The Republican Party in the "Awkward Stage"

The GOP Senate runoff election in Mississippi is instructive at how useless that party is in the cause of restoring the Republic.  Consider:

A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles.


The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats’ major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction.

Consider:

“[They] orchestrated flyers that called me a racist,” [McDaniels] said. “They said I would end food stamps for everyone. They went into the same communities with speaker trucks and said that I was trying to suppress votes in those communities. They did every dirty trick in the book, behaving just like liberal Democrats do.”

Consider:

National advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and the American Action Network have gone to bat, with the NRA rushing to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s aid

As if we needed another reason to despise the NRA ...

Consider:

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,

now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked

from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already

it was impossible to say which was which.

Consider:

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
....

On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. But most people are still standing around numb and confused, knowing something's wrong with the country, but hoping it isn't quite as bad as they're beginning to suspect it is.
....

Something's eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many.

Or you can relax in the belief that the Party of Caesar will be checked by the Party of Antony.  And the circuses are entertaining and the bread is free.