Ross Douthat is a hoot today:
You can’t have a successful political party without centrists. Happily for Republicans still smarting from last week’s defection, you can have a successful political party without centrists like Arlen Specter.
***This doesn’t mean that Republicans should be happy that their tent is shrinking toward political irrelevance. But more Lincoln Chafees and Olympia Snowes aren’t the answer. What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.
Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.
No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today. Maybe something like it can grow out of the listening tour that various Republican power players are embarking on this month. Maybe it can bubble up outside the Beltway — from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, or reformists in deep-red states, like the much-touted Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Utah’s Jon Huntsman. But to succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either.
No political party can be effective without a center, now watch me crap all over the two remaining centrists in the GOP and then pretend that solid conservatives like Huntsman and Jindal are centrists. So Douthat doesn’t like Specter, or Collins, or Snowe. Fine. But pretending that the guy who voted with the Republicans 70% of the time is actually a liberal isn’t actually achieving much other than to further the current Republican delusion. It is only in the fanatical wingnut world where the answers to everything are tax cuts, more bombs, and prayer that folks like Souter or Specter or Snowe are “liberal.”
In other words, they only look liberal because you all are nucking futs. To the rest of us in what we like to call the real world, they are what they are- center right Republicans.
The Grand Panjandrum
You have to wonder what conservatives are thinking. Jonah Goldberg was on the Diane Rehm show yesterday claiming he wasn’t necessarily a Republican. He was a conservative! What, logic?
SpotWeld
Riiiiight.
The best way to stop the Titanic from sinking is to go back in time to the wonderful piont right after the inceberg hit.
Michael D.
I never thought Douthat was ready for the NY Times. He does, however, fit right in with conservatives these days.
DanSmoot'sGhost
Amazing. We need centrists. So, let me name a few of our last remaining centrists and diss them, except for the one guy who is dead now, but who while he was alive was treated as a crazy uncle by the base of our party, but who was truer to real traditional conservatism than any of the current crowd ever will be.
So …. um …. let’s see, the strategy would be to get rid of all the crazy people running the party now and start over? Or …. what am I missing here?
What to do? What to do?
I know, let’s go out and listen! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Listening R Us(tm)!
Innovation!
Grassrooty!
Just Some Fuckhead
Yep! That’s just what I’ve been saying. Claiming yer a Democrat so you don’t have to face yer own angry supporters doesn’t actually make you a Democrat.
Wes Clark is a good example of doing it right. Spent a lifetime voting as a Republican then ran as a Democrat for President. Doing so, he either rejected or explained away his earlier support for Republicans and wholeheartedly embraced the Democratic agenda. (Too much so, I remember thinking at the time. He would give a speech outlining his support for the litany of “Democratic” causes, and I’d think you just need shut up about all that stuff and tout yer leadership.)
jake 4 that 1
Douchehat has a lot of maybes, here’s one more: Maybe there’s a pony under all this horse shit.
asiangrrlMN
Great. You made me read Douthat’s (do that? Doubt that? Douche hat?) turgid prose. My head is exploding as I type. Interesting graphic, that.
What have we learned? Douthat can recycle the crap just like the rest of the tired old conservatives. Yes, I know Douthat is young, but he sounds old.
In addition, Ratface Pawlenty is not a centrist. You know his answer to MN’s deficit problem? Tax cuts and spending freezes. Unless it’s to help rich team owners build stadiums. Then he’s all for that. Centrist my ass.
I think I blew my outrage wad over the SCOTUS preemptive fight. I need recovery time to properly deal with Douthat.
Xecky Gilchrist
All part of their plan to regain the Permanent Majority by really, really explaining to everyone in a slow, clear voice that the same old hard-right shit is really centrism.
Sort of like, again, Karen Hughes’ world tour to really, really explain how everybody actually liked the Iraq invasion and only thought they hated it.
Ned
John, I’m a much bigger fan of you than I am of Douthat, but in fairness to him, he didn’t say that Specter was a liberal; he said he was one of the “horse-traders and deal-cutters,” who lean towards the center when it’s politically advantageous instead of out of principle. That seems pretty uncontroversial to me.
El Cid
Douthat’s right.
The example of true innovation in American politics can be found in the Reaganite hysterical rejection of the New Deal, good governance, wholesale embrace of genocidal and death squad tyrants, and Southern Strategy nonsense which has spent 30 years harming the nation and undermining middle class earning and stability, and the good Democrats are those who thought the party’s future lay in copying that as much as possible.
