition to the Fr. Revolution (1790), but the word conservative is not found in his writing. It was coined by his Fr. disciples, (e.g. Chateaubriand, who titled his journal defending clerical and political restoration “Le Conservateur”).
Barry Goldwater wrote “The Conscience of a Conservative” in the early 60′s. I can’t recall for sure, but I believe that William F. Buckley also used the term freely.
Art Chance – 100%! A+.
“MR:‘Crazy’ in this case means willing to use force to impose their
religious beliefs on those who do not share them, in defiance of
the separation of church and state required by the US Constitution.”
Hey, MR, your education is deficient. The First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..” meaning the government can’t regulate religion or prohibit the expression of religion. So in reality it is the current efforts by your side to have the government ban religious expression in public that is contrary to the Constitution. The imposition of a moral code for law/justice, like do not murder, comes from God. But of course, you don’t believe that so killing of unborn human beings, the sick, the mentally deficient, the lame, the criminal, or those you disagree with is just fine with you, I suppose, as long as you have a logical secular argument for it, like Jews are the cause for all the misery in the world so killing of Jews is justified. Be thankful for all the religious loons who have protected your natural God given rights as expressed in the Constitution, a document you grossly misunderstand.
The key word here is ‘establishment’.
If the federal government makes abortion illegal because the Bible
says it is a sin, or if it mandates a Carbon tax because Al Gore
says ACGW will otherwise wipe out civilization, it is writing
religious belief into law, establishing it. This is unconstitutional.
Wrong! The constitution allows for both no matter WHAT the the arguments so long as the electorate votes for those things. Don’t forget that the first amendment allows for both freedom of Religion AND freedom of Speech! The constitution doesn’t allow the State to support its own Religion at the exclusion of others, but it does allow Religions and their ideas and theologies to exist in the public space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Wrong again. The case, Lemon v Kurtzman (403 US 602 [1971]), established what is known today as “The Lemon Test.” The Lemon Test is used to examine a law to see if it has the effect of establishing a religion. The Court wrote:
In the absence of precisely stated constitutional prohibitions, we must draw lines with reference to the three main evils against which the Establishment Clause was intended to afford protection: “sponsorship, financial support, and active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity.”
Flip your abortion example around to what the law currently says: abortion is legal and all will pay for it (except government designated exempt religions, e.g. muslims) and support it even if it’s against your religious beliefs. So the feds are sponsoring, financial supporting, and actively involving themselves in interfering with religious activity as it pertains to abortion. But of course, today your side demands reinterpretation of the Constitution to mean whatever suits your desires of the moment. The founders were very clear about where rights derived from, for example:
Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ..
Ultimately, the Constitution is a document to limit the powers and abuses by the government against the people. It is not meant to limit the activities of the people in private or in public. That you construe it to mean the laws of the land cannot reflect the religious moral codes of the people is false. What government cannot do is show preference of one religion over another. And for the record, I would submit atheism or anti-theism or secularism that demands religion be kept out of the public view are in effect religions.
During the Teapot Dome scandal, the Supreme Court convicted
Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall of accepting a bribe
that Oilman Edward Doheny was acquitted of having offered.
Please do not tell me that ‘It is that way because the courts
say so.’; The courts have been political from the beginning,
and progressively Progressive over the last century.
The Constitution is indeed intended to restrict federal action,
and the Supreme Court just got through agreeing, in the Obama-
Care trial, that there is _nothing_ the Feds cannot do.
Sorry, again, not true. There are very specific restrictions imposed as well as other parts of the law that are in the process being challenged. I’ll let you research the actual ruling for now as I’m too busy with Christmas and friends, etc.
Have a Merry Christmas yourself. It’s been a worthwhile discussion. Hope you feel so too. See you on the blogs next year.
Sorry, the Establishment Clause was a Federalist Provision to limit the Federal Government, period. Not a general principle of governance. These matters were reserved to the primary sovereigns, the states….of which 12 explicitly endorsed Christianity in one way or another, with solely Virginia adopting the Jeffersonian formulation…but still allowing prayer in public schools, teaching the Bible in public schools, and generally allowing for the free expression of Christians to inform legislation and within the institutions of society.
You’re absolutely correct. Unfortunately, the courts have subsequently interpreted the 14th amendment to mean states cannot restrict the peoples “rights” any more than the federal government can. I use the term “rights” loosely here as in a penumbra of rights as inferred by the judge or judges du jour. It really is a slippery slope we’re on when one does not adhere to the original intent of the founders. This is one of the many reasons there is so much dissension between the courts and the judges, and why we get so many 5 to 4 decisions on the Supreme court. Supreme Court Judges like Ginsburg, who have actually counseled others that socialist constitutions are better than our own exemplify the trouble we’re in. There aren’t any Solomons on the courts, if there ever were any since the nation’s founding. In the end, it is and will always be the people who must ultimately protect, preserve, and defend our liberties and rights. When we depend on our elected leaders and appointed or elected judges, we get the chaos and confusion we have now. Only the military takes their oath to preserve, protect, defend seriously any more. The rest are liars, cowards, and oath breakers. Couple that with the massive influx of foreign born legal and illegal immigrants without a firm understanding of our countries founding principles, coupled with the lack of proper civics instruction in our schools, we are being transformed before our eyes into another progressive, socialist, leftist, elitist Euro-Latin America banana republic where now a slight majority of the people actually believe the lies, and claptrap of the left about the Constitution and the peoples rights. God help us all.
So what is your take on the Spanish Inquisition? That God gives a right to life until God tells some tribe of his children to take it away?
Not sure where you’re going with this. However putting it in a modern context, you have a valid point in that some religious beliefs are antithetical to others. Where religions refuse to tolerate the existence of another, and demand the extermination or restriction or punishment of peoples of another faith or sect within a faith, then there is a big problem. For instance, even though the majority of muslims are tolerant, there is a significant minority numbering in the millions who demand conversion or death for non-muslims. Clearly a society that demands religious tolerance, i.e. the US, can’t permit such groups to reside in the country much less be protected in their threat to others. We have not faced up to this threat but we’ll have to if their influence in the US grows.
It’s pretty clear from the comments on this post and many others with the same general tone that the top two enemies of conservative values are:
1) Supporters of leftist policies – divided into two camps, those who oppose everything good (unethical) and those who are merely unaware of the results of those policies, as well as basic ethics and justice (some ethics, but essentially blind). We need to identify the unaware, the intellectually lazy and get to work on them. The left has done a great job through generations of indoctrination and convinced the well-meaning among them that the right will try to brainwash them, so their guard is up. I think of a co-worker, who is a respectable, hard-working guy with a family, but is a staunch supporter of leftist policies. When I asked him what his ideas were based on, he says “good”. He sincerely believes that greater good can be achieved through the state. While his thought process and ignorance scares me, I do suspect that he is basically a good guy, and that he means well. The only thing that will change his mind and others like him may be financial collapse.
