In a sign of how far the conservative movement has fallen, Mitt Romney, the Jay Gatsby of the 2012 campaign, told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) the magnificent lie that he was a "severely conservative" governor of Massachusetts. The CPAC delegates then voted for Romney as their presidential vision of modern conservatism.
Then, while the GOP that suffers a gender gap of intergalactic proportions became the first Republicans in history to seek a partisan religious war over women and contraceptives while opposing pay equity for women, with today's Republicans being the first in GOP history to attack collective bargaining and seek mass firings of police and firefighters and teachers, Mitt Romney as Jay Gatsby adjourned to his latest home state of the month.
As President Obama has hit his stride since his Theodore Roosevelt speech in Kansas and continues on an upward curve, Romney has become downright incoherent, and the GOP nastiness is now turning against itself.
Mitt Romney claims credit in Michigan for opposing the highly successful auto industry recovery program of Obama, while quoting George Romney, who spent a lifetime standing for a nobler conviction politics than the shallow convenience politics of his ever-pandering son, and standing for a more American brand of business than what Rick Perry called vulture capitalism.
George Romney would have respected the Obama way to save the auto industry. Mitt Romney preferred more mass layoffs, more bankruptcies, more pain and more suffering to create more profits for the very few.
To fully understand the magnitude of what could be a GOP death march in 2012, consider the column Wednesday, on this page, by my colleague Dick Morris, who appears to almost hunger for America to fail, and appears almost desperate that data have begun to show America is coming back.
Morris's column is a calling card for what I call the "Hope America Fails" wing of the Republican Party. They're betting their fortune that the American economy fails, which is a perilous place for a great party to be. These Hope America Fails Republicans look mournful after good economic news and gleeful after bad economic news.
The words "death march" occur to me when the GOP is reduced to attacking Clint Eastwood when Eastwood is talking up America.
Students of history know that my line of argument closely tracks the line of argument from conservative icon Jeanne Kirkpatrick when she supported Ronald Reagan.
The Hope America Fails Republicans are joined by the Blame Americans First Republicans, who say the jobless want to be jobless and the poor want to be poor, and the Help China Win Republicans, who attack the president's support for new energy while the Chinese government is mobilizing investments to dominate this business.
There is a great common denominator to what could become the GOP death march of 2012:
The Republicans have become so consumed and blinded by the intensity of their obsession against the president and their pure lust for power that they stand for nothing, and offer nothing to voters, except the intensity of their obsessions, ideologies, hatreds and dislikes.
GOP leaders have forgotten the lesson of Richard Nixon's farewell address. Nixon warned that those consumed with animosity for their enemies will ultimately destroy themselves.
Republicans today have no George Romneys, Ronald Reagans, Jack Kemps or William Buckleys who promote conservative ideas with a politics of good will. They have few ideas. They offer no good will. Their champion's own father would be appalled by his pandering to extremism and his Gatsby-like reinventions without any core of lasting values. He is opposed by second-rate pretenders who are neither true conservatives nor qualified for the presidency.
At least Gatsby's reinventions were to pursue his timeless love for Daisy, while Romney's are to pursue his next career move.
As Republicans now turn their venom against one another other, their death march advances and it is springtime for Obama.
This column was originally published at The Hill.
OBAMA IS SUCH A WISE EXPERIENED BUSINESS PERSON WITH THE HELP OF 86 CZARS.......................
Remember 2000. Shoulda been springtime for Al Gore then, too.
Such a party as the Kochs brothers fund and Dick Armey embodies might try obtaining power through other mechanisms than an up or down vote (ever surer to go against them) for example, voter suppression tactics they deploy in Wisconsin or as once evidences by the now forgotten 'hanging chads' in Florida.
Yes, who can blame me, I think they'll cheat, via 'black box' or otherwise and SCOTUS, out of the confusion this election brings, will once again rule in their favor if need be. Supreme confidence in outcome is a more likely reason than 'confusion' about retreat--that they don't seem to fear touching political 'third rails' anymore or voicing their most appalling obsessions, ideologies, hatreds and dislikes.
But don't call me paranoid...the price for our freedom is eternal 'vigilance.' You'd think the press and news-media would be more interested, find more fulfillment in 'hipping' us to danger as opposed to regretfully reporting about 'preventable' calamity afterwards.
More emphasis should be placed on conducting the fairest possible elections in the U.S. this upcoming term what with the high stakes and the unpredictable but sure to be crippling effects of Citizens United, floods of money, influence peddling and all that....(we could welcome and invite third party monitors from the UN, after all, who is afraid of fair elections?).
I just hope that some TRUTH can get out there too. My fear is that everyone will be mobilized by these campaigns to vote righteously against themselves and their interests.
As near I as can tell, they want to have corporations run everything. Turn it all over to their buddies in Big Business. The billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns. They say that government should be run like any other big business.
Someone else said just about the same thing, back in the 1940's, and the United States declared war on him.
Benito Mussolini..........."Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
Why spend all that money, waste all those lives, fighting a war over a doctrine that many of our current leaders willingly embrace less than 100 years later, in exchange for campaign cash?
It's repugnant, and they call themselves patriots?
A patriot is someone who loves and supports his country, not someone who says ""I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
You don't like what the government is doing.........fix it.
But don't try to destroy the government of the United States of America, and claim you are doing it for the good of it's people, cause you ain't.
You're doing it for personal profit and power, and it's time the American people woke up to that fact.
Almost daily I receive E mails that have something to say against Mr. Obama and it's usually something that is so outlandish that only an ignorant person would accept it as truth, but they're promoting it to the ignorant.
A one term US Senator and former "community organizer" humiliated a 20 year US Senator who was also a former prisoner of war during vietnam in one of the most unpredicted elections in recent history.
The party of the 1% got their teeth kicked in by a black democrat. They were utterly embarrassed, humiliated and brought to their knees by an electorate that had enough of the Bush policies that had nearly destroyed our economy.
If Obama had been white, I really don't believe the right would have become so extreme and hateful, but be that as it is, their hatred has only been fueled by their inability to control the White House as they did so successfully for the first 6 years of the Bush experiment.
Hmm...with all THAT in mind, you folks might be in for a rough DECADE.