Oh. Okay. Thanks for continuing to inform all us idiots out here how the future is to be made by continuing to repackage the same old harmful shit as new.
Persia
@DanSmoot’sGhost: They can call it a ‘listening tour!’ I hear that sort of thing is popular.
Michael D.
Off Topic: The Maine legislature voted today to allow marriage equality. Just one more vote in each house. Probably foreshadowing good news, they also voted not to send it to voters to decide – which is appropriate. I hate ballot initiatives. Voters elect people to decide things.
Maybe it’s the Canadian in me…
Thankovsky
Yeah, well, thankfully most Americans seem to be wising up to this reality. On the other hand, I find it somewhat disappointing that Douthat, who’s a genuinely smart guy (even if he’s flat-out wrong on a number of issues), is so much in the dark about the true cause of the GOP’s woes. It ain’t because of the Specters and the Snowes and the Collinses in Congress, folks. It’s because of the out-and-out nutballs like Bachmann and Sessions and Palin. Start calling them out as the lunatics they are, distance the GOP from them, and your party is suddenly going to look a lot more palatable.
Calouste
The start to turn things around for the Republican party would be to put an emphasis on competence rather than ideology. That’s how the Tories are coming back in the UK, by pointing out that the results of Labour’s policies suck, rather than the policies themselves.
But as the GOP is rather low on competence and high on ideology, and Obama rates fairly high on competence, it will be a while.
dww44
Funny you should mention Souter. Try this story in my local paper today about Erick Erickson’s twittered remarks on Justice Souter. Erickson is also an elected member of City Council and these remarks are on top of a long running and locally publicized battle of words with Afircan American citycouncilwoman, Elaine Lucas.
PeakVT
rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation
These two phrases do not go together.
Thankovsky
@Michael D.:
Most Americans seem to have forgotten that the the majority of the voting public opposed biracial marriages when anti-miscegenation laws were overturned. They’ve forgotten that there’s a reason why we’re not a direct democracy.
kid bitzer
you know, if douthat could only learn how to cut and paste, he could be ben domenech some day.
The Raven
Is it perhaps time for a new second party, to replace the Republicans in the way that the Republicans replaced the Whigs?
Svensker
So what are these great Conservative Principles these folks are always yammering on about?
Torture?
Tax cuts for rich people?
A giant government agency snooping on people’s sex lives?
Another giant government agency reading people’s mail and listening in on their phones?
Ridiculing science and education?
A gigantic Defense Department ready to bomb and go to war at the slightest provocation?
Worship of the military/industrial complex?
Belief in a particular kind of fundamentalist Christianity?
Worship of the State of Israel?
Ability to listen to Rush or Sean without feeling the urge to smash the TB into little bits?
But really, we could just stop with the first. Because anyone who can pledge belief in “limited government” while supporting torture hasn’t the faintest clue.
Elie
I’m with El Cid —
Any real reform within the Republican party begins with checking out reality — what has hurt and almost destroyed this country over the last thirty years…The whole process of setting groups against each other, making fun of cooperation and re-enforcing policies that help only the rich big guys at the expense of the little guy — that is what the Republicans stood for. Yes, that is being rightly repudiated and to my mind, there is no way to make that be what is good for the country anymore.
The Republicans have earned their banishment through destructive and self defeating behaviors that no one should want to emulate. There is no plan B — only rethinking of what it means from the ground up and ploughed from a completely new direction than the reactionary, selfish and divisive perspective that they had.
joes527
So, if I’m reading this right, Douthat thinks that what the Republicans need is more dead people.
I suppose an argument can be made that the dead greatly outnumber the living, so I can see the draw.
I just don’t see The Party of Zombie Reagan working out the way that they want it to.
JGabriel
Ross Douthat:
I usually dislike copying Monty Python, but this is just too spot on:
Dem Collector: Bring out yer Dems! Bring out yer Dems!
(a man puts a body on the cart)
Ross Douthat: Here’s one.
Dem Collector: Ninepence.
Olympia Snowe: I’m not Dem yet.
Dem Collector: What?
Ross Douthat: Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.
Olympia Snowe: I’m not Dem.
Dem Collector: ‘Ere, she says she’s not Dem.
Ross Douthat: Yes she is.