2) Division within conservative ranks – often caused by an inability to cut through the superfluous and focus on fundamentals. A lot of conservatives can be a bit cranky perhaps (myself included)… I get frustrated that there isn’t even a frame of reference on which to base a discussion with someone who doesn’t understand the fundamentals of good government and civic duty. The principles in the constitution as they were envisioned lay the foundation for individual and national prosperity. The principles rely on individuals to govern themselves too. Comment #33 states that conservatism goes hand in hand with Christian truth, and while I wouldn’t disagree with that, I think that it goes hand in hand with ANY practical truth, and therein lies the power. The Founding Fathers wanted all nations and races of good character to come and prosper here, regardless of religion or creed. The problem is the decline of morality, and we need to be more strict within our own ranks, and acknowledge that conservatives have sometimes been corrupted just as bad as the left, and they pushed policies that either paved the way or directly embraced the reckless deficit spending that threatens our global civilization. I think particularly of Nixon, cloaking himself in limited government, anti-communist rhetoric, and then driving through socialist policies and deficit budgets that would reverberate for generations. The paradigm of left and right is outdated, as the real issue and proper spectrum was summed up by Gary Allen when he stated “a more rational political spectrum with total government in any form on the far Left and no government or anarchy on the far right. The U. S. was a Republic with a limited government, but for the past 60 years we have been moving leftward across the spectrum towards total government with each new piece of socialist legislation.”
http://www.whale.to/b/allen_b1.html
Many conservatives are angry, because we know what’s at stake; it’s not just higher taxes or larger government (which is bad in and of itself) but the basic freedom to control ANYTHING in your life because the government is too busy increasing its power and control. When the left becomes too bold (I guess they have to become even worse) then I’m confident the discussion will be from this general viewpoint, and things can begin to improve, but again, not until some major crisis forces people to rethink their views, and become animated in the fight for right. Educating our children to distrust and dissect both the government and the media for what they really are and do also seems a tall order, but do it we must.
In 2004, observing the meltdown of the Howard Dean campaign, Rush Limbaugh accurately observed: “Anger does not win elections.”
Conservatives’ anger, the bitterness, the self-pity, the sheer outrage at an electorate that re-elected Obama, adds up to an extremely negative image. Young people, single women, Hispanics, all the new-type voters that voted in larger numbers than ever before, aren’t going to be attracted to a bunch of scowling, angry, folks whose first reaction to them isn’t “Welcome aboard!” but “You’re stupid immoral morons!!”
I became a conservative back in the 1970s, when I was still a college student and we had a friendlier GOP base that wasn’t so angry. If the GOP base back then had gone around saying that young people (I was young then) are stupid morons, I would probably have ditched politics altogether.
America hears you loud and clear. You’re all mad as hell–and some of you are close to going ballistic–because the electorate re-elected Obama.
And you need to GET OVER IT.
You need to learn how to greet new voters with “Welcome aboard!”
Republicans don’t have a branding problem, they have a Beleif Problem.
The Republican Leadership doesn’t beleive in conservativism – it was simply a tool for them to get elected.
When you don’t beleive what you are saying you end up like Mitt Romney, totally Cow-Towed by Candy Crowley in a debate where you had the upper hand and a hanging curve that Ronald Reagan (who did beleive in conservatisim) would have knocked out of the park.
Pointing out the truth and putting someon on the spot when they have stepped out of line are not disrespectful and unpresidential.
I can see Ronald Reagan (Who Said, “I paid for this microphone”) saying to Candy Crowley, “Well, since you had the foresight to coordinate with my opponent and bring in the transcripts he asked you to, would you take a moment to read the portion where he specifically refers to the attack as an act of terrorism, but not just mentioning terrorsim in a general way.”
It would have put Candy and Barack in their places without being nasty, or (dare I say it) offensive.
It appears that they also have a spelling problem.
Unless and until there is an edit function – you point is both Moot and Irrelevant.
It also establishes the poster as unable to contend with ideas, and, therefore, focusing upon the appearance rather than the substance.
That’s not quite true. Execrable spelling isn’t purely an extraneous phenomenon having nothing to do with substance. It’s also evidence. A writer who can’t spell ordinary words almost certainly hasn’t seen these words written out often enough. That means that he or she doesn’t read very much. That, in turn, means the opinions expressed by such an individual are probably not well informed.
Quit whining and learn to use the spell checker that is on this site, jd. You haven’t noticed the red squiggly underlines yet? Sheesh.
Americans have forgotten reason and her principles of liberty. Iltimately thr blame lies with an ignirant electorate electing the wrong people
Republicans did it to themselves -
I vote Republican because I want low taxes, limited government and strong defense. What I get is an obsession with school prayer, creationism, flag burning and abortion.
When it comes to economics we have a socialist party and a hard core Marxist party.
And many of us believe without the latter, the former is not worth fighting for. You’ll have to get used to that and learn how to work with it – or not and continue to be upset.
I’m not so sure people like you are worth fighting for when you’d be the first to kill us when you don’t need us anymore.
You’re just as much a big government progressive, you just want to use big government to force an Evangelical agenda down the throats of agnostics.
As a somewhat objective and ‘high information’ Canadian observer of the political scene (including having lived in the US for many years, and in particular during the ’67-’71 period at the peak of the Vietnam anti-war days), I have a somewhat different take on the results of the recent election. The larger part of the electorate we know to be the so-called ‘low information voter’, meaning generally apathic, having superficial and ‘cherry picked’ informaion, and thus highly susceptible to MSM manipulation. So, while Republicans are down and depressed, the fact is that Obama won by a far small margin of votes than in 2008, and when you consider the active Dem voter suppression tactics, particularly of military votes, plus the considerable known voter fraud, the election was a ‘squeaker’ at best, and my very well have been ‘stolen’. Clearly, there is an ideological split within the Republican party and supporters, between the purists and the ‘big tent’ (RINO) folks, that was fought during the primaries. Romney may not have been the ‘ideal’ candidate, but he would undoubtedly have been far better than Obama, and he was very strong in the polls especially after the debates. Had the election been held 2 weeks earlier, before the hurricane gave Obama a ratings bump, Romney might have won. So all this handwringing and introspection, while normal, is actually a waste of time. Obama also won because the Dems had a better ground game and were able to get more people out to the polls, while too many so called Republicans stayed home. The most devastating results of the election is the ‘defeatism’ that seems to be taking hold among conservatives. Get off it! You (we) don’t have time to waste. The next election is less than two years away, which is barely time to get the ‘ground game’ up to snuff. Obama and the Dems also have far a more powerful progaganda campaign and tactics. They understand ‘divide and conquer’, they understand how to target specific demographic group with particular propaganda messages, they understand and are perfectly willing to use personal character destruction of their opponent as a political tactic. Conservatives need to read and understand the Alinsky ‘method’ for gaining power, and had better smarten up real quick. It’s not about superior ideas (if only it were..sigh), it’s about superior strategy, tactics and organization. I say, if we’re as smart (and correct thinking) as we think we are, we should be able to find a way to win over a few more percentage points to our point of view. So, time to quit whining and navel gazing and get to work, kiddies!
You have a good take on this post election ennui.
“So all this handwringing and introspection, while normal, is actually a waste of time.” Let the recriminations begin! Actually we have to go through this. It reminds me of this scene:
Clemenza: You know, Mike, you’re gonna turn out all right. You take a long vacation, nobody knows where, and we’ll catch the hell.
Michael: How bad do you think it’s gonna be?
