Posted on 02/09/2020 3:32:31 AM PST by Kaslin
It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon and attack Massachusetts Senator by proxy Mitt Romney of Utah, but what does it get you? Nothing. I was initially disgusted by his decision to vote guilty on the first article of impeachment, then I realized I simply didn’t care what he does or thinks about anything. And seeking retribution for something that ultimately doesn’t matter actually takes away from a very powerful weapon the GOP has against the Democrats: their demand for purity.
Democrats are the party of absolute uniformity, demanding conformity from its members. Pro-life Democrats are silenced until they can be run out of the party. Oppose socialized medicine? Better keep that to yourself or else you’ll find yourself with a primary challenger embraced by your colleagues. Refuse to denounce capitalism as a cog in the racist oppression machine that is the United States of America? Good luck holding a town hall meeting without being shouted down as history’s greatest monster.
The Democratic Party has created an outrage mob in which someone who supports their agenda 99.9 percent of the time is their 100 percent enemy, and it is hurting them with voters. Americans don’t like drones, we like winners. That someone disagrees with us on something is not cause to never speak to them again, unfriending/blocking people over a single issue/tweet/post is the domain of the left. Normal people have experienced this firsthand when they read the unhinged comments on Facebook from “friends” when they post anything positive about President Trump, the economy, killing a terrorist leader, or anything insufficiently “woke.”
The Pavlovian freakouts occur constantly, and being able to weaponize this demand for absolute obedience to progressive groupthink is a powerful tool Republicans have effectively used to turn people off to the Democrat mob. That’s why becoming them is a bad idea.
Mitt Romney is an idiot. Changing one’s mind on some issues, even slightly, is expected over the course of your life. Experience always does that, or at least should. But Mitt has done 180s, 360s, 540s, and 720s on so many issues over his political career that he either has no idea what he believes or he “believes” in nothing and will do whatever he thinks will help him at a given moment. Whatever his rationale happens to be, it doesn’t matter.
Romney voted to convict the president on one article of impeachment – so what? We all knew it was possible, even likely. The president was still acquitted. That’s what history will record. You remember who won the Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, World Series, etc., not the score.
My father taught me that it doesn’t matter if you win by one or one million, what matters is you got the victory. President Trump got the victory. Democrat journalists praising Romney as a hero will be forgotten by history because it did not matter, it didn’t make a difference.
I didn’t believe him either when he was moral-peacocking on the Senate floor about how his faith led him to this decision, but I also didn’t care. When I started seeing people wanting to expel him from the party or ridiculous and constitutionally impossible calls to recall him, I thought they were equally dumb.
Romney votes with Republicans the vast majority of the time, and he’s not up for reelection until 2024. There’s nothing the GOP can and should do to him. It was one vote, one time. Yes, it was a big deal, but it will also be forgotten by anyone not served politically by remembering it by tomorrow. Unless Republicans spend the rest of the year seeking revenge over it and make Mitt into a martyr.
Romney craves attention, don’t give it to him. Ignore him; freeze him out. When asked about him, on any issue, the response should be a simple, “I don’t really care what he does.” The media will elevate him, we don’t have to play along.
But don’t try to run him out of the party either. Be bigger than Democrats. Don’t be them. Use their inability to accept differing opinions, to tolerate someone not conforming, hurts them. The endless stream of videos of speakers being shouted down, of people being harassed, is one of the greatest election advantages we have. The “party of tolerance” being intolerant of dissent differentiates us from them. If we join them, we lose that advantage.
We’ve known we couldn’t count on Mitt Romney since he ran for president in 2008, so his vote really surprises no one. It also changed nothing. President Trump is acquitted, period. Democrats are still unhinged, demanding absolute loyalty to policy and ideology or else. We don’t beat them by becoming them. You want to go after Romney, do it when he’s on the ballot again in 2024, the only time it can be done.
Until then, welcome his vote when we get it, and ignore him when we don’t. With the exception of a very few, history doesn’t remember senators, no matter how beloved they were by the media. Let them write books praising him, they won’t be read because who cares? Keep your eyes on the prize. November is coming. Elections are about the future. Focus your energy on what’s to come, not what’s come and gone. No amount of anger will change his decision, and since it wasn’t even close to being the deciding vote, no one will remember it, or him, either.
Carpetbagger Romney!
Here comes a load of crap from Townhall.
Why do republicans need to avoid becoming like democrats on unity?
