GOP’s Present and Future

I am loving this:

Aides to George W.Bush, former Reagan White House staff and friends of John McCain have all told The Sunday Telegraph that they not only expect to lose on November 4, but also believe that Mr Obama is poised to win a crushing mandate.

They believe he will be powerful enough to remake the American political landscape with even more ease than Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Considering that Bush won by one or two percent in 2004 and called it a landslide, it’s fun to read that Bush’s minions are freaking out about a likely five percent or more win by Obama.

I know schaden freude doesn’t look good on my, but it’s damn fun!

The prospect of an electoral rout has unleashed a bitter bout of recriminations both within the McCain campaign and the wider conservative movement, over who is to blame and what should be done to salvage the party’s future.

My advice to the GOP is that if they want to be a viable party in the future, they need to dump the religous right and go back to being a party that supports smaller government, but stays away from social issues. No one wants the GOP in their bed rooms.

Snip.

“It’s hard to see a turnaround in the White House race,” he (former Bush speech writer David Frum) said. “This could look like an ideological as well as a party victory if we’re not careful. It could be 1980 in reverse.

“With this huge new role for federal government in the economy, the possibility for mischief making is very, very great. One man should not have a monopoly of political and financial power. That’s very dangerous.”

I agree with Frum on that one. I prefer an executive branch controlled by one party and the legislative branch controlled by another, but Bush and the GOP failed so badly, the Democrats deserve at least a couple of years of one-party rule.

In North Carolina, where Senator Elizabeth Dole seems set to loose, Republicans are running adverts that appear to take an Obama victory for granted, warning that the Democrat will have a “blank cheque” if her rival Kay Hagen wins. “These liberals want complete control of government in a time of crisis,” the narrator says. “All branches of Government. No checks and balances.”

Um. Didn’t we have six years of one party GOP rule recently? There were no checks and balances from 2001-2007. How did that work out for us? The Democrats will probably fuck up one party rule, but let’s let them try to deal with our nation’s problems. If they fuck it up, they’ll be out by 2011.

Snip.

But the real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.

In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain’s running mate as a “symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics.” Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”.

Snip.

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin’s critics as “cocktail party conservatives” who “give aid and comfort to the enemy”.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?”

Mr Frum thinks that Mrs Palin’s brand of cultural conservatism appeals only to a dwindling number of voters.

He said: “She emerges from this election as the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Her supporters vastly outnumber her critics. But it will be extremely difficult for her to win the presidency.”

Mr Nuzzo, who believes this election is not a re-run of the 1980 Reagan revolution but of 1976, when an ageing Gerald Ford lost a close contest and then ceded the leadership of the Republican Party to Mr Reagan.

He said: “Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan.” On the accuracy of that judgment, perhaps, rests the future of the Republican Party.

Schadenfreude is a dish best served cold.

That being said, I am starting to think that Palin will be the GOP frontrunner in 2012 as the GOP rallies behind their socially conservative soulmate. By that time, I imagine that Obama will have had a relatively successful first term that will have the fundies up in arms over something.

Their two most viable candidates will be Palin and Romney. Huckabee may also play a role.

GOP voters will have to decide between a pro-business Romney and a pro-fundie Palin.

I have no idea which direction they will pick, but it will be a lot of fun to watch.

The Dumbing Down of the GOP

Great piece by Joe Conason:

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin’s ideas make no sense? Having said last week that “it doesn’t matter” whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she “doesn’t want to argue” about the causes. It doesn’t occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem.

That moment seemed like a major gaffe to me. She acknowledged that climate change is a problem, but isn’t concerned about what caused the problem?

Maybe it makes sense in the GOP mindset; after all, they want to fight terrorism, but “don’t want to argue” about its causes. Finding solutions to problems seems too often to be about appealing to emotions and making sure to not piss of the party’s base.

More from Conason:

Why should we ignore her inability to string together a series of coherent thoughts?