Olympia Snowe: I’m not.
Dem Collector: She isn’t.
Ross Douthat: Well, she will be soon, she’s very lib.
Olympia Snowe: I’m feeling better.
Ross Douthat: No you’re not, you’ll be stone Dem in a moment.
Dem Collector: Well, I can’t take her like that. It’s against regulations.
Olympia Snowe: I don’t want to go on the cart.
Ross Douthat: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
Dem Collector: I can’t take ‘er.
Olympia Snowe: I feel fine.
Ross Douthat: Oh, do us a favor.
Dem Collector: I can’t!
Ross Douthat: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? She won’t be long.
Dem Collector: Naaah, I gotta go around to the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.
Ross Douthat: When’s your next round?
Dem Collector: Thursday.
Olympia Snowe: I think I’ll go for a walk.
Ross Douthat: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Look, isn’t there something you can do?
Olympia Snowe: I feel happy. I feel happy.
(Dem Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then clubs Snowe over the head)
Ross Douthat: Ah, thank you very much.
Dem Collector: Not at all. See you Thursday.
Ross Douthat: Right.
(Obama clippity clops past them)
Ross Douthat: Who’s that then?
Dem Collector: Dunno, must be the king.
Ross Douthat: Why?
Dem Collector: He doesn’t have shit all over him.
.
LarryB
There’s an old political saw from the ’60s, “Your Left is my Right”. In those days, it was us rad-libs complaining about the Center but it today it works from the other perspective. Kinda adds to that weird “Through the Looking Glass” feeling I get watching the Right’s implosion.
Thankovsky
@Elie:
One must keep in mind, though, that, for a good long while, the Republicans took the positions they did because it was what the American people wanted to hear. They deceived Americans, and Americans allowed themselves to be deceived because it was what they wanted to hear.
In this sense, a lot of the impetus for making sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past eight years falls on people like us. We really need to go the extra mile in educating our fellow citizens, so that they start voting for what’s actually good for them, instead of simply what they want to hear.
JGabriel
The Raven:
It’s been time for that since Nixon.
.
geg6
Ross Douchebag, in only his second column for the NYT, shows that not only is the GOP filled old, completely insane, white men who seem to exist in an alternate reality, but is soon to fill with a smaller number of even more stupid, even more insane young white men who have an even more tenuous grasp of reality than their elders.
The idiot seems to think the DLC was a great watershed moment for the Dems, instead of the almost party-busting disaster that it was. I mean, seriously. Who here thinks creating a Democratic Party wing that basically labels itself as Republican Lite was good for the party or the electorate? Come on, show of hands.
/crickets
So what does Ross Douchebag recommend for the GOP? That the party of wingnuts, Left Behinders, tea baggers, and the Aryan Nation should move to the middle and become Democrat Lite with Jindal the exorcist, Huntsman the Mormon who only loves the gays because they make the polygamists seem less scary to Bible thumpers, and Pawlenty who doesn’t seem to stand for anything as the shining examples of moderation. What about Collins, Snowe, and Chaffee, you say? Losers. Pay no attention to them. They are losers.
WTFever. I told you people Douchebag sucked and the Times was making a bad pick. You never listen. ;-)
The Other Steve
The Republicans had a good game going for a while, basically wrapping extremists positions in sugar and feeding it to the public and then using the anger this elicited in the Dems to claim they were being moderate, not like them angry liberals over there. This seems to have all fallen apart when things went to shit, and they were left defending it. They fell into this trap quite easily.
There’s something to be said for demanding party unity, and in many ways this was one of the things we did with the Democrats post-2004 to straighten them out. But the Dem unity wasn’t about positions, but rather attitude. Disagree, but don’t insult your friends… it was the primary complaint against Lieberman.
Is this what Douthat is asking for? Not clear, he seems to be fixated on ideological purity.
Anoniminous
Go read Fabrizo’s 2007 GOP poll and the deep systematic problems of the GOP become apparent.
Item: 38% of the GOP is in the South 12 points higher than their next region, the MidWest. (20% in the West and 16% in the Northeast.)
Item: 71% of the respondents self-labeled as Conservative
Item: their largest age cohort is 55+ (at 41%), followed by 35-54 at 40%, and then plummets to 17% in the 18 to 34 age bracket. (Love to know what the 10 year breakdown is.)
