I call this one, “Hope and change.” For the irony.
(h/t nr, who points out that you should pay special attention to 23:07, with ear toward Mike Lee and the continuing resolution plan)
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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
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The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers? Reagan, Thatcher and the real battle behind defunding Obamacare.
The GOP rebounds from the influence of a great statesman to return to its mewling cowardly propensities, buckling under the weight of their own lust for power regardless of the interests of the American people. And yet this robust refusal to be moved by uniquely American political principle won’t be understood to be perfect proof that the GOP is dead to the concerns of the large majority of American people themselves, who just can’t possibly know what’s good for them.
No. And it will still be urged “Once more into the breach my friends! We must ‘take back’ the Grand Old Party.”
With what? Or with whom? Statesmen akin to Reagan don’t come along every day. Hell, they hardly come along every century.
Rush Limbaugh is still firmly in the take back the GOP camp, arguing yesterday that the way a third party becomes the second party is to take the existing party over.
I think that’s probably fair advice, if only because of the local and state infrastructures. But so long as the neo-Rockefeller alumns of the Bush administration –think Karl Rove– control the National apparatus, and then use it to work against grass roots efforts like the Tea Party, it’s likely to be no more effective than going third party altogether. It may even prolongue the fissure on the right.
” it’s likely to be no more effective than going third party altogether. ”
i’ll wait for levin’s book to be published. it’ll be
“easier” to defang the fed gov’t state by state.
Fiddling while the nation burns, it seems to me, just as a practical matter. It isn’t that I don’t think there’s no possibility to overcome the establishment control of every aspect of the GOP as it sits today (in particular its lifeblood, money), but that the effort is a waste of time and energy which would be more productive put to work in a new association. Heck, who knows, the one time ease and grace of American civil association (noted by Tocqueville) might even be rediscovered as an accidental accompaniment to the main effort?
“more productive put to work in a new association”
perhaps but do you think this “new association” will fair better than the “tea party” pr wise?
newrouter (and apologies to all for the incoherence of my last — I was hasty while pissed at learning an Astro stole home without so much as a glance from the starter — grrrrr) — I think arguing over sophistries, whether with leftists (with whom we’ve no choice but to argue) or with nominal “Republicans” is a profound waste of time, and that “faring” better than the Tea Party isn’t the question; that “public relations” as the Democrats and Dana Perino understand the work of Edward Bernays also isn’t the question, since that question is serving their purposes, and not ours.
When we make an association for our political purposes, we aim to serve our political purposes and not the political purposes of our opponents. To that end, we focus on our own aims, our ends, our political well being and not theirs. We would more productively spend our time at work on thinking about and articulating our political principles and the policies which stem from them, and less on frivolous extraneous crap the like of which Karl Rove vomits up all day every day.
stole home and the pitcher was awol? oh geez.
awol as in fixated on a guy at first.
Ernst, Rush is going to be a guest on Greta’s show tonight. I wish he’d throw in with Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, et al., and make a clean break. What is he holding out for? As sdferr says, seldom is there a Reagan to hitch one’s wagon to his star.
i feel a little better just now: CD has finally broken his drought (with a man on, no less).
[…] Protein Wisdom […]
Plus, there’s this.
the guy on 1st might get to 2nd. gotta have priorities.
the comments are of interest
Cruz: Either We Stop ObamaCare Now or We Surrender To It Forever
baseball? the pitcher should ignore the runner on 1st and throw inside to the batter?
You can’t really say Cruz and Paul are breaking from the GOP, can you?
Defying the leadership, sure.
And if tomorrow the Pope mused aloud, “you know, maybe those Amerian Episcopalians are on to something. What do we need to do to make them like us?” Would head for the nearest Orthodox Church?
A “you” dropped out of hyperspace somewhere.
And if tomorrow the Pope mused aloud, “you know, maybe those Amerian Episcopalians are on to something. What do we need to do to make them like us?” Would head for the nearest Orthodox Church?
It would probably do to give the Curia 15 mins. or so to get its collective hands around his throat, and if that doesn’t speedily come to pass, only then to think on alternatives.
The Curia would go crazy. So would the National Catholilc Reporter.
Just not in the same way.
“You can’t really say Cruz and Paul are breaking from the GOP, can you?”
why not when they are taking on the ruling proggtards? karlrovester and dnc?
Because they’re taking on the ruling proggtards as elected Republicans, not just conservatives or constitutionalists or state-rights federalists.
so cruz/paul are taking on the proggtards? i’m so confused i need a “little debbie” or a taco?
I’d hate to think the TEA party was all fashion.
“I’d hate to think the TEA party was all fashion.”
