Posted on 11/12/2008 7:27:24 AM PST by marshmallow
(CNN) -- The questions now being asked are: Where to go from here and who's to blame for the downfall of the Republican Party?
Too bad the concern for the future of the Republican Party had not been seriously addressed in the year 2000 when the Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency.
Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?
But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There's no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we're on the wrong track. That's why the candidate demanding "change" won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.
Once it's figured out what is fundamentally wrong with our political and economic system, solutions can be offered. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the policy changes needed, then the party can be rebuilt.
In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power -- with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.
Most Republicans endorsed this view in order to achieve victories at the polls. Limiting government power and size with less spending and a balanced budget as the goal used to be a "traditional" Republican value. This is what Goldwater and Reagan talked about. That is what the Contract with America stood for.
The opportunity finally came in 2000 to do something about the cancerous growth of government.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Newsflash: Bush lost the Election. LOL
It doesn't take a genius to know that the Republicans governed poorly when they were given a chance (which explains how Ron Paul can know that), but if the party had nominated anti-war isolationist Ron Paul (saying that without a snicker is rough), we really would have lost in land slide.
There are probably hundreds of reasons why Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008. It is partly because we have done such a poor job selling our principles. (No matter how right, if a majority disagrees, even those with the right principles will lose.) And its partly because we have done a poor job following our own principles. But even these things just make up a small part of the answer.
Frankly I don't know what the Republicans need to do to regroup, but I doubt that anyone really does right now. And we won't know until somebody does something, and it succeeds. After that happens you'll find a bunch of people claiming to have suggested it no matter what they might have really said.
What I put in my reply was what Ron Paul said. I didn’t say Inflation (or deflation).......he did.
Duh.......
Correction: America lost the Election.
Given the circumstances Bush has been a good President, but idealist Republicans and leftest Democrats were too dense to know that.
Really. Where does it end? Who is going to pay for this? Does anybody think they'll get all this money they're spending from taxes? They might be able to borrow some, but most of it is going to be printed. Created out of thin air.
Well, the good news is that they may just succeed in bringing down the entire mess known as our monetary system. The bad news is many people are going to be hurt. I'm old enough to remember 1970's style inflation. What's coming is gonna be much worse. Goodbye value of the dollar. Goodbye dollar denominated savings.
This is going to be one big mess folks. Better hold on to your hats, because there's gonna be some cold wind blowing over the coming years.
If the Republicans don't wake up and convince the American people that this is insanity... God help us.
I know. I’m just making fun of the FReepers who are still campaigning against Bush.
Talk about grandiosity!
Look Ron Paul cnn retard, I'll spell it out for you. The reason the country is headed in the direction it is, or "on the wrong track", was because of the policies and acorn work this very candidate demanding "change" was involved in!!!
Here it is in a nutshell:
" When the CRA was created during the Carter administration BY DEMOCRATS, the administration also funded with tax dollars numerous "community groups" that have helped the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other federal regulatory agencies to enforce the act. Under the CRA, if a bank wanted to make virtually any change in its business operations — merging, opening up a new branch, getting into a new line of business — it had to first prove to regulators that it has made "enough" loans to the government's preferred borrowers.
The (partially) tax-funded "community groups" like ACORN filed petitions with regulators that stopped the bank's activities in their tracks, sometimes defeating them altogether. The banks routinely paid off ACORN and other "community groups" by giving them millions of dollars as well as promising to make even more dubious loans to those who didn't qualify for them.
In order to try to diversify the risk of these loans, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Company ("Freddie Mac") pioneered the "securitization" of bundles of these high-risk loans so that they could be sold on secondary markets. Such "securitization" exploded during the 1990s as a result of government regulation. As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke himself stated in a March 30, 2007 speech entitled "The Community Reinvestment Act: Its Evolution and New Challenges" (published online by the Fed),
Securitization of affordable housing loans expanded, as did the secondary market for these loans, in part reflecting a 1992 law that required the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to devote a large percentage of their activities to meeting affordable housing goals". In 1994 the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act loosened up the regulatory barriers to bank mergers. Consequently, said Bernanke, "As public scrutiny of bank merger and acquisition activity escalated, advocacy groups [like ACORN] increasingly used the public comment process to protest bank applications on CRA grounds." In other words, there was a burst of additional legalized extortion perpetrated by the Fed and its pet "activist organizations" beginning in the mid-1990s. As a result, says Bernanke, "banks began to devote more resources to their CRA programs."