Item: Whites comprise 93%, AA 1%, Hispanic 2%, Asian 1%, Other 1%, and Refused 2%. They have more “Refused” than Asians or AAs.
So the typical GOP voter is a staunch Conservative, White, 55+, living in the South. If you look at a typical leader of the GOP they are pretty much staunch Conservative, White, 55+, elected from the South.
The GOP is locked-in. If they continue to run candidates that appeal to their staunch Conservative, White, 55+, living in the South voters they are going to continue to elect staunch Conservative, White, 55+, from the South and the geographical/demographic sub-regions of states similar to the South – and nowhere else. If they don’t run candidates that appeal to their staunch Conservative, White, 55+, living in the South voters it means they lose their base and, thus lose the election.
The current leaders of the GOP got to where they are by playing the GOP’s Southern Strategy and, since it elected the best and finest – themselves – it must be the best of all possible plans. Therefore, they have no reason to change it. The average GOP voter was persuaded, by and large, to vote GOP by the GOP’s Southern Strategy and so they have no reason to question it.
If neither the rank and file nor the leaders of the GOP have an impetus to change their ways then they ain’t gonna change.
I grew-up in the South at the tail end of the Jim Crow era. I know these people. The are intellectually inert. They lack critical thinking skills. They project their own psychology on others. They have no ability to divorce their wishes, wants, and needs from their intellectual “life.”
I submit, the previous two paragraphs intimate not only do they not want to change they lack the ability to change.
Prognosis: more of the same. The GOP will pretend to change and we’ll get to laugh at them.
Marked Hoosier
Ross Douthat thinks Indiana is a swing state. Ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hahaahahahahah!
The state goes democratic in a presidential election for the fifth time in a hundred years, and we are now a swing state.
gypsy howell
Yes, I wish the Republican Party had a lot more Jack Kemps too.
ie, dead people.
JDM
Ross has a peanut dick and a pea brain.
Signed,
Chunky Reese Witherspoon
gex
@Thankovsky: There is a structural problem the GOP faces. Two of the inviolable rules are: 1) Never admit you are wrong and 2) Never compromise.
Moving center and renouncing the base violates rule 2, so the great purging is a natural result. Now obviously this was a strategic mistake, but because of rule 1, they cannot reverse course. So they split the difference with nonsense: centrists are bad because they do centertastic things like compromise and work with others, but we need centrists to get our numbers up, so obviously we need centrists that don’t do centrist things.
Thankovsky
@Anoniminous:
Yup, that’s pretty much the size of it. The GOP has backed itself into a political negative feedback loop: those who might move the GOP back in the direction of a national party will not get nominated by the base, and those who get nominated by the base will not move the GOP back in the direction of a national party. And in the meantime, states like Georgia are rapidly becoming part of the “New South”…
Steve M.
Jindal advocates intelligent design and hangs out with David Barton, whose life’s work is persuading Americans that the Founders didn’t want church and state separated. That’s “centrist”?
eemom
how the fuck do you pronounce Douthat anyhow??
My phonetic is “dough twat,” but I could be wrong….
R. Porrofatto
dww44,
Lest we forget, here’s what Erickson said about Souter: The nation loses the only goat fucking child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court. Here’s his explanation now: “I was just creatively expressing my disdain for a guy that hates America” (http://www.macon.com/198/story/704937.html)
Can you imagine the kind of twisted small mind it takes to believe that David Souter hates America?
Thankovsky
@gex:
Right, I understand that this is the case right now, and has been for quite a while, but that’s not likely to be the case forever. Sooner or later, they’re going to abandon those rules out of necessity. It would be wise for liberals like us to figure out how and when a conservative resurgence is likely to play out, and to help guide it in a way that is advantageous to our country. The progressive movement can only benefit if it has a strong, principled, but above all pragmatic opposition, so that liberals in government don’t grow complacent and corrupt. In this sense, I think Andrew Sullivan is spot-on when he says that, if the GOP wants to survive, it needs to take a page from David Cameron’s Tory playbook. They need to focus on the small-government orthodoxy, and abandon social conservatism, if they want to stay relevant.
Of course, it’s in this manner in which the “negative feedback loop” that I described comes into play. The only way these major changes in platform are likely going to happen, is if the old dinosaurs in the GOP die off and leave control of the party to a newer, more pragmatic generation. Unfortunately for the GOP, the old generation is still clinging onto this mortal coil, and the newer generation doesn’t seem all that terribly pragmatic.
dj spellchecka
my problem with ross’ column…to have a “center” you need both a right and a left…..the gop is down to a right and a further-right….and the faithful are now interested in purging the right
asiangrrlMN
@eemom: Oh, I like your pronunciation. I have been saying, “Do that”, but I will now adopt “Dough Twat” In my mind.
R. Porrofatto, Erick, Son of Erick is a bigger Douthat than Douthat is.
Jon H
“from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels”
That would be Mitch Daniels, former George W. Bush White House Budget Director.
How’d that work out for the GOP?
MattF
Republicans think that “politics” is the act of drawing uncrossable lines between “us” and “them”. Here’s a message from the real world: there’s more to it than that.
someguy
Republicans are vicious, closed minded swine who seethe with hatred for anybody who isn’t just like them. The moderate Republicans are different because, thanks to their lack of character and morals, they will deviate from the party line out of unprincipled political expediency or corruption. They aren’t worth bothering with or trying to convince, any more than you’d try to convince a stoned homeless guy to straighten up and fly right. Their problem is more like mental illness than logic error.
Anne Laurie
When the Doughy Pantload can smell the stink of death on the fReichtard/Talibangelical/RobberBaron triangle that is today’s Republican Party…
Thankovsky
@MattF:
Yeah, well, as much as I hate to say it, this is a problem for which both sides the equation – liberals and conservatives – share a lot of the responsibility. Both sides seem to have largely forgotten, over the course of the past thirty years, that two different points of view can, in fact, disagree in good faith. Which is not to say that there aren’t some genuinely bad, self-serving individuals in the political arena as well, mind you. People like Jeff Sessions and Michelle Bachmann are genuinely awful human beings, and there really isn’t much room for compromising with them. But the bottom line is, the Manichean worldview that you describe – that my side is righteous and the other side consists of nefarious, dishonest fanatics who want to institute a totalitarian society – is present in both sides of the debate.
Of course, I think it’s more prevalent among conservatives than liberals at this point in history, and that’s a big part of why I’m a proud liberal. :) But if we want that vicious cycle of tit-for-tat politics to end decisively, we liberals have to take a page out of Obama’s book and stop treating conservatives and the GOP like a monolithic entity.
After all, that’s how the GOP treated us, and now look where it’s got them.
dbrown
The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp … .
Kemp who invented supply-side economic theory ((just what an ex-quarterback who spells ‘farmer’ as “Ei-ei-o” (as you sing the farmer in the dell) would think up)) or how to cut taxes for the rich since deficits don’t matter because the middle class will pay, and pay and pay is this AO’s idea of innovative? Repug-a-thugs are beyond stupid.
asiangrrlMN
@Thankovsky: I don’t think as individuals, they (the Republicans) are all bad. I do think their party is bankrupt of any good ideas and for the most part, they are the party of obstruction right now. Obama is starting to make noises that bipartisanship only goes so far. He is right. Until the GOP lets its grownups out to play (and I know they have some), they need to be treated like the regional party they are. You can’t have bipartisanship with only one side doing the bending. I believe that the wishy-washy nature of the Democrats has been one of our problems for far too long.
brantl
Innovators don’t tend to be conservative. Conservatism as a reflex is to “keep things the same, don’t change them”. Very few conservatives tend to be innovators, either, even when push comes to shove. If conservatives had had their way throughout history, we would still be in caves, and noboyd would have fire. We’d have discovered it hundreds of times, and abandoned it every time.
Thankovsky
@asiangrrlMN:
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I feel the same way about the GOP itself as an institution. But that’s really where we, as liberals, need to make sure we’re absolutely, 100% clear in how we phrase our arguments. We would be better-served if we made an unambiguous distinction between how we relate to average conservative Americans, and the corrupt charlatans that purport to represent them via the Republican party. Our message to conservative Americans needs to be that the GOP really isn’t championing their conservative principles in any way, shape, or form. And it’s out of that distinction that a sustained advantage for the progressive cause may very well arise, if we’re far-sighted enough to seize it: we serve their net interests better than the GOP does. I think we liberals tend to lose sight of that, from time to time.
gizmo
If I were editor-in-chief at the NY Times, I’d probably struggle to find a good conservative editorial writer to hire. At the moment, I can’t identify a single one of them who makes any sense.
DougJ
Well put.
