Posted on 01/26/2008 5:57:27 AM PST by fightinJAG
[snip]
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The 100 percenters aren’t going to like this.
Bush destroyed it...Nixon destroyed it...Hover destroyed it...everyone seems to be writing the party obituary. The GOP is a lot stronger than a single person. What it needs is leadership, which is currently lacking.
You mean like this guy?
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine
That is why there is Mitt.
I don’t think it’s a very well-written piece. It founders and lacks evidence. Which is too bad. The evidence is there.
Bush wrecked the Republican Party by governing as a Scoop Jackson pro-defense democrat.
It was a monumental job of wrecking. The results are all around us in this election cycle.
Peggy Noonan taking on the king of the Jaw Bone Media. That will be interesting.
Gonna be hard to come by when the suits running the GOP hate conservatives as much as the 'Rats do....
I’m voting for Mitt, the “Mormon”.
There’s nothing wrong with the Republican Party that couldn’t be cured with a dose of legitimate conservativism. It worked in 1980, and it worked in 1994.
Mittens Romney, won’t nominate, won’t pardon, didn’t build and never served. The Great Leader.
At worst, he will govern like George Bush without the speech impediments and slavish devotion to Mexicanization of America.
I think that the person who will lead the GOP back to prominence is out there, but not on anyone’s radar screen. When he or she appears I hope that they don’t make the same mistake Reagan didn. If Reagan had a fault it was that he didn’t bring along enough like-minded conservatives into prominent positions to make sure that his positions survived him. Reagan turned out to be a flash in the pan, Gingrich self-destructed, and the business-as-usual Republicans of the 60’s and 70’s took over.
I believe we have a great big BINGO!
We will never sell conservatism (or the GOP) to the electorate if we cannot define it. Even if we were not directly responsible, we have to point out where the “right” went wrong and exactly what we need to do to rectify the situation.
That's the guy! Lynch 'em.
(What he's already dead? never mind)
Ayn Rand had a wored for the Republican party back in the old days. She described it as the “me too” party. As in, whenever the Democrats proposed another welfare program or subsidy the Republicans would respond that we want that too, just more incrementally. Looks like they’ve returned to their roots. I think Rush nailed it yeaterday when he compared the Republican future to a AAA or AA farm club compared to the major league Dem party.
Brilliant headline on Drudge’s part!
Grabbed everyone’s attention, lured in all the Democrats thinking they were gonna get their Bush Derangement Syndrome jollies off it, then proceeded to read a long piece that eviscerated the Clintons. At the very end is a single sentence aside to a different story where Peggy says McCain can’t destroy the GOP because Bush already did.
Well played, Matt. Well played.
Wikipedia has the middle name as “Mitt”. Where does “Mittens” come from; it must be a family name, but it sounds like Michigan hand covers in winter. HRC will steal MI from him! And he won’t even have a MA campaign if he is the nominee — unwise expenditure of limited funds.
There is nothing new about this. Every thing bad that has happened since he was elected is his fault.
Mitt it is for me, as well.
I have had trouble listening to him for many, many years.
He’s not even funny anymore. Kind of stale. I like Neil Bortz way more.
I download MP3 history and economics lectures off the net and listen to them. I’ve even dumped my XM radio.
Well of course. But to be fair, he was simply making palatable the wussified RINO approach prevalent since the gov. shut-down cave in.
Shame on me for falling for it. No more.
Well damn! Me, and a very few other, use to get flamed for saying this, now it’s headlines on Drudge. Again, GWB will go down in history as the worse POTUS. He destroyed the Republican party, and most of our America.
Harriet Myers was a hard one to take ...
It’s not that everything bad since 2005 has been GWB’s fault, but he has sure played the role of Nero to the hilt.
Already been posted plenty o’ times FRiend, i.e., “search is your friend”...
That’s exactly why I’m for Huma.
That 2005 speech was a laundry list of liberalism. After sitting through it, I have never listened to GWB again and won’t listen to his last State of the Union speech next week either. He has nothing of significance to say to conservatives.
Then you'd better hope his dealings with Bain Capital were above board...
Sounds like something the high schools should do too.
Bush didn’t destroy the party. He kicked it in the nuts.
Yep,
So now we will be left with McLame in November.
Unwarranted alarmism.
Your point concedes that there are/were many causes for the "destruction" of the Republican party, while you specifically fingered Bush's approach on spending, the war, and immigration.