Why should we give her a pass on the most important issues of the day?

All the glaring defects so blatantly on display in her debate with Joe Biden — and that make her candidacy so darkly comical — would be the same if she were a hockey dad instead of a “hockey mom.” In fact, the cynical attempt to foist Palin on the nation as a symbol of feminist progress is an insult to all women regardless of their political orientation.

There was a time when conservatives lamented the dumbing down of American culture. Preservation of basic standards in schools and workplaces compelled them — or so they said — to resist affirmative action for women and minorities. Qualifications mattered; merit mattered; and demagogic appeals for leveling were to be left to the Democrats.

Not anymore.

This goes back to the farcical nature of the McCain campaign. They have run their entire operation as if it were some kind of a cynical joke run by privileged frat boys who think they are smarter than anyone else, but who in reality have a lot of growing up to do.

Campaign flailing? Pick a hot governor from a small state with very little experience. She’s so hot that no one will notice that she is most certainly not qualified to be a president (and as Vice President to McCain, a 72 year-old man who has had malignant melanomas three times, there is a decent chance that she will become president if McCain wins).

Wall Street crisis? Pretend to lead. Pretend to suspend your campaign. Go to Washington to have dinner with your friend Joe Lieberman. No one will notice that even members of Congress in your own party won’t follow your ideas on the bailout. No one will notice that when your campaign was “suspended,” you continued to campaign, your ads stayed on the air, and that you didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get back to Washington nor that you hadn’t cast a vote in the Senate since April.

Unpopular Republican President? Pretend to be a “maverick.” No one will notice that since you were defeated by Bush in a nasty and foul South Carolina primary 8 years ago, you’ve become Bush’s lapdog in the Senate, voting with the President over 90% of the time.

The ultimate irony of Palin’s rise is that it has occurred at a moment when Americans may finally have grown weary of pseudo-populism — when intelligence, judgment, diligence and seriousness are once again valued, simply because we are in such deep trouble. We got into this mess because we elected a man who professed to despise elitism, which he detected in everyone whose opinions differed from his prejudices. That was George W. Bush, of course. Biden was too polite and restrained to say it, but the dumbing down is more of the same, too.

Indeed.

Photo of the Day

This is why Republicans scare me a little bit:

Republican-Americans

I’m feeling a huge cultural divide between Republican-Americans and the rest of us. Watching their convention, I feel like we are living on different planets.

Who ARE those people?

“Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat”

Mike Meehan is only trying to help Republicans. That’s why he’s posted a patriotic billboard in Orange County, Florida that shows the an image of the burning World Trade Center with the caption “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat.”

Nice!

Remember, Bill Clinton was in office on September 11, 2001 and it was Bill Clinton who ignored the Daily Presidential Brief of August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

So 9/11 is the fault of the Democrats.

See?

If you vote for Democrats, you’ll help cause another terrorist attack.

If you have any doubts,  Mr. Meehan was nice enough to post a video of his hit single, the Republican Song:

If you can’t bear to watch it, you can read the lyrics ,which are also really nice:

The Democrat secular progressive move,
political correctness is killing us too.
They want to take the money from the hard workin man,
and give it to the lazy folks that don’t give a damn.

Democrats and Liberals, shame on you,
don’t punish us all just to please a few,
Your holdin people back while we’re pickin up the slack,
and that’s why we can’t vote for a Democrat.
Oh no, a no, no, no, no, no, no…

See, the problem with Democrats is that they want to help lazy people (might that be code for something?) at the expense of all hard-working white Americans. That’s why if you read Obama’s platform, you’ll read that it’s just full of new entitlement programs for lazy people.

Seriously, I have a hard time imagining that these kinds of fact-free attacks will have much of an effect any more, but what’s to keep him from trying?

Silver Jews Saturday – David Berman on LOMLOC, Obama, and Squirrels – Part III

This is the final piece of the series. Part I is here and Part II is here.

