The Olympic Games are winding to a close, but the biennial -- and increasingly competitive -- contest to be the craziest GOP congressional candidate is going strong.
This week, Missouri Rep. Todd Akin won his state's Republican Senate primary, putting him in position to be one of the nuttiest members of a club already full of, shall we say, "strong personalities." Before this victory, Akin was most widely known for his observation that "at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God," which understandably got some progressive believers a little worked up. He also received some attention when he suggested that marriage equality might wind up destroying our civilization, blamed legal abortion for illegal immigration, declared Medicare unconstitutional, and compared student loan reform with "stage three cancer."
Then there's Indiana's Richard Mourdock, who ousted Richard Lugar -- one of the few moderate Republicans remaining in the Senate -- in a primary in May. Mourdock, who walks the Tea Party line on issues like abolishing direct election of senators, actively campaigned against bipartisanship, saying, "It is bipartisanship that has taken this country to the very brink of bankruptcy."
And, of course, there's former Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz, who wrapped up his Senate primary late last month and has already scored an invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention. Cruz campaigned on his work as solicitor general helping Texas undermine an international treaty in order to execute a Mexican national. He's a ready conspiracy theorist, warning of the "enormous problem" of Sharia law, calling President Obama the nation's "most radical president," and accusing the United Nations of trying to abolish the sport of golf. Yes, golf.
No wonder Olympia Snowe of Maine is retiring before she's the next moderate Republican to go. Republicans have already run African-Americans, Latinos, non-evangelical-Christians, gays and lesbians out of their party. Now they're driving out the infidels. Soon there will be nobody left except for a handful of tea partiers keeping golf courses safe from the UN.
Last month, The New York Times reported on the dwindling Republican party of California. A Republican consultant told the Times,
They are down to 30 percent, which makes it impossible to win a statewide election. You just can't get enough crossover voters... They have alienated large swaths of voters. They have become too doctrinaire on the social issues. It's become a cult.
In California, the Big Tent is becoming the pup tent. Sound familiar? As California goes.....
Sure, there will be short-term victories, but the GOP has got to rethink a few things if it wants to survive in a country that's increasingly pluralistic, tolerant of difference, and craving national solutions to national problems. Driving out moderates to make way for regressive policies and the hard-liner conspiracy theorists who push them just isn't going to cut it in a diverse country.
Just look at the young Republicans who the Times interviewed for a story this week. By and large, they're tolerant of gays, open to reproductive rights and seem turned off by the Tea Party's hard line. How long will it take them to realize that in today's Republican Party, their personalized politics just aren't welcome? Sure, they can vote. But as we're seeing in this year's primaries, straying from an increasingly far-right line won't get you elected.
Follow Michael B. Keegan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peoplefor
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 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
Two scenarios:
One, the moderate Republicans form a third party - I know, I know, a viable third party is almost an impossibility. Call it the, well, the Moderate Republican Party.
Two, the current GOP will become a far-right fringe hate group, and the moderate Republicans will increasingly become independents.
- One of your greatest attributes is your quest to make government more efficient and cost less. I mean I don't like paying taxes either, and I would rather pay less. But you have to put defense cuts on the table.
- I think there are too many regulations. The problem resides in the fact that you have deregulated large corporations and left the small business's struggling. Ask any small business owner and they will tell you that there is so much regulations, fess, and paperwork. Its the corporations that have teams of lawyers to deal with it, its the corporations that harm our environment, treats it employees like a number, and takes advantage of every tax loop hole that they put in place with their intensive lobbying.
- Completely ditch your current social agenda. If you say you want the government out of the peoples life, then that means everything. It means you have no business incarcerating drug users, telling someone who they can or cannot marry, preventing a women from having a choice in what to do with their own bodies, hell even terminally ill patients should be allowed to have an assisted suicide if they so choose.
The younger generation contains many more minorities, people without religion affiliation or strong religious beliefs, and a much greater tolerance of certain social issue (i.e. abortion, drug legalization, gay rights, and acceptance of people of different cultures). Which kind of points to a fading neoconservative demographic.
But liberals shouldn't rejoice, because so far the democrats kind of suck too. Image the path the country would take if the democrats ran the country without any opposition what so ever (I live in CA, so have first hand knowledge what life would be like).
In order to have a complete political discussion you need a dissenting opposition. A strong second and possibly a third party is needed to bring up counterarguments so policy can properly evolve and adapt. What goes unsaid until now is that an integral part of this process is having all the sides work together and they will have to compromise (currently a right wing dirty word).
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25838
Republican Party Platforms: Republican Party Platform of 1956
"...Our great President Dwight D. Eisenhower has counseled us further: "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative."
While jealously guarding the free institutions and preserving the principles upon which our Republic was founded and has flourished, the purpose of the Republican Party is to establish and maintain a peaceful world and build at home a dynamic prosperity in which every citizen fairly shares.
We shall ever build anew, that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land.
We believe that basic to governmental integrity are unimpeachable ethical standards and irreproachable personal conduct by all people in government. We shall continue our insistence on honesty as an indispensable requirement of public service. We shall continue to root out corruption whenever and wherever it appears..."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9743.htm
First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.
Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.
Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.
Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.
And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.
The Soviet government held a vastly different vision of the future.
In the world of its design, security was to be found, not in mutual trust and mutual aid but in force: huge armies, subversion, rule of neighbor nations. The goal was power superiority at all costs. Security was to be sought by denying it to all others.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
The U.S. interstate highway system was due to President Eisenhower's observation of the German autobahn network of freeways:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/reichs.cfm
The Reichsautobahnen
"...For Eisenhower, the vision of the autobahn was strong in his mind as he became President. Years later, he would explain that "after seeing the autobahns of modern Germany and knowing the asset those highways were to the Germans, I decided, as President, to put an emphasis on this kind of road building. ... The old [1919] convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land..."
All of the brouhaha also means that Karl Rove's plan of a thousand years of Republican majority has just gone up in smoke.
F&F