On the Decline & Fall of the Republican Revolution
 Printer-friendly
|
 Email article |
Related subjects: Economic Recovery, Healthcare Policy, J.E. Robertson, Legislation, Obama administration, Opinion, U.S. Elections, U.S. Law, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments Off
Has the Republican party lost its way? Has it entered a long period of wandering in the wilderness, in the absence of fresh thinkers and new ideas? How could a single political entity, with all three branches of the American government firmly in its grasp and in ideological unison, just a few short years ago, be so cast aside by the tides of democratic process and public sentiment? The short answer: a lack of genuine services to offer the people who decide who fills the positions of power in the people’s government.
Or rather, a party that offers few genuine improvements to democracy, once this fact comes to light, will lose most of its points of attraction to the electorate of a democratic nation. The Republican party has to acknowledge the grave toll endemic hypocrisy has played in its failure of leadership, and take seriously the possibility that its platform has been more fluff and spin than genuine public service.
This reality has not yet been understood by the party elders, who continue to wage a scorched-earth campaign of character assassination against anyone who dares to speak the obvious, whether it’s Michael Steele in his early days as RNC chair or Megan McCain and her criticism of the irrational fundamentalist fringe putting her father’s party at risk. Only the loudest of the loudmouths and the least nuanced of the bullies can reach the top, even now, and they are convinced that John McCain’s electoral defeat is proof of this.
The sickness of confabulation has spread to every corner of the party, with sitting senators buying into Karl Rove’s puerile Manchurian-candidate rhetorical requirement that all GOP faithful call the Democratic party the “Democrat party” in order to make it sound alien and awkward (by using a non-existent adjective), and otherwise rational people claiming that the only two choices on guns are “Obama’s gonna take yer guns!” or do the NRA’s bidding and let wave after wave of children be murdered by high-powered combat-grade automatic assault weapons.
Sarah Palin, until recently, was still touted as a great hope for the future, mainly because the thinking Republicans consider the mystical power of the fundamentalist base to be beyond their understanding, reachable only through the most narrow-minded and ill-conceived sort of polit-speak. This makes her perfect for their task: court the mysteriously inept masses (as they conceive them) and to hell with any idea of sound policy, thoughtful public service innovations, or improvements to people’s quality of life.
Despite what some in the media call “momentum” in the rhetorical arena —success in spreading false claims about healthcare reform—, the party is so wayward that it actually spends more time and energy on crafting a public relations message than it does on crafting the policies it wants to pitch. Party members who have sought to fashion new molds for conservatism have been treated like traitors and attacked from within the party, which continues to try to figure out how to trick the electorate into supporting ideas and policies that will work against its interests.
So much we see in a daily news cycle. What’s actually going on, behind the scenes: who knows? Desperate pleas for anyone with a good idea to help build a cartoon website that will tout the virtues of tax breaks for every problem in life? Cognac-laced wood-paneled gatherings in which known faces try to figure out the best way to pitch the virtues of torture to the public? Fundraisers for the Alberto Gonzales criminal defense fund? (These are real stories that parallel the Republican leadership’s quest to “break Obama”.)
The problem Republicans have is that they have so come to distrust the idea of valuable public service, as a matter of ideological dogma, that when Pres. Obama promises to improve people’s services and quality of life, by cutting waste and reorganizing spending, then actually does implement the policies promised, they consider it a nasty conniving political manipulation designed to “buy” votes by catering to people’s actual needs.
As if this were no different than catering to the needs of defense contractors or bankers who want fewer ethics requirements. As long as the Republican party remains convinced that all politics is just show and all successes are just manipulations, it will falter, in the face of a population and a Democratic majority determined to get things right, however muddy the rhetorical game gets for the fractious Democratic party.
One Republican leader recently said of healthcare reform that Republicans would never support a bill that costs $1 trillion. Never. But they wholeheartedly supported George W. Bush’s massive 2001 tax cut, which cost well over $1.7 trillion, erased a decade of projected budget surpluses and plunged the federal government into debt, or his trillion-dollar-war in Iraq to locate non-existent WMD.
In fact, the last Republican president spent more money, by wide margins, than any previous president, doubled the federal budget in just 8 years, and in October 2008, issued the most massive giveaways, in the form of bank bailouts, in the history of the United States. Due to Bush’s increases in Defense spending, the Pentagon budget for any two years is now over $1 trillion. It was a Republican president that made Obama’s Treasury into the caretakers of the nation’s major banks, but the Republicans would never spend $1 trillion.
Meanwhile, Pres. Obama is presenting a framework for healthcare reform in which he demands that Congress craft legislation that will cost up to $1 trillion, but require no new revenues or additional federal spending: it will be “deficit neutral”. So, the Democratic president and the Democratic majority are crafting the most fiscally responsible massive legislative initiative ever conceived, while the Republicans organize their entire party around the lie that the Democrats are would-be socialists trying to bankrupt future generations.
The lie defames the liar. It is the Republican party that needs to look inward and seek sincerely to diagnose what ills have led its members to countenance or even engage in hate-mongering rumors that suggest Pres. Obama is trying to “destroy the Constitution” or “euthanize the unproductive”. It is the Republican party that is smeared and degraded by this vapid rhetorical warfare. It is the Republican party that needs new leaders and remains rudderless, despite all the favorable press suggesting the rumor-mill might have something meaningful to contribute to American dialogue.
| Printer-friendly
|
Email article |
CafeSentido Partner Sites: