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 ...
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...
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