David and Doris

Raford: In past interviews I’ve read, you emphasized your adolescence in Texas, but rarely have I have read you reference another part of your upbringing, which was in Wooster, Ohio. I hear a lot of Wooster influences in your lyrics. How has Wooster influenced your art?

DCB: It’s true that Wooster is something I keep to myself. It’s a secret wellspring of inspiration for me and always has. It is also a place of serious social awkwardness for me. My sense of myself as an artist and as a social human being starts at about age 15. I developed a public persona very late in life. I don’t talk about Wooster because I didn’t talk while I was in Wooster. Does that make sense?

Raford: Yeah, I didn’t realize you were shy like that early on.  I don’t think I said one word to any of my peers outside of the family until I was 16, so that makes a lot of sense.

DCB: Of course I “talked” to you and a few people but mostly I was zipperlipped.

Raford: A question about your Jewish faith. As kids, we were raised in very secular environments. Beyond trips to church and temple (for you) on holidays, I don’t see religion as a great part of our upbringing. As an adult, what drew you to Judaism?

DCB: Well Christianity is just out of the question for me. None of it makes sense when you get down to it. Just the little stuff like the trinity is complete bullshit. Judaism is massive and it all correlates and makes sense to me.

Judaism is what helped this small group of people survive for over 3000 years, without a common language, as empire after empire that tried to wipe them out crumbled to nothing. And they are still here. And until 50 years ago they had never even fought back.

The continued existence of the Jewish people is the only supernatural fact of history I can be sure of. A couple of years ago I realized that if  I wanted to survive the next forty years I was going to need whatever the Jews had that made them last. Judaism is that thing.

Raford: Wow.

Raford: This is a mostly political blog, so I’d like to hear your thoughts on the current political situation in the US and the world.

DCB: I think we are waiting for the crisis that will make the Republican way of living and legislating a complete anachronism. It will probably be a major disaster brought on by Republican policy, that in the struggle to repair will have the country finally waking up from a dream where we are all assholes and loving it!

David and Cassie

Raford: Obama? McCain? Barr? Nader? Pinny Doo?

DCB: It’s pretty clear that Obama has a date with destiny.

Raford: As kids, why didn’t we go outside more often?

DCB: I think if the squirrels and birds and fish had been more friendly we would have.

Raford: What was the story w/the window and the BB gun? Are you still being judged too harshly because of that incident that few living people understand?

DCB: Well you have never had a problem with it. I took out grandfathers bbgun pistol which was  for shooting squirrels! Anyway I walked out the street and turned around and faced the house. It was night so there was only one window glowing and it was right at eye lever. Behind the window you were drawing a picture on papa’s desk. Yes I pulled the trigger that night, but I swear that bb  wasn’t’ meant for you. I think it did make a crack in the storm window though.

Raford: I appreciate that the BB wasn’t aimed at my head. But all things seem to go back to the squirrels.

Raford: Have you been able to find any creme sticks that can compete with those from Buehler’s?

DCB: Every couple years Ill see one but it’s no good.  I only liked vanilla. The Maple ones were weird. I never liked that old fashioned flavor. Maple I associated with Wooster.

Raford: You didn’t like the maple ones? How is that possible?

DCB: Did you know they opened a Buehler’s in Louisville a couple of years ago where a Winn-Dixie was. I couldn’t make anyone understand who weird it was that there was a Buehler’s there. Subsequently they left.

Raford: Damn! People don’t understand that magic that is Buehler’s if we’re lucky, there might be at least a couple of readers who understand that grocery store’s beauty.

Raford: Any pizza like Coccia’s?

DCB: That pizza is weird. I  believe they were actually Albanian shepherds who presented themselves as an Italian pizza family when they arrived in Wooster..

Raford: Man, I love that pizza! I think the secret is in the provolone cheese and the garlicky red sauce.

David, thanks so much for taking some time to chat with me. Good luck w/LOMLOC! It will do well.