Clemenza: Pretty goddam bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us. That’s all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble.
[Clemenza now finishes working on the gun]
We gotta figure out what went wrong, flesh out our differences and then realise that if we want to get some if not most of what we want we will have to do it together, libertarians, social conservatives, Tea Party and even the RINO Establishment wing.
Many of you haven’t been paying attention, at all.
It isn’t merely your freedom that is at stake.
It’s your lives.
Listen to, and read, the lefty’s articles and commentaries, even newscasts. Words involving bloodshed – yours – keep coming up, again and again and again. ‘Kill,’ ‘murder’ ‘assassinate,’ and ‘useless’ ‘crazy’ and worse are used with the words involving your bloodshed. It’s called ‘propaganda,’ or ‘memetic engineering.’ You’re all on the wrong end of this meme.
You need to quit arguing among yourselves over the little s*** and start thinking about priorities.
The only thing you’ve got in D.C. -that can change anything- is… shaky control of the House. Other than that, all that remains to you is your guns…and the government knows who you are and where you live.
I Hope they do start killing. Then we can finally get down to business and we won’t be the ones to blame for “shooting first” when the civil war comes. And it is coming. We will win because a lot of conservatives know how to aim when liberals just know how to shoot. Not only that, but a large majority of the military will be on our side. Bring it on!
If only the problem were as simple and correctable as a failure to articulate and communicate effectively. Unfortunately, the real situation is that the conservatives’ diagnoses and policy proposals are correct but toxically unpopular and thus can’t be sold to the public no matter how good the pitch. The electorate simply doesn’t want to hear the truth. The news is simply too bad. They’d rather believe that the government can fix everything by the expedient of making someone else pay for it, and the bigger the government the more it can fix. The argument is finished. The Democrats have won it. And it’s all over but the rest of the crashing decline. Sorry.
It’s time to stop courting public opinion. If the O has a 57% favorable rating at this moment, what does that matter with the next election 23 months away? The Repubs should go over the “fiscal cliff” and refuse to raise taxes. Send real spending cuts to the senate. Let the moronic voters rot and squeal in economic pain if the gov’mint “shuts down.” Republicans will need to go into the political wilderness until 2016 (at least) or even 2018 with the likely loss of the house but the country needs the real pain of a depression with the blame squarely affixed to O in order to snap out of this time of orgiastic government spending. Keep your powder dry; it’s going to be a very turbulent decade. By the way, our troubles today have their genesis with George W Bush’s failures. He could have gotten our fiscal house in order. He could have fought wars of punishment instead of “building democracy” in Iraq & Afganistan (how stupid does that sound today). He could have spear headed a new respect for the constitution. Unfortunately he was the wrong man at the wrong time.
Warren, everybody dies. Why fear what is inevitable? If you don’t live on the edge, you are taking up too much room.
Conservatives have a lot more then your panty wetting politicians. You need to start reading the Bible some. When it’s the darkest and things look the worst, when danger is on every side, that is when you take the lord’s hand and walk with him.
You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
I don’t buy this argument at all.
How can anyone get out a coherent message when you rely on your political enemies to communicate this message to the voters? Until the problem of a biased press is solved, it doesn’t matter what the conservative message is.
If it was up to me me, I’d have Republicans stop talking to the networks, NPR, the two Times, Wapo and the lot of them. I’d just have them laugh at those guys.
In the end it would probably backfire, but it might at least communicate to the low information voter that there was a problem here.
To solve that problem, you gotta be in it to win it.
Many conservative parents actively discourage their kids from majoring in subjects like political science, art, media, sociology, etc. But those are the fields that dominate the institutions of government and mass media and Hollywood.
Conservatives have let liberals have those institutions by default because they have refused to actively participate in them.
It’s the flip side of comments by liberals bemoaning the fact that most of the U.S. military officer corps votes Republican. They vote Republican because their conservative parents encouraged them to pursue a military career, whereas liberal parents discourage their kids from going to West Point or Annapolis to become military officers. You gotta be in it to win it.
I agree Sinz. We have to target and actively support the march through the instittuions by Conservatives.
Of course this will be demonized in the media as Nazis and Racists and Christian Theocrats reasserting their power over the disadvantaged, minorities, etc. But it has to be done. We have to literally take back our country. It isnt enough to elect Conservatives to office. The bureacracies must be changed from the ground up.
This means at first keeping your head down and disguising your true intentions ala Communists Entryism. Then as you gain power in institutions, you use them to first hire and promote Conservatives as priority over all other considerations. Discrimination against Leftwingers, no matter how capable, experienced, etc….must become THE priority.
Additionally, Affirmative Action must be totally destroyed, ostracized from polite society as racist, made illegal, etc. Then we must reverse that damage via preferential hiring of Conservatives (minorities are overwhelmingly Leftists).
Then after we take our country and it’s institutions back, we implement Conservative policy, teach Conservative views of history, etc.
We must then continue to discriminate against Leftwingers in perpetuity, ostracize them from polite society, disempower them by ostracizing them from positions of power within all our institutions, and relegate them as hostile outsiders to hostile outsider status in perpetuity. It shouldnt pay well to hold Leftwing views, it should be dangerous (treason charges), and lead to negative economic and professional consequences. We should be intolerant of Leftists and Leftism. Ridicule them and it, publicly and profusely.
drop out? That’s insane – what are you? Timothy Leary? Sinz has 1 thing right – you gotta be in it to win it.
I’ve long advocated that Republicans in Congress stay the Hell out of Washington except for actual sessions and legitimate committee work. There are no votes for Republicans in the BoWash Axis of Evil so why have pressers there, why go on the Sunday shows? The Sunday shoes are just a forum for self-aggrandizement for a few pet Republicans, e.g., McShame, and a rigged Gotcha Game for everyone else that goes on them. Even FOX’s Sunday show tries so hard to be “fair and balanced” that it tilts left and the rest of them are just leftist cesspools.
Republicans should go to the media in their district and state with their news and appearances. The local and regional media has to be much more fair to them because they need to sell advertising to people that supported the Republican. I know from experience here that the McClatchy-owned Anchorage Daily News hates Republicans, but they can’t trash them they way they’d like because they really need the advertising from those companies who supported Republicans. Note I didn’t say they were fair to Republicans, and Alaska really misses the old Anchorage Times as a countervailing voice, but they can’t openly trash them the way their editorial staff would like.
Five billion dollars of borrowing a day is fueling today’s economy. We think this is a recession but our grandchildren will look back at today with envy. GOP leaders like Boehner and McConnell have no interest in confronting our debt since that would required sacrifice.Spending for the current year needs to be reduced not theoretical spending ten years from now.Of course everyone loves Obama. He seems to be able to create unlimited wealth in a way that no leader in history ever could. The election was lost when Boehner gave him an unlimited credit card. When the dollar collapses as it must, the rich will be blamed, not the left.
So many lengthy comments!
For goodness sakes, the Republicans made gains at statewide (california excepted) and local elections. And Romney lost by a 4% margin. Do not fall into hysteria. Slap yourself out of it!
Out of the 47% who is entrenched in Government (be it federal employees or welfare cases) about 20% are stupid enough to be very easily distracted by shining objects. That is about 9% of the electorate. Get that extra 9% and you have it made.