I'd reserve judgment, but the idea of a US Senator cooking up something with a supposed ‘witness’ against a sitting president - well, yeah, we all know how this plays out. Shocking bombshells sink the president and the knight Romney rides out to save the GOP from their terrible mistake and wins the presidency.
I understand where some people are coming from when they defend Romney - he votes with us most of the time, so you should excuse his vanity poses. But if what I suspect comes to fruition on March 17th (with the accompanying ‘I'm vindicated’ speech by Romney) we'll all know him for exactly who he is.
Gonna have to disagree on this one. I despise group-think, and mob mentality. Probably a large reason why I am a conservative.
Tough calls deserve rational minds, free to think and answer questions and make decisions that are just and fair. However, this was far from a tough call. It was pure partisan BS from the get-go, from before Trump was even sworn in. We all knew Mitt was a Trump-hating flip-flopper, and he proved us all right again. That much is true.
Not every politician was presidential candidate.
Romney is irrelevant. He’s an attention whore. A distraction. Ignore. Now is time to focus on the coup conspirators who were hiding 0bama’s illegal war.
My mid March Comey will be in the dock or Barr will be fired. Romney and Bolton are yesterday’s news.
i’m tempted to agree with the guy about becoming democrats on purity. There’s a tendency on the GOP side to insist on your own ‘rightness’. Expressing a dissenting opinion results many times in being attacked and vilified. But it was never the attackers or the demonizers that ever changed my mind on a subject. It was always the ones who engaged me in a conversation and sought to understand what i am saying. These are the ones that we want to emulate.
So I thought the writer was trying to make that point. But looking closer what he’s really trying to do is to get us to embrace Mitt Romney, and those like Mitt Romney. I’ve explained in past posts that there are some politicians and pundits in the GOP that are a product of the Reagan era ‘big tent’ theory. Those were the days when you could disagree with a democrat respectfully. These days democrats are known for rampaging through the streets breaking windows with baseball bats. Local police wondering whether driving a car into a republican voter registration tent could possibly be politically motivated. That’s not true any more. The democrats that were absorbed by the GOP in the 80’s are mostly still democrats and never were converted. The democrats on the other hand never had a reformative ‘big tent’ era that i know of. The closest thing the democrats did to that was their ‘triangulation’ method of Running to the right and governing to the left.
The democrats exercise absolute party discipline. You can see that mostly in the gallery at the SOTU speech where the evil eye of the ice queen was scorching the left side of the aisle with her imperial command to sit or stand. Perhaps rather than avoiding the democrats ideological purity tests, we should emulate some of their Party Discipline. Romney should be trembling for his job after taking a vote like that. But He has nothing to be afraid of. Because the republicans dont exercise party discipline, like the iranians before solimani there’s no demonstration of deterrence. The democrats have 20 different ways to discipline their elected members and they will exercise every one of them. What i see in the gallery of the left is FEAR.
So rather than talking with Derek here about tolerating a mitt romney betrayal vote we should maybe be talking about taking away some of romneys committee memberships. How about defunding his campaign or primary him over and over until he loses. How about redistrict him out of office. I think it’s way past time that we started to discipline these politicians the way it was intended. At the ballot box. And I think that if trump were to leave a legacy out of his presidency that would be ideal. Trump should start using the weight of his office to push these squishy democrats out of the republican party. Send them scurry back to the democrats where they belong.
Why do you beshit every day with your posts?
this is not a matter of purity, it’s a matter of protection of the herd (in this case the GOP) when it’s under mortal attack from enemies who want to destroy it ... it’s no different than if a wagon train was circling the wagons when under attack, and Mitt the wagon driver suddenly pulled his wagon into the center for selfish reasons, leaving a gap for the attack to penetrate the circle and thereby destroy the entire wagon train ...
And Benedict Arnold was a great military leader except for the little incident in New York. Maybe Town Hall thinks we should have had a counseling session with Mr Arnold.
Eh? Romney is not even moderate. He is a communist witch hunt sympathizer. It is Romney who is the purist who wants to change the RNC with coward PC purity hypocrisy.
Townhall got it a$$ backeards
Sound advice if you have more important real world things to deal with. Those who just want to act out their emotions won’t take it.
Townhall.com wrote this? My are you ignorant
I’m not sure how many people look to a website like Townhall for political insight, but I guess it’s very few.
(This is your #16 that I swiped & pasted coming back at you :))
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