lso in 1995, the US Treasury Department created the multibillion-dollar "Community Development Financial Institutions" fund to "provide banks with access [i.e., taxpayers' dollars] to new opportunities to finance community economic development" as "encouraged" by the CRA, said the Fed chairman.
The government also "streamlined" the regulatory requirements for CRA loans in 1995, allowing — and indeed pressuring — banks to make such loans without the benefit of many traditional credit-worthiness criteria, such as the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, savings history, and even income verification! Instead, the Fed told banks that participation in a credit-counseling program, many of which are federally funded, could be used as "proof" of a low-income applicant's ability to make his mortgage payments. In other words, federal bank regulators required banks to make bad loans based on nonexistent credit standards.
"In his April 26 New York Post article on the CRA entitled "The Real Scandal," Professor Liebowitz explains how the government's Fannie Mae Foundation singled out one bank in particular as the role model for all other banks in America in terms of its commitment to CRA lending: Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, had committed to $600 billion in low-income or "subprime" loans as of 2003. Today, Countrywide is essentially bankrupted and has been merged with Bank of America."<>
The myth that the CRA would not be harmful to bank-industry profits was hidden for years by the Fed-created housing bubble, which allowed for easy refinancing of all the bad debt. "[The] CRA increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without undermining banks' profitability," Robert Gordon proudly proclaims. But now that the bubble has burst, all those unqualified borrowers — whom the government calls "subprime," as though their credit ratings are only a tiny, tiny smidgen below "prime" borrowers with the very best credit ratings — are defaulting on their mortgages in droves.
Bank profitability has been extremely "undermined," to put it mildly. The bursting of the Fed-generated housing bubble is the reason why the CRA scam was not exposed until now, despite having been in operation for some thirty years.
So thanks to biased media like CNN, we now have elected the very people who put us on this "wrong truck" in the first place!! How BRILLIANT was that?
So STFU, cnn, had you done your job as REAL journalists, this would have been exposed far and wide, and Americans would have been able to make a wizer choice at the ballot box.
Instead, Media used their power to steer the election to the worst possible person on the planet in hopes of "change".
Oh and P.S.
There were several attempts to address these issues by Rublicans, McCain being one of them, but it was always blocked by the RATS in the senate and house.
We need the American Party!
Or use them to hound outspoken conservatives for being potential terrorists for seditious communications (i.e. not towing the Obama philosophy).
Obama et al are not going to rescind the Patriot Act. They are going to USE it in exactly the ways the people with their heads screwed on straight said the government would eventually use it. The major problem with giving power to one specific leader is not only that HE might abuse it, but that his successors will.
It is going to be a few hard months or possibly years before the blinders of partisanship come off the eyes of the core Republican constituency. X is bad whether done by R or D, and it is really sad, as this thread evidences, that the moderate Republicans are still in denial.
Yup, we’re about to do some reaping for our short-sightedness.
ping
RE : “Hence, we can NOT trust Republicans to promote and protect Conservatism in America”
Well we certainly have to be careful, power is corrupting next time but that is a long way off. (Watch Lord of the Rings again , it’s perfect) One thing is the Republican congress of 90s (Dick Armey, John Kasich, others that made us proud to be republican) that fixed so many things under Clinton was gone by 2000 and so GWB who made so many bad decisions himself had a congress that was corrupt and power hungry and no understanding of us, especially in senate. Lord of the Rings.
But more to your point, this total loss and humilation forces a natural cleaning cycle that could NOT happen with another close win. Why ? AS Mark Levin told a caller just before election, ‘we cant fix our party, we just have to win because the alternative is worse’ which is what that led to.
So sadly there was no positive outcome possible this election.
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