Recently, I read that the conservatives in Japan won the parliamentary elections.
Name of the Japanese conservative party? The Liberal Democrat Party.
Rename the Republican party the Compassionate Progressive Liberal Socialist Democrat Party and you have it made. Maybe just Liberal Socialist Democrat Party, namely the LSD Party. You get the dopers’ vote.
In the beginning of the Obama administration I had high hopes that the Tea Party would bring their simple and direct message to the American electorate and would win their allegiance thru simple appeals to common-sense. Fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets became, once the popular media tortured and distorted those three principles, racist-bigot-homophobe. Ordinary citizens who were rightfully concerned about our fiscal and cultural trajectory became “tea baggers” to the media. The lesson learned is that any political movement that refuses to go along with the current disastrous administration’s socialist/Marxist plan is going to have their narrative defined by the media and cultural icons exactly as the administration wishes it to be. I have no hope that there is any message that will reverse the lemming march so long as our current celebrity culture and mainstream media prevail. In short, we’re going over the cliff…all shouting for common-sense and protesting aside. When the successors, starting with Bush #1, to The Great Communicator failed to pick up on his message and act accordingly the stage was set for our current disaster. Possibly the greatest squandering of hope and opportunity in history.
“Fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.”
Had the the original Tea party who was founded on those principals you list, NOT been overrun by the evangelical social movement, The Tea party and their message would be a powerhouse to reckon with at this moment and probably across party lines. I personally think the GOP would have won the 2012 elections handily but for the evangelical social movement taking over the original Tea Party movement.
ESPECIALLY since the Republican Establishment clings to the Evangelical Social Movement in order to never have to actually do anything about Fiscal policy.
You bring up an interesting point but I wouldn’t agree that its to evade dealing with fiscal and other constitutional mandates of congress. I think they considered the evangelical social people in the GOP as something they could control and obviously, coming up to 2010 the party found they couldn’t control them. Are they and their projected base considered important for GOP votes? Of course! Is the GOP correct in that assertion? Absolutely not! The majority party (democrats) have a huge base of social conservatives across all party demographics — especially their minority base who are largely Catholic but well represented accros the board of other Christian churches.
What the social issues are, is what separates the social conservatives of the dems from those minority evangelical social conservatives of the GOP. For the Christians, God gave to all, free agency. The government too, follows the constitutional concept of individual freedoms and protects such freedoms. If the GOP were to adopt its platforms accordingly, they would have a much larger party membership. For example. If ones religion leads them to believe that abortion is wrong then, don’t partake of abortions. If contraceptives are believed to be against ones religion then, don’t partake of them. The constitutions Second Amendment does NOT allow for enacting any laws on behalf of any religion and or its belief other than the common laws codified.
Whats termed as ‘entitlements’ is never going away and actually conforms too most religions precepts. If the GOP were to adopt a platform that better regulated eligiblity similar to that of private sector insurance (not life insurance) based on actual economic need and better enforced corruption in the systems, they would find great support. We all buy into insurances we never end up needing.
In other words if the GOP were to get back to a platform of the constitution; small government, fiscal responsibility, individual freedoms, free market enterprise, and deal with the entitlements in a ‘reasonable’ means etc., they would become a strong party to reckon with. If they continue to submit to some radical religious movement, they will continue to be a losing party over the long run as it stands right now.
And, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we would all be having a Merry Christmas.
First you must have a message, the you must be able to communicate it. The Republican elite back east have no concept of controlling spending. There is little difference between them and the dems – that is why they are also know as dem-lite. When they get a coherent message and a messenger who can deliver it clearly, they may succeed, but until then, all they will be able to do is sit on the sidelines and watch the dems destroy the country……….
The Tea Party too may have outworn its usefulness, having been relentlessly attacked, even though almost always unfairly.
You’ve almost got it. The Tea Party was not just ‘attacked’, it was successfully demonized and its name became a liability with the general public. The successful demonizer? The MSM, reading their script from Democrat talking points and slanders.
In case you think that’s a one-time event, think again. It worked with the Swift Boat veterans – whose first-hand testimony was actually true of John Kerry’s disgraceful behavior – so successfully that to be ‘swift-boated’ is now understood to be blackened by lies and slanders.
And it worked last spring and summer against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
And in all cases, the demonizing success was enabled by the gaping vacuum where the Republicans should have been communicating, not just rebuttals, but positive support for the demonized groups, and spirited counterattacks against the beneficiaries of the demonizations.
The Republican party is not playing to win. It apparently thinks that with a sufficient hiatus from governing, it’ll get its turn at the trough sooner or later. About time it dropped that juvenile nonsense, and recovered some principles instead.
The Republicans don’t have many communicators and the ones they have are thoroughly demonized by the Democrats and the MSM. Their solution is relatively easy to solve. First, they need to concentrate on the message they want to get out and, once they hit the message, just keep repeating it. Secondly, they have to understand they’re in a war with the MSM, not just the Democrats. Right now, the Democrats do not want to compromise, they want to win. They have their message down pat, the Republicans want to save tax cuts for the rich. The Republicans counter with??????????????? What they should be saying is, more taxes for what? To spend on Solyndra? To spend on General Motors? To waste on more windmill farms?
The message should be that all of this can, and should, be worked out through the budget process. Reid and Obama haven’t been too good at passing a budget. Just tell the world you want to deal with this, but in such a way that you’re not dealing with it in 2 months.
The Democrats want to use the cliff to hide their tax increases and the Republicans are going to cave and sign something before they adjourn for New Years and that is the problem with their message, the have none and they have no core principles they’re willing to defend.
The intellectual dishonesty in these comments speak for themselves.
The author confronts the subject head on, and deals with it. Refusing to face truths and reality are what caused the current situation, why continue sticking heads in sand and whistling show tunes?
We have a Petro dollar system that manufactures U.S. Dollars out of thin air, and we are supposed to pretend that is Capitalism..?? It is Fiat currency, losing 90% of its value since 1971 when the system was created by Nixon and Cohorts. It is certainly not capitalism and the root cause of most of the nations current problems.
Mining, Manufacturing and Agriculture CREATE wealth. Banking, Finance, derivatives and Wall street SERVICE wealth. They are not interchangeable. Allowing the Banking and Equities markets control over the economy is a fools game and will create much more havoc in the near future. America began its economic slide when we accepted the lie that Banking creates wealth for a Nation.
Posters are throwing around words like communism and socialism, while themselves continue building a system Marx and Mao would be proud of. Get off your high horse and understand what Capitalism actually entails.
The NYSE was just sold off, not for its infrastructure based on equities, but for its derivatives structure. If this is not a massive red flag waving at America’s future then more of you should be reading what constitutes actual economic foundation.
Politically the Republican party is in trouble for accepting Leadership from individuals that cooked polling data. The results were there for everyone to see on Election night, and the chef could not believe reality did not match his fantasy. If we continue to allow people like this to influence Party direction then we deserve additional major losses.
Keep burying heads in sand thinking happy thoughts, we have only ourselves to blame.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading! Your insight will escape most on here across all intectual lines. This platform largely serves the social conservative moment cloaking themselves as “conservatives” and use the rhetoric of fiscal conservatism deceitfully, when it serves for their image.
The Federal Reserve system is what implements fiat money. FDR took us off gold nationally and Nixon took us off gold internationally. But it was Johnson who took us off silver and moved the country to a fiat money system. Keynesian economics is a complete failure, but since it justifies fiat money and government price controls on money it is an unquestionable “truth”. Once federal reserve notes start to lose value sufficiently rapidly and steadily (as their continual and accelerating debasement ensures that they must) then the collapse of the welfare state as we know it will have truly started. We don’t have many national figures who are not uneducated morons( and thieves) , so a workable replacement currency ( commodity backed) may well come from china.
Are you asserting that it’s the Republicans’ fault for not communicating through a tendentious media aligned with their opponents?
How’s that supposed to work?
That’s a part of the problem. Many of you seem to think that it is all completely and totally the media’s fault. Granted, they aren’t on your side, but having a state controlled media of your own wouldn’t change anything, except for switching who got to tell the rest of us what to do, how to do it and when to do it.
Both sides think that it’s about gaining control and power. Both sides think that if only they had all the power in D.C. – and in state houses and governor’s mansions around the country – that everything would be hunky-dory. Each side thinks that only they know how to wield power properly and equitably. The problem is: It’s not about exercising power and control over others.
It’s about freedom. It’s about freedom or death. Slavery and tyranny aren’t options…no matter who you are or which party you support and defend.
Uh-uh. Be honest, here.
…’cause part of the problem is that many of you aren’t being honest with yourselves, let alone with one another.
You’re bad guys, just like your political opponents are bad guys. Neither side is wearing a white hat in this scenario. Hmpf…it’s not even gray, let alone white.
Because by your logic, the GOP could never win a national election. But it has. Repeatedly.
The media’s liberal slant is not something new. It’s existed since the 1960s at least. (Remember Walter Cronkite going on TV in 1968 and saying that the Vietnam War was lost?)
The GOP has managed to break through the media’s liberal slant with the right image and the right message, a number of times: 1966, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1994, 2000, 2004, 2010.
It failed this time because Obama offered something unique: He was going to be The First Black President ™. And the media went all-out to re-elect him. Because as liberal columnist E.J. Dionne pointed out, his fellow liberals decided that for the The First Black President ™ to be defeated for re-election and end up in the history books as a one-term failure like Carter would be disastrous for race relations and for America’s image in the world.
But that’s a one-off. The media won’t go all-out to elect The Second Black President ™.
You’re probably more right than you realize. My problem with that scenerio is that the state of the country did not enter into the equation. I believe Obama would have lost the election if the media had just done it’s job. What they did was not even close to their job. First, they participated in the trashing of the candidate. HOw? By not challenging the out and out lies put out about Romney, such as the tax debate. ONce Romney put out his tax statements (which everyone making those assertions knew about before they lied) the press never went after them for corrections. Secondly, we all know they refused to report on Solyndra, Fast and Furious, and Benghazi. Were these minor events in Obama’s Presidency? According to Pravda and Izvestia it was “No news here, move-on please.” all the time.
The Republicans need to trash the media, just like the Democrats trash Fox News.
“Why don’t the media do their jobs?” I must confess that many of us have had this same question some time ago. As one becomes more awake to what is happening in this country and the world, one realizes that this question is meaningless and the assumption that underlies it, that the the MSM have some sort of contractual arrangement with society to report on the news in a balanced, objective , and unbiased way, is false. The corporatist MSM is the propaganda arm of the left, and they are doing their job exactly as they see it. It is only because things are now moving so quickly that they cannot conveniently keep their propaganda and cover-ups from being so blatantly obvious. The problem we face is that at least 60% of the population still believe everything they are told by the media and are highly susceptible to the Matrix-like false reality that the MSM has created. Like many others, I feel that all of this is being done to usher in a socialist dictatorship, and most of the population will never wake up to this until it is too late.
You can rebrand diet Tab all you like, and it’s not going to outsell Pepsi. The problem isn’t the brand, the problem is the product: The GOP nominally believes in a lot of popular things, but all too obviously doesn’t actually care about any of them.
A new product, which is actually what the GOP has long lied about being, is needed. That it will be a different brand is almost incidental. Unfortunately, for this new product to arise, the old product has to die. Few people will miss it.
The real problem here, is that the Democrats have no interest in facing a new product, and will work to defend the decrepit GOP. I don’t know how we deal with that, in a political system far less free than in the days when the GOP killed off the Whigs.
I totally agree. Conservative and Libertarian writers, speakers, radio hosts have to stop insulting people who disagree with them and start converting them. They have to stop pandering to the ignorant extremists on their own side which they do for profit and popularity. It’s an up hill battle because the main stream media will not let them break out of their stereotype and has too many of the conservatives afraid to speak openly about their own principles.
The silver lining is that the American people don’t want one party rule. They will always want an alternative, and a balance of power. It all comes down to what kind of alternative to Liberalism they’re being offered.
As long as the economy was doing well, the GOP could afford to go along with the Leftward lurch that began with Woodrow Wilson, and has continued unabated, with the sole exception of Reagan. That’s not the case anymore.
The GOP base has the power to nominate a true Conservative, like a Palin or a Bachmann, if only they can get over their fear of losing another election. Keep running the likes of a Palin or a Bachmann, and eventually, they’ll win, because the American people don’t want one party rule. And the worse things get, the better their chances are.
The one thing that can save the GOP from the fate of the Tories is fact that we’re a Republic of 50 states. People living in truly Red states like Kansas and Oklahoma will double down on their Redness in the face of Liberal fiscal insanity.
These states will become little bastions of freedom and Constitutional fealty. And from these states, true Conservative voices can arise. Britain does not have this option, because it’s basically just one big state.
What we have today is pretty simple: there are millions of conservative and patriotic Americans, but they are not represented in the US Congress. This lack of representation will serve to a further alienation of these people from the political elite.
No sense rebranding if you don’t sell it. The establishment GOP doesn’t want to sell conservatism, because a majority of the minority, which includes the so called leadership of the House and Senate, is quite comfortable with being mediocre. They get a great view, perks, good retirement…they aren’t going to risk losing it, because were it not for the public teat or post Congressional lobbying jobs, they’d be unemployable.
The GOP has not sold it’s ideas for years…you rarely see the GOP going head to head with the opposition. Really, it’s too late…we are out of time. The financial crisis will be upon us before the GOP ever figures it out.
Well, we got what I think is the best explanation in the first few posts.
It’s not a matter of bad press. We’ve won battles like that before. The elections aren’t for two more years, and we can’t work up the courage to accept a 2% spending cut? Seriously? Boehner has already caved on taxes, so we know it’s not that. So what’s going on?
1) Conservative/Libertarian ideas are ragingly popular. Even now. This is supported by pretty much all the polls.
2) Nobody, not even the liberals, seriously believe that the GOP in Washington stands for these principles.
3) The best and brightest liberals go into politics and government. The best and brightest Republicans become businessmen or entrepreneurs. So our DC establishment isn’t exactly made of the brightest bulbs… but they don’t see themselves that way. Romney is the perfect avatar for them: his main objection to liberalism is that he isn’t in charge of it.