Assuming for the sake of argument that you are correct, can you really say it was Bush's approach to these issues, and not the inherent divergent approaches to these issues within the party's ranks, that caused the division?
IOW, is there a politician on the face of the earth, using political tools, that, under all the circumstances, could have reconciled all the inherent divergent views on these issues within the party to the even more wildly divergent political reality outside the party?
If not, then was it the politician who "destroyed" the party or was it political reality?
I do agree that Bush could have taken a more conservative approach in several areas. However, I do not agree that it is correct to analyze the effect of an administration on its party in "pieces."
To do so, just plays into and gives legitimacy to the "single issue" (or, in effect, multiple "single/handful of issues") mindset.
An administration can never be successful when measured against the multitude of "single issues" inherent in a party.
What will destroy the Republican party is it becoming more and more like the Democrat party: that is, more and more a loose coalition of multiple "single/handful of issues" subgroups who are unwilling to measure the party's success in terms of "net gain" rather than on a zero-sum basis viz-a-vis a handful of issues.
When subgroups form around their handful of issues, and then measure the party on a zero-sum basis---e.g., the party didn't do what I thought was appropriate on immigration [fill-in-the-blank with an issue], therefore the party accomplished NOTHING across the board---NO party can endure and NO politician can cause it to endure.
The Republican party needs to use what worked before, The Contract With America. But why did it work?
1) It wasn’t so much what it said, but how it said it. Most of us probably don’t remember a single item on it.
2) How it said it was simple, clear and honest. No hesitation, no conflicting statements, no hedging, no qualifications, no voting both ways. It was a transparent agenda. You either signed on to it, or you didn’t.
3) Most of the people who signed up were new candidates, not incumbents who had become comfortable with the Washington way of doing things. As such, they were there to break the two party “monolith of stagnation”, not to become part of it.
4) The public loved it. Not just Republican voters, but Independents, and even a lot of moderate Democrats. Finally, a simple checklist to determine who *should* be running the country, and those who just *wanted* to run the country.
5) Conversely, the professional politicians and bureaucrats hated it. It was like light shined on cockroaches, forcing them to flee. They *couldn’t* sign on to it, because it would ruin so many of their schemes and plots.
Neil Bortz??? That fag lover wouldn’t make a pimple on Rush’s ass.
Bush destroyed the Republican Party for this election cycle...
Like the Lincoln that most Republicans admire, Rush is self-educated. He can be repetitious because he has to explain positions ad nauseum to the sheeple. Reagan tried that approach too with some success. I lost interest in the program in 2005, when he seemed to be a defender of GWB and the RNC even as they were adopting ruinous policies. Sometimes I listen some to M. Savage now.
For some reason I’ve yet to figure out, Reagan named the “anti-Reagan” (GHWB) to be his VP and other Bush people to positions of great power. He also kept the advisors who convinced him to sign the “Therapeutic Abortions” bill, while Governor of Kalifornia.
It is way past time we figured out and concentrated on what we have, and must have, in common. We must find leaders that feel, and have felt that way also, instead of taking whatever candidates the GOP establishment and the media choose for us.
Duncan Hunter certainly doesn’t think so.
I think Reagan was more than just a flash in the pan. His commitment to reducing marginal tax rates from 70% to 30% or so and to supply side economics (people responding to incentives) has had long lasting effects not just in the US but elsewhere.
Except for that observation, post #14 is spot on.
The flaw in GWB is that he has left a “base” that practically no longer exists and is totally demoralized. And he has procured no Democrat support to replace that base, as he apparently sought to do.
I am sure the one-trick borderbots who will disagree, though they don't help fight for the fence that the government is still fighting envirowackos in court to get built.
I imagine the Reagan as “flash-in-the-pan” stems from his two poor Supreme Court nominations, one of which was practically an outright shill for liberals.
A lot of middle-income persons saw very little tax relief, as the taxes are so high as the “cut” was not observed otherwise.
“The chief problem of American political life...has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
~Carroll Quigley, ‘Tragedy and Hope’
Good point, apparently some of the Reagan advisors convinced him he needed a “moderate” Republican (GHWB) to hold the liberal Republican segment of the party — to keep it from defecting even more to John B. Anderson of liberal IL. He had already tapped a “moderate” at best in 1976 — Richard Schweiker.
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