” Judged merely in general terms, one can say that Czech national culture and its sense of morality had never before suffered the sort of outrage theydid from the organizers of the ‘protest’ against the Charter and what was intended as a mass disavowal of it. The fact that the establishment gave the task of defending its positions to the usual political and journalistic hacks was probably a case of Hobson’s choice in an emergency, but it gained it nothing and was just one further error, since those gentle- men’s standards are notorious. As could be expected, they immedi- ately brought into play against the Charter a whole set of slanders, distortions, abuse, half-truths and absolute falsehoods which all represent the dismal range of their capacity. Ispeak from experience as one who has been a favourite target for their sort of behaviour for the past thirty years, and who could well lay claim to the laurels of seniority and worthy service. Though the powers that be may not know it, or rather, would sooner not know it, nay, cannot afford to know it (for where else would they find more obedient, unscrupu- lous and servile creatures), the media are the principal, albeit unintentional, creators and encouragers of opposition, since they are totaJIy suspect and nobody believes them. ”
popowerless pg 127
Well, sure nr. The Media is the message as Mr. McLuhan told us long ago.
The odd thing about the nominal Republicans itching for change, those like Sens. Lee and Cruz, to me, is this: we humans extend loyalty and fidelity to those who reciprocally extend loyalty and fidelity to us. Once stabbed in the back (and the principles these men hold have been back-stabbed repeatedly now), we typically turn away. Remaining in league with such back-stabbers waiting to have this treatment repeated again and again is transcendently foolish.
Or medium, I always forget.
I’ve noticed a lot of concern trolls trying to get us all back in line with the RINOs and to compromise. “No”, is the answer to that. The GOP can actually do the right thing in regards to spending, et cetera. It’s just a matter of finding some spine.
Is it there? I don’t hold much hope for a rally, but it would do us all a lot of good for TPTB in the GOP to send Obama a stack of stuff marked “Denied”.
can we agree that we are being “ruled” by communists?
Sdferr, the House Repubs are suffering from battered wife syndrome.
Yes, nr. I believe we are agreed on that. And without the scare quotes.
we need a “mr obama tear down that wall” moment. or at least mrs. baracky don’t show us those glutious maximus pics.
I thought the booty pictures were embargoed?
A colossal show of disrespect to the Wan would be great. Impassioned speechifying and a refusal to reach across the aisle—unless it’s with a right hook.
Seems to me that House Republicans, similarly to politicians generally, suffer from a variety of ills. Stuff like ignorance, stupidity, cupidity, narrowness of vision, a refusal to come to grip with their own shortcomings and to correct them. But they have nothing to learn, since they believe they know it all already. And the worse the condition of the nation gets, the more they seem to know how finely everything proceeds.
True, sdferr. I have found that all the people who truly know how to run the country are driving cabs and cutting hair. They are regular solution generators.
“Seems to me that House Republicans”
the “leadership” i presume?
What does the RNC control if all 50 state parties are Tea Parties?
To put it another way: don’t the states decide who’s on the national committee?
the “leadership” i presume?
Nope. I wouldn’t cast so narrowly, since on the whole they’re all responsible for the “leadership” they’ve got, and impose on the country in consequence. They voted the fuckers in, and so far, refuse to vote them out.
I don’t know the answer to that, McGehee. Would it matter since they do as they please once they are sworn in? I’m pissed off at Tom Cole (representative) and Tom Coburn (senator) who are flying right in the face of their constituants wishes.
My answer to that, without digging through Google to find the supporting article, is point out that Levin recently talked about an op-ed piece somewhere on the net in which the author advised conservatives looking to get rid of Boehner to skip the primary process and just vote for the Democrat in the general.
The theory being that Boehner, being the time server he is, owns or is owed by everybody in the Ohio party.
And then theres’s the lesson of what the GOP in Rhode Island did to that crazy witch-woman, O’Donell.
And then you have to remember that the folks like Rove are using their positions and connections to organize against another outbreak of Tea-Party inspired candidates.
And then theres’s the lesson of what the GOP in Rhode Island did to that crazy witch-woman, O’Donnell.
That would be Delaware. But yes, it’s small. And so was the slime-job Rove worked on the candidate.
Rhode Island, Delaware, what’s the diff?
Everything east of the Appalachians mights as well be Europe as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks for the correction, by the way.
oh my
Court Staffer Fired for Helping Wrongfully Convicted Man
70-year-old great grandmother gave him a public document
… what’s the diff?
heh
On a guess only, R.I. has a higher mafiosi quotient, with possibly the stupidest Governor in the history of Governors. Then too, Delaware has Dover AFB morgue to its credit . . . and Joe Biden.
To do Boehner like O’Donnell you need the cooperation of the IRS, some State level investigators and the Press. Good luck with that venture.