4) We now have a working majority of Americans who are dependent on big government, and are willing to vote that way. The old saw, “People are always conservative about their own line of work” is now inverted. People are liberal about their businesses, desperate to get their share of the pie, at the expense of everyone else.
For all the Romney/Obama drama, the big news of the election came from the two popular revolts in the conventions. Boehner and Priebus cheated on national TV to undermine the Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party activists. The Democrats cheated on national TV because their grass roots wanted to condemn Israel. Both sides were restraining their most ideologically driven factions. The Democrats held onto a paper commitment to a cause they have been undermining in policy for years, for the sake of good press it turned out they didn’t need. The Republicans changed their operating rules to keep the establishment GOP in charge and lock the door behind them. In both cases, despite blazingly obvious violations of the rules, even the activists shrugged and accepted the outcomes.
Those are the broad strokes of our new political era. Ultimately, people follow incentives. The incentive structure hasn’t changed since Hayek, they’ve just become more compelling.
“Conservatives” in Virginia and Ohio stayed home because for all their principles, Obama is the one who’ll feed their family. From here, the road to Athens may be long or short, but it’s inexorable.
Before any rebranding the GOP, the matters of a radical minority faction within the party needs to be seriously address! Solution? Send the social conservatives packing to what ever they wish somewhere eles — even form the ‘own’ party.
THEN, the GOP’s fiscal conservatives, capitalists and libertarians can begin to serious rebrand the GOP.
You’re either really bad at math, really bad at demographics, or both. We can grant you your wish, but you’ll be left with a party that more closely resembles Ralph Nader territory.
You be the first to jump.
I’ll ask once more. Is it acceptable to have murder, abortion, theft, adultery,what may be grown, what may be ingested or inhaled and who or what may marry who or what all be dealt with by the police powers of the 50 states various criminal codes. As I read the constitution the federal government has no power to deal with these issues, so by the 10th amendment they are left to the states. I dont see such a position as being anti christian or anti social conservative. Is such a position offensive to social conservatives and if so why ?
If the republican party were really and consistently the party of the constitution, freedom, free markets and free enterprise it wouldn’t need a new brand or any fancy marketing.
The more people a party expels, the smaller it gets.
Nobody–NOBODY–should be thrown out of the GOP. As Reagan once said, if you agree with 70% of the GOP platform, that’s good enough. Nobody should be expelled because they disagree about part of the remaining 30%.
The GOP should be doing the opposite–welcoming millions of new voters in.
A small army can become a very large army of many, if the cause is agreed to by the many. We don’t allow many to serve in our military yet we stand a large military not even counting the alliances of foreign militaries — if they agree with our causes(s) for war.
It serves NO purpose to ‘include’ those inside a party who have a different ‘platform’ from that of the traditional party.
The Christian Evangelical Social Movement and their causes, have in large part, no constitutional merit. In spite of all the documents they use as the foundation of their religious social causes, the Constitutions First Amendment : “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Therefore, their Christian evangelic religious views have no greater weight over any other religious views and regarldless, cannot be legislated upon the society by any congress.
Why would the GOP want to retain a portion of its party whose ‘social’ platforms are unconstitutional?
When the traditional GOP gets back to it foundations of a small government, fiscally conservative, respecting the Tenth Amendment and constitutionally balancing the intent of the welfare and commerce clauses, you will see the rise of a great party with strength in numbers.
You can’t win at five card draw poker chosing to ‘hold’ a hand with duece, trey, four, five and a jack. You’d be rightfully called out as something far less than intelligent in such a case.
Hope you had a great Christmas!
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman empire, Gibbon wrote “I have described the triumph of barbarism and Christianity.” If you guys actually win, some future historian will be able to use the line again without alteration.
The trouble with goofy versions of Conservatism is that they finally amount to a grudge against civilization. You claim to stand for the individual, and yet your policies all favor local tyrants. You aren’t against collectivism, you just want it to be the collectivism of unregulated firms, rich bosses, authoritarian churches, patriarchal families, and gun-toting thug militias. Even the “state’s rights” of your spiritual ancestors, the Confederates, wasn’t really a complaint against government, but a complaint against a Federal government that interfered with the state’s right to lord it over black slaves and poor whites.
The project of civilization is to create a realm of freedom in which individuals can be sovereign because they have agreed to limit the arbitrary power and violence of oligarchies, the default state of mankind. The last thing conservatism stands for is individual rights—your talk about the “rights of the minority” are bogus because it’s always the same minority. If you really want to do better politically or simply be better human beings, the obvious thing to do is to give up conservatism.
One quick perusal through this man’s untrafficked blog, which he invariably proudly links to, would provide solid empirical evidence the world doesn’t much care what Jim Harrison thinks about anything, and is most certainly not influenced by the demented nonsense he pens. I just wanted save someone the trouble and loneliness I experienced at Jim’s blog.
Merry Christmas.
The south had many legitimate complaints before the civil war which had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with tariffs. The south was being forced to pay northern industries inflated prices and simultaneously fund the federal government out of all proportion to population by tarrifs and shipping laws which prevented them from buying foreign goods at much cheaper prices. New York city was a den of manipulative thieves long before our time.
After World War II, the Germans did some soul searching and undertook a comprehensive program of denazification. Nothing really comparable happened in the former Confederacy after the treason of 1861-1865, even though slavery had been every bit as horrible an atrocity as the holocaust. So far as I know, not even a single one of the Southern states has ever apologized for causing the death of 600,000 Americans in order to safeguard their right to own human beings. Indeed, Southern apologists still crank out their transparent excuses, which are plainly contradicted by an enormous historical record. Read what the South Carolina firebrands were writing to each other and saying in public in 1861. (William Freehling’s Road to Disunion reprints many of them.) The state’s rights business is crap, though I suppose their are still people dumb enough to buy it—recall that shortly before the War the Southerners had no trouble with Federal law when they wanted it to apply to escaped slaves. That’s what Dred Scott was all about.
Despite the words of the song, we never hung Jeff Davis from the sour apple tree; and now our desire to let bygones be bygones is coming back to threaten the country again. Of course not all wingnuts are Southerners—there are other roots of disloyalty—but Dixie is the rotten heart of American reaction these days.
We may never know if conservative ideas were the problem, since Republicans never defend them. They posture alongside them at election time. There’s a difference.
If I said it once, I said it at least nine times, Mitt Romney had a bunch of hacks and amateurs working as a communications team, and the Republican Party has the same problem. They’re just paying off friends with minimal real experience in media matters.
They belong in the movie, “Dumb and Dumber.”
Republicans and Democrats operate on the same principle. “We are NOT going to leave you alone.” The people evidently would prefer Democrat molestation.
Libertarians are actually doing well. Look at Colorado. And Washington State.
If Libertarians are the Party of Marijuana legalization, then they are doing well. Otherwise, they can’t get elected dog catcher here in Colorado either.
The Republicans might do well if they could come to terms with the end of Prohibition. If the evangelicals would let them.