Cyrus
Talk about missing the point. You think you need a Republican counterpart to neoliberals? They’re already out there. They’re called ne-o-con-ser-va-tives. They’re blended closely and somewhat amiably with the Pat Buchanan-style paleoconservatives, but both types of cons are cons.
Adrienne
Larison makes sense most of the time on most issues even if I don’t agree with him most of the time.
Thankovsky
@Adrienne:
Yeah, he’s at least consistent and relatively in-touch with reality.
D-Chance.
Little Mitch finds a Specter website with a picture of an Asian woman with her mouth taped shut.
And she’s now gone ballistic.
Hilarity.
D-Chance.
Memo to Eric Kleefeld:
Specter Wants Coleman To Win In Minnesota — Memo to Sen. Arlen Specter (RD-PA): You’re supposed to be a Democrat now. — In an interview with the New York Times, Specter stated in no uncertain terms that he wants Norm Coleman to win the disputed Minnesota Senate race …
Any Republican will tell you (and did so as recently as a couple of days ago) that Specter is in it for Specter and no one else, Republican or Democrat. Enjoy your new “playa”, hoss. He’s all yours, now. You will become accustomed to all those knife wounds in the back, soon enough.
JK
@JGabriel:
Monty Python Rules!
Ross Douthat is starting to sound like as big a douchebag as Bill Kristol.
Douchehat couldn’t shine the shoes of rational, reasonable moderate Republicans Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker, William Cohen, and Millicent Fenwick
Martian Buddy
Semi-related: it would appear that the Club for Growth has declared Todd Platts anathema… err, I mean “RINO.”
Pug
Funny that today Douthat and Brooks in the Times and Jonah Goldberg in USA Today were all opining about how to fix the Republicans.
Goldberg, of course, was even stupider than Brooks and Douthat put together. His article was a long paean to . . . guess who . . . Ronald Reagan. He also trashed Specter, Snowe and Collins, as is de riguer with the wing nuts.
To the young folks I know, at work or my grown up kids, Reagan is a guy from the history books, much like Harry Truman or FDR was to my generation. They couldn’t care less about the guy, and yet, Republicans still can’t talk more than 30 seconds without swooning over him. Springsteen’s “Glory Days” must have been written just for these guys, but I doubt that, too.
someguy
@ Asiangrrrrl
What we need isn’t a better type of engagement; it’s a more easily packaged brand of eugenics. Tell ’em “if you take this green pill, your 401(k) will swell, George Bush will be widely respected, and Jebus will love you.” Give it out free at the door to WalMart, Weight Watchers and in megachurch parking lots. It’ll work like a charm.
dww44
Thanks, R. Porrofatto, for getting that link in that I could not , though I did try mightily, and then tried to kill my whole comment when I couldn’t, but no, nothing worked. Perhaps there is somewhere I could go to educate myself on the ins and outs of posting at this site.
And, yes, there are lots of small minds in these parts and a goodly number of them entered comments on the macon.com website article about Erickson’s misspeak. Several folks claim that politically incorrect though he was, he was speaking the truth about Souter. Not a soul provided any actual facts, of course.
TheLorax
That they still view Clinton as a liberal is proof enough that they are fucking clueless.
Accepting Clinton as a moderate will be the first step back towards relevancy for the GOP
TheLorax
Additionally, its their bombastic over-the-top rhetoric that was repeated ad-nauseam that has finally come back to bite them in the ass.
Problem is, they repeated the same half-truth and lies so much that they and their base actually believe them now. Yet they still believe the same rhetoric that has driven the moderates out of the party will bring them back.
I have to admit, that it is joyous to watch.
How long do they keep it up before they finally wake up? In order to recover will require them to dismiss, publicly the likes of Limbaugh, Savage, Sessions, Bachmann and Delay.
Amazing how we are looking towards Hatch to return some sort of sanity to the GOP.
/boggle
Martian Buddy
First, they’ll have to understand what “liberal” means rather than using it as a catch-all term with the connotation of “heretic.”
tc125231
tc125231
@Thankovsky:
Thankovsky
@tc125231:
Yeah, well, I dunno…it’s possible that I’m just holding the bar for “intelligent Republican” very, very low…
Joyful Alternative
Thank you, Martian Buddy. Platts is my congressman, and maybe there’s a chance to pull him toward the center. I’ve been telling him how bad and dumb all that bloc voting looks.