Haven’t read any of these m’self, since I only just now encountered them, but based on the subject, the titles and the correspondents, it looks as though there’ll be some worthy meat there.
You can’t do an O’Doneell on Boehner. I was trying to point out that there are plenty of people in Ohio who’d be happy to do an O’Donnell on a primary challenger because Boehner, like Rove (even more than Rove) is “wired in.”
Ah.
I’m glad you and I understand each other. I’ve been arguing on and off all day with some idiot who thinks he knows better than I do what’s happening with my police department.
Well, not that they work for me, but you understand.
If the idea is to take control of the party apparatus, actual elected officeholders are the toy, not the hand. Always keep your eye on the hand.
The idea is to get control of the hand and thus control of the toy — like the proggs did in their Long March Through the Institutions. Well, taking control of the national party committee means taking control of the state party committees.
If all 50 state party committees are Tea Party-controlled, the RNC will be Tea Party-controlled. If the RNC is Tea Party-controlled, to which candidates will the RNC lend support? From which elected officeholders will it rescind support?
Building a third party would require similar work plus extra organizational work that’s alredy been done in the GOP. If there isn’t time to take back the GOP the way that will work, there’s sure as hell no time to start over from scratch.
I’m not saying we owe anything to the GOP. This isn’t about persuading the Establishment they should do what we want — it’s about kicking them out so they can’t keep doing what we don’t want. A hostile takeover.
I’m not saying we owe anything to the GOP.
Oh, but we do. We owe it a death. We owe it our eternal mistrust. We owe it to walk away.
If there isn’t time to take back the GOP the way that will work, there’s sure as hell no time to start over from scratch.
Building a new party will take effort of course. It isn’t costless, but I believe the time involved is much shorter than the time involved in fighting with (a waste of resources) and rooting out the entrenched operators (another waste of resources not to be encountered in beginning afresh), not to mention that in many places these leftist collaborators known as the ‘establishment’ have and will keep the numbers to prevent their removal. But read the Machiavelli chapter 6 (or the whole thing, for that matter).
Since the piece I wrote, “How the “New Left” took over.” has disappeared from PW I’ll point to the piece that I heavily quoted from; “The New Politics & the Democrats ” which details the takeover of the Democrats by the “New Left.”
The process was not a nice clean affair and also was not wholly successful in the 1969-1972 period (the McGovern camp hijacked the Party from the hijacking of the New Left to get him the nomination) but continued for many years and was matched by the slow takeover of the academia, schools, union and foundations leadership. Funding for activists and the indoctrination of a couple generations took time and support. If the Republican Party is to be taken over it will have to be done completely differently from what the Left did to the Democrats.
For myself I see the political destruction of the Democrats (as they are incarnated now), the support system they have built in the schools/academia/unions and the funding they have setup through foundations/union dues/government grants to be more important than what Party opposes them as long as they are implacably opposed.
How?
It’s also worth bearing in mind that organizational “scratch” includes recruiting and vetting those with needed know-how. Many people currently involved in state and local GOP operations are already Tea-Party sympathizers and may be loath to abandon what they’ve invested to throw in with a reinvented wheel.
How?
Only think of the New York GOP. There are simply areas of the country where for some time to come Tea Party adherents will be vastly outnumbered.
Too, I should not fail to say directly that the Tea Parties and their sympathizers are already a reinvented wheel, or a rediscovered wheel, to the extent to which the original propositions of uniquely American political philosophy are merely that for them.
We owe it a death. We owe it our eternal mistrust. We owe it to walk away.
Precisely. They have earned every bit of it, too.
Everyone at National came up through states. Everyone at State came up from local. “Some time to come” is the price of anything worth doing.
I use emotion as an impetus, not a guide.
Time is critical. If proposals to “take back” the GOP were plausibly faster (ignoring the propensity of the establishment to rebound from such efforts for the moment), then there may well be a cogent argument to follow that path. In the event, perhaps it would be best to assiduously examine each of the two alternatives, each fully developed in its own best light, comparing the relative virtues of each, and only then make a decision which promises the better net value.
I use emotion as an impetus, not a guide.
Yes, well, that ignores that there are serious lessons which need teaching.
The 70s and 80s, the period in which the New Left fully entrenched itself, coincides with a period of exceptional Republican dominance in Presidential electoral politics (between ’68 and ’92, the GOP won the White House 5 times, the Democrats once). I’m not sure, but I don’t think that’s coincidental.
My only point being that an extended period in the wilderness may be the price of striving to take over the GOP.
On the other hand, a third party split will certainly cause exactly that.
a third party split
It still only amounts to a second party split — a second party already on the scene, by the way — no matter how often this canard is repeated.