It seems to me that while we sit around reading our blog sites and take turns pontificating about which is the most righteous Conservative group, Media Matters and the others are invading our little space and driving wedges between us. The last nail into our coffin, as it were. And we are so one dimensional in our one approach to Conservatism that we can’t resist going after each other like fool’s on an errand for the Collective. The enemy is not Social Conservatives. The enemy is not Economic Conservatives, the enemy is not Religious Conservatives, nor is it Neo-Conservative hawks or even the Tea Partiers who are just fed up with more taxes. Our enemy, and the enemy of our nation, is the Democrat Party and their Communist, Socialist, Labor Union, and Gang Green allies. We can argue about the Republicans not having a voice all we want, but it is US who have given up on having a voice. Until we can show a united front to our enemies, we will remain a House divided until we no longer even have a House. Democrats don’t all think alike either, but they don’t shoot themselves in the foot to prove it. Maybe we do need to come up with a new catchy name for ourselves but we had better rediscover our political enemy, no matter what they are calling themselves, first.
We are all discussing symptoms of the same problem. That is, the walls of the constitution have been breached. So we have a version of Republic that drifts from crisis to crisis, with no statesmen that want to limit much of anything. They (both parties) derrive power from spending and regulation. The fight seems to be over which constituencies get thrown the bones and which ones get the bill.
So what to do? The power lies in the States through federalism. The corrections will NOT come from Washington as its too corrupted and too entrenched. So we must find another way as electing John Boehner & Republicans to the House has not give us anything. I would suggest that deep blue state Tea Party activists redirect their efforts to electing conservatives in states that are light red or purple to the State legislatures & goverorships (such as Ark, Mo, Colo, Minn, Ky, WVa, & Mont). If states get fed up the the EPA or Interior Dept, they can make constitutional changes; but we need to have more red states.
Pressure your states not to set up Obamacare exchanges. Really it doesn’t matter whether you live in a red or blue state; the country can not afford this monstrosity. Alums, pressure your alma maters to hire conservative profs and get conservative lecturers. Band together and threaten to withhold donations.
Find out what your school board is doing, read the text books, challenge them. Demand they do the right thing. Sponsor religious schools and scholarships. The Catholics have done a good job, but we need more religious schools as well as homes schoolers.
Go see the few good movies that are made; boycott the bad ones. Limit the video games your kids play. Monitor their tv shows, music, online downloads, and refuse to allow the junk to pollute their minds. Above all, be a role model and guide and educate them to a better life based on principles and hard work.
Buckle up for the crash. Its going to come and the takers are going to be quite surprised that there is no unlimited pot of gold from which to draw their sustenance and all the promises that the venal politicans have made can not be fulfilled. And the in the throes, its bound to get quite chaotic, if not violent.
Instead of “conservative”, or “libertarian”, how about simply “freedomist”? If anyone attacks us, we just say, “Why are you against freedom?”
The ability to exercise personal initiative is the ultimate safety net … for it enables one to prepare for, and work around, the errors, mendacity, and greed of others, as well as provide for others when they can’t help themselves in timely, effective, and sustainable ways.
It is also the ace-in-the-hole of American productivity and prosperity … the not-so-secret sauce that keeps us competitive with the worker-bee/authoritarian societies in other parts of the world.
The fundamental problem we have in this nation, is the encouraged outsourcing of that personal initiative to an elite few at the top … encouraged by that same elite few … thinking that we CAN’T get ahead without their intervention to solve our problems FOR us, because we have been told we ordinary citizens lack the intellect/expertise/connections/resources to solve them.
That outsourcing is what has put our nation in the peril it is in today. Virtually all our other problems are symptoms of it … from the safety nets that have turned into glue traps with rotting netting, to the moribund economy, the dysfunctional education and health-care systems, and the inept/corrupt politics-as-usual that has been substituted for leadership.
That is what needs to change … and the need to change it, and restore the value of and respect for personal initiative, is the message conservatives need to carry back to our neighbors as I see it.
Unfortunately, in the face of those selling this outsourcing with free ice cream and a pony, we are in the position of pointing out the reality on the barn floor behind the pony and the need to pick up a shovel.
This is going to require putting the message out in front of people in ways they can’t ignore or gloss over. Ways that the GOP wing of the professional/political complex does not perceive, at present, to be in the interests of their careers and paychecks. Ways that our opponents will try to smear as “hate”, because we will not lie about a government “guarantee” that each citizen will get their ice cream ration in their favorite flavor (ranging from free contraception to preferential tax treatment).
Yet a third party is not the answer – ballot-access laws written to protect the major parties, and the temptation of political expediency that can lead even Republicans to start handing out the ice cream and ponies, make a third-party challenge today an exercise in futility.
No, we’re going to have to take over the GOP, and over-ride the professional/political complex within/supporting it to present this message … that is in one’s PERSONAL interest to NOT put all their eggs in others’ baskets and look to those others to carry them all through life … that the primary mission of legitimate government is to secure our unalienable rights, so we are free to bring our personal initiative – alone, and/or with our neighbors, but OUTSIDE of the coercive force of law – to bear upon the problems of human society.
I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Simon’s premise. America has heard the republican message of gays being second-class citizens, sticking government nose into bedrooms while simultaneously claiming to be the party of smaller government, and letting the wealthiest enjoy tax breaks. The Republicans got this message out loud and clear and it was rejected, fortunately, by a majority of Americans.
A bare majority, Mr. Corlett … who apparently bought into the way Progressives framed the debate, as you have.
Open your mind a minute, and consider …
… that gay activists are demanding that we re-define a biologically-based social institution that has transcended cultures and religions to serve as a stabilizing influence upon societies for thousands of years, simply to make themselves feel warm and fuzzy about their lifestyle choices … and to create a “new normal” where their critics are muzzled by application of gays’ very own version of the Race Card. Equal protection under the law for GLBT individuals does not require a re-definition of that institution.
… that the Powers That Be were demanding that we pay for others “reproductive freedom”, even if that runs roughshod over our freedom of conscience.
… that allowing the dividing line between “tissue” and “human” to be chosen arbitrarily by another makes a mockery of the unalienable right to live … and leaving that line arbitrary, to be moved and/or replicated in the future as still others see fit can come around and bite each of us in the butt someday.
… that those tax breaks the wealthy “enjoy” often results in economic activity that produces more government revenue than if they were denied that “enjoyment” … and that, even if that were not true, any “increased” revenues that would result from denying them that “enjoyment” would not make a dent in the real problem: our profligate spending.
All of the above fly in the face of – or are counterproductive to – the stated desires of Progressives for freedom and equality. And the Progressive activism regarding these subjects is every bit as big an attempt at jamming a particular morality down the throats of others, as you are accusing Republicans of attempting.
Now tell me … just where is the GOP denying equal protection under the law for GLBT individuals, as opposed to re-defining social institutions to suit their whims?
Where are conservatives sticking our noses into bedrooms … as opposed to being dragged by the wallet and through our TV screens, into them?
How is the definition of human life, and the protection of the unalienable right to live, NOT a legitimate function of government?
Why do YOU get to decide when another has “made enough”, and seek to take more from him/her to fund activities that go well beyond the scope of government’s legitimate mission of securing our unalienable rights … in many cases, activities that are intended to coercively support a particular socio-economic morality to the exclusion of others?
