2010. Republican Establishment says: OMG! Obamacare is horrible and will ruin the country! Vote for us so that we can take control of the House of Representatives and stop him!
[GOP wins the House; nothing happens]
2012. Republican Establishment says: OMG! Obama is out of control! But RomneyCare was awesome in Massachusetts, because reasons. Vote for us so we can ... well, something!
[Nothing happens]
2014. Republican Establishment says: OMG! Obamacare really stinks, and the IRS is attacking people, and things are really going to Hell in a hand basket. Vote for us so that we can take control of the Senate and stop Obama!
[GOP wins Senate; nothing happens]
Last weekend. Republican Establishment says: OMG! Trump says mean things! We can't vote for him.
What a pathetic bunch of sad sacks.
I think many people still believe that there are two parties with different goals.
ReplyDeleteExcept its more than "mean things". Its implying sexual assault. Have we learned nothing from he Aiken disaster? Sure, the media and liberals will smear us regardless, but let's not have them be truthful! Trump is the liberal caricature of Republicans.
ReplyDeleteI'm no supporter of the GOP Establishment- they certainly have done us very little favors. But Trump is not the man to take it down. Partially because he is the Establishment. He tapped into the dissatisfaction, but he won't do anything to change it.
Oh, and here is a history of Trump:
pre-2012: "I love gun control! I love liberal ideas! I love Hillary and Bill Clinton! I invited them to my wedding I loved them so much! I donated to Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid! I love Democrats!"
post-2012: "Oh shoot I need to pretend I never did any of that to fool people to vote for me so I can run for President!"
I just don't understand how people can be so easily conned.
Patrick Henry,
ReplyDeleteI'm very unimpressed with the talk that what Trump said is "sexual assault". That would change if there were credible accusations of assault from women levied against him. Note that "credible accusations" would need to include a police report.
Partly this is a reaction to all of the breathless pearl clutching we've heard about Trump from pretty much everyone over the last year - it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome. More accusations of the form "I heard that ..." and "It logically follow that ..." are things that I automatically tune out now.
Your point about Trump changing his tune on gun control is valid, but the choice is not Trump vs. Gary Johnson, it's Trump vs. Hillary. There's no question at all what she wants to do to the 2A, via SCOTUS if nothing else. And this quite frankly is very damaging to the GOP establishment - they KNOW that she will appoint 2 or 3 Justices that will gut the Second Amendment, but they still use the specter of gun control for fund raising. It's not at all impressive, or persuasive.
Johnson/Weld2016
ReplyDeleteChris,
ReplyDeleteI voted for Johnson last election because (a) Romney was a status quo candidate (as opposed to a change agent) and (b) I was in Georgia and it was a guarantee that Romney would win there.
Neither of those hold true for me. I am now living in Maryland, so (b) is not a factor. Trump *is* a change agent, so (a) does not apply to anyone.
Quite frankly, change is coming one way or another. If Trump doesn't bring it, someone likely much uglier will. The country is in an ugly mood and a Hillary administration will have absolutely no desire or credibility to make the needed changes. Perhaps a Trump administration will not be effective making the changes but my sense is that he would at least try.
But the desire for change is global - look at what's going on in Europe for a sense of what would follow under a Clinton administration. We will have our own version of the Front Nationale/AfD.
Along those lines, I would point out where we are in the Four Boxes of Liberty:
ReplyDelete- soap: 2010 Tea Party. Shouted down as racist and sexist, then ultimately infiltrated by self-servers until the sun set on it
- ballot: imperiled by the fact that Trump is having to run against Hillary, the establishments of both parties, and the entrenched media (fun reading - Mike Cernovich's Twitter feed regarding the rank-and-file sabotage of any Get Out the Vote efforts on Trump's behalf)
- jury: discredited by the FBI basically stating to the camera that there was evidence enough to prosecute Hillary, but they wouldn't be doing so because reasons (to use your term)
- ammo: I knew the basic point I intended to make in this post, but actually typing it out brings it into focus. Are we really this close? God help us all.
Patric Henry:
ReplyDeleteYou can list infidelity as a character trait of Hillary. Just look at her daughter. She is obviously not Bill's kid, but the family friend's. I think his name is Hubble. Absolute spitting image of him, and nothing at all like Bill's side of the family.
Sure would like to see a paternity/DNA test on Chelsea. But, I figure that is about as likely as any of Obama's documents to show up in public.
"Nothing happens" is the natural product of a political party that spends decades saying that government is the problem.
ReplyDeleteIt's the natural product of a political party whose strategy for taking power is to force dysfunction by declaring the opposition to be corrupt and pathetic.
It's the natural product of a political party incapable of compromise.
Republicans sowed the wind and are now complaining about the resulting whirlwind.
Nonesuch, I'd add that the GOP (and the Democrats, but that's beyond the scope of discussion here) have demonstrated that they are entirely uninterested in the interests of the middle and working classes. They've sold those interests to the Donor Class. Crony Capitalism rules.
ReplyDeleteBut that, quite frankly, is a pretty good reason to think that government will continue to be the problem.
And if you believe that this is a bipartisan problem, then there *isn't* dysfunction - any dysfunction is simply window dressing to distract the rubes while the Donor Class feeds from the public trough.
@Borepatch - I might believe that this is bipartisan dysfunction if we didn't have Mitch McConnell and other high Republican office holders deciding on or before President Obama's first inauguration that their single most important goal was to make him a one-term president and that he should get absolutely no Republican cooperation. I understand that both parties want the other's presidents to be one-term, but Democrats have a history of working with Republican presidents in ways the Republicans don't. And it wasn't just Obama - look at Republican opposition to Bill Clinton.
ReplyDeleteAnd in both cases, the Democratic president took serious flak from other Democrats for trying to work with Republicans.
False equivalence, anyone?