Too, I should not fail to say directly that the Tea Parties and their sympathizers are already a reinvented wheel…
Their principles and policies are. What we’re talking about reinventing is the apparatus by which we support and promote those principles and policies and get fellow supporters of those principles and policies elected to office. In luring Tea Party supporters away from existing GOP machines, the hurdle isn’t getting them to support our ideas (which they already do); it’s getting them to walk away from the organizations and the connections and the institutional knowledge they’ve worked hard to accumulate.
In luring Tea Party supporters away from existing GOP machines, the hurdle isn’t getting them to support our ideas (which they already do); it’s getting them to walk away from the organizations and the connections and the institutional knowledge they’ve worked hard to accumulate.
Granted to the extent it’s so Squid. Certainly with regard to the acquaintances and friendships struck up with dedicated GOP loyalists, and so with other personal connections — though in the purely private respect it wouldn’t be necessary to abandon all these, but possibly certain utilitarian aspects of the relationships, favors owed, proposed or concerted organizational actions in process, that sort of thing.
If, however, the urgency of the situation warrants the loss, then loss it should be. I leave the question of “luring” aside. Either there is proper persuasion or there isn’t.
But it isn’t entirely that these would walk away without gain, insofar as they would walk away with their general institutional knowledge as well as their specific institutional knowledge, acquired skills, etc. (which we can acknowledge wouldn’t always be usefully applicable to specific new situations they may come to confront, though at other times may very well be).
Too, I believe there may be much more significant work yet to be done on the principles and their implications than we recognize thus far. (In Machiavelli’s Prince sense, there’s both quantitatively and qualitatively more difficult work to be done at the inception of an independent attempt to gain control [One’s own arms] so more risk, we can reckon — with the reward being two-fold: 1) matters proceed coherently with or according to the ends desired and 2), there’s much less trouble keeping control once gained.) And if not, there’s little harm to be found in careful reexamination of these principles in any event. Heck, the founders and their faithful followers (Lincoln, Coolidge) urged we constantly return to examine those principles anyhow. I don’t think we can do this too often.
Some thoughts.
There are some things which would happen whether “we” form a new party or work to takeover the existing one. It would mean that there would be a Democrat in the presidency for at least a couple of 4 year cycles with all that would imply for the nation. I say this because a war within the Republican Party would result in a weak (Rino likely but even if Tea Party the Rino section would sabotage the campaign) candidate for the presidency. If a new party were to form and run/nominate a presidential candidate the rules for getting on the ballot in the States would make that difficult unless an existing 3rd Party is used as a vehicle plus a three way race would likely, if competitive, end in the House where the Democrats would be lock step and the Rinos likely to join them to put in a not-Tea-Party person.
If a viable 3rd Party is formed or if the Republican Party is taken over, then I foresee that the Republican Party would be split with the Rino part likely joining the Democrats as the pro-slave Whigs did when the Republican party formed. There would have to be an outreach to conservative Democrats to bring them into the “new” Party. This would be easier to accomplish with a new brand as the Democrats have been demolishing the [R] brand for many years though they have also been at work on the Tea Party brand. Still I think a new brand would be an easier sell as many conservative Democrats are already involved in the Tea Party.
I am on the fence as to which way is the better. What I see in both major Parties is the result of a decades long campaign started by the USSR and continued by their flunky CPUSA through the community organizing New Left to not just take over the Democrat Party but to infiltrate people who have their “values” into all positions of authority in every institution. A slow-mo coup. Undoing this, unseating their authority is a massive undertaking. One which goes far beyond a Party. The Parties that we see are a result of this takeover of society’s authority positions by people who have been indoctrinated to think, to feel as a good member of the Left does even without thinking of themselves as of the Left. It is simply the ocean they swim in and is the normal of how things are.
There are pockets of those who do not see the world this way, and they can be grown easily as they do not need constant subsidy as do those on the Left. Because the Left is built against human nature this means it must be constantly repaired to keep it from collapse. De-funding the subsides that keep the Left going is a way forward no matter what Party is used a the vehicle. Even slight pushes hurt them horribly, see Wisconsin, vs Detroit or Chicago which show how the Left always needs more and more until they eat everything and then die. This de-funding is not just for the domestic scene but also international one too. Doing this is what I think of as “what needs to be done” to win against the actual enemy of which the Democrats and the Rinos are just pieces the enemy plays in a larger “game.”
Time is critical. If proposals to “take back” the GOP were plausibly faster (ignoring the propensity of the establishment to rebound from such efforts for the moment), then there may well be a cogent argument to follow that path.
If the time is truly that short, sdferr, then shouldn’t we be talking about forming a militia rather than a third party? Different process, with different organization, infrastructure, and membership requirements.
Consider only the possibility that the reason time is critical is precisely to obviate any such need, SDN, and you will have it.