Notice that no invocations of God, no Scriptures, no fire and brimstone, were used in the above. I thank you for your facilitation of a teachable moment for many in this discussion – a teachable moment for how evangelicals should present the issues they are sensitive to in ways that respect freedom of religion, and for those who criticize them, regarding why those issues are/should be important to said critics.
Great propaganda, Joseph. I am sure they will give you bonus points for that rant back at the Media Matters outlet. Maybe your comrades will even place you somewhere in the apparatchik so you don’t have to waste any more of your time on the mundane chores of the useful idiots. Sheesh.
“The Founders built safeguards against that danger in the establishment of the electoral college and the election of senators by state legislatures, and the exclusion of women from the electorate. The 17th and 19th Amendments have destroyed two of those safeguards and now the malign forces are going after the electoral college.”
Yeah, this “war on women” was a creation of the left. Mr. Simon, the above message came through loud and clear which is why, of course, the R’s lost.
The R’s lost the young unmarried women, who are naive and/or needy enough
to believe The D’s demonizing of Rs and promises of endless govt. money.
When the 2nd Great Depression takes effect, and the jobs and money go away,
these women will lose their illusions, and perhaps their votes.
“Now tell me … just where is the GOP denying equal protection under the law for GLBT individuals, as opposed to re-defining social institutions to suit their whims?
Where are conservatives sticking our noses into bedrooms … as opposed to being dragged by the wallet and through our TV screens, into them?
How is the definition of human life, and the protection of the unalienable right to live, NOT a legitimate function of government?
Ritchie:
Fair enough questions. In Florida, until the courts found “no reasonable reason”, it was illegal for gay couples to adopt children. There is a heartwarming story of two gay guys adopting two black kids, out of state, in the Satasota Herald Tribune today. But according to conservatives, these black children would be better off in foster care than in a loving, although untraditional, homes.
Look no further than the Terri Schaivo case to see conservatives sticking their “we’re the government and we know best” noses into very private family decisions. And they claim to be for smaller government, that’s what kills me.
The problem with government deciding that human life begins at conception is that now government will decide that the IUD and the pill, as abortifacients, will be illegal. Conservatives don’t want to defend life, they want to tell others what kind of contraception is acceptable. Hey, be a real conservative and MYOB. Less government, less telling others what to do or not do.
No, Joseph, we want to see the dividing line between “tissue” and a human life based upon immutable criteria … something more than whims and convenience … when it comes to deciding what lives deserve protection under the law.
If certain contraceptives threaten a human life, they should not be used if we really consider the right to live unalienable. Progressives are the first to mandate all sorts of safety requirements – and environmental regulation – for the sake of kids, allegedly out of concern for their lives. Where is the consistency?
And the same care needs to be applied when it comes to removing life-sustaining mechanisms from those in vegetative states. If the right to live is unalienable, it should NOT be “left to the family”, let alone a husband with multiple motivating factors to end that life. I certainly covet that protection, as I get closer to senior-citizen status.
As for gay adoptions … you don’t need to re-define marriage to allow that, or to assure protection for next-of-kin, medical decision-making, and estate protection.
Though, despite your anecdotal evidence, and the problems with foster care, I do question whether placing kids in a gay home is truly the best course of action. You may have a point … however, when we focus more on the “rights” of the adoptive couple, a caviler “What, Me Worry?” attitude when it comes to the effects of human sexuality on the person as a whole, and the desire to establish a “new normal”, the actual effect on the kids might get lost in the rush to establish it.
Face it … Progressive activism in the above areas is primarily about making sure your mellow is NEVER again harshed by critics like me … that you are never again inconvenienced by warnings that where this is going may not be so desirable to you in the end, let alone an unplanned life under your care.
The way you make it out, theocracy is just around the corner if the GOP attains power … I will tell you this, the evangelicals within that coalition are your first line of defense AGAINST the theocracy you fear. Google “church autonomy” and “priesthood of the believer”, and you’ll understand why.
The Cult of Human Omniscience that promotes Progressive ideology is the greater threat of “theocracy” here … a blind faith in the superiority of beings, on the basis of their credentials and expertise, to make even individual-specific decisions FOR the rest of us – even in the well-documented history of error and mendacity coming from those beings – and impose them by the coercive force of law.
And they seek to do so, with a fundamentalist zeal that makes Baptist preachers look like libertines out for beads at Mardi Gras.
Be careful what you are asking for … it might not be what you think.
“Great propaganda, Joseph. I am sure they will give you bonus points for that rant back at the Media Matters outlet. Maybe your comrades will even place you somewhere in the apparatchik so you don’t have to waste any more of your time on the mundane chores of the useful idiots. Sheesh.”
This is a perfect example of Ad Hominem attack. You can’t/won’t rebut my arguments so you attack me instead. The readers here are a bit more sophisticated than you’re giving them credit for being.
Sorry Joseph, I thought that I was responding to an ad hominem attack on Republicans wherein there was no attempt to show how your prejudicial opinions were formulated. I made the conjecture that you must have been brainwashed by the Collective, possibly over at Media Matters, and that you are obviously proud of said effort or you wouldn’t be popping up in the comment section of every article on this blog with the same tired drivel. You have a long way to go before you can throw off the yoke of the useful idiot, but at least you seem to be trying. That is more than I can say for most of the imbeciles in Mr. Ezekial’s neighborhood.
Roger, I have encountered much the same missive from numerous sources since the election. A cursory glance suggests you (and others) have correctly analyzed the problem. It also reinforces the notion that a solution will be extremely difficult to implement if the current conservative coalition is to remain intact.
The problems arise when you peruse the responses to articles such as this one.
The GOP establishment seems to favour accenting the “fiscal” and filtering out the “social” in conservative messaging to widen the appeal of the Republican brand. I read many conservative sites and while living in the liberal PNW, I work in an airplane factory with a fairly high percentage of conservatives and i am here to tell you that the disconnect between the establishment message and what i hear from the conservative on the street could not be greater. The overwhelming majority of my conservative co-workers aren’t interested in watering down conservatism to attract new blood and appear to favour continuing to press the social agenda and “double-down” on what you consider to be failed messaging. This, IMO … even more than any perceived damage already done to the brand, is the larger problem. One that may have no path to resolution considering the numbers game the GOP must play to remain electorally viable.
Precisely how the GOP can accomplish this is only lightly touched on if not completely ignored in similar discussions.
I know I am late to the discussion but here’s the deal.
Roger, you need to run a column “How to talk to the left”.
That would include distinguishing between the con-men
(waste of time to talk to them) and the conned (hard to
disabuse but we must). Yes the conned are threatened o
and angered by the truth. There are ways to work with
that, as cult deprogrammers know.
We must take back the moral stance and I don’t mean
issues of sex and abortion.
Policies of the left hurt the wretched the most.
Affirmative action and entitlements hurt exactly the groups they purport
to help.Freedom doesn’t have appeal to the narcissist do-gooders. To them
it sounds like a selfish argument the rich make and let thewretchedsuffer
Most conservatives hold their truths self-evident and don’t know how to ddisabuse the conned.
Published on Apr 5, 2012
Conservatives don’t “fix” big government. They end it.
The Deal with Jack Hunter: Goodbye to Conservatism!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TS4KCaoAGM
Change doesn’t come easy, especially for a Party passionately devoted to resisting it.