The face of the Republican Party has become a buffet of jarring personalities. Bobby Jindal might easily be replaced by a rubber duck. Sarah Palin is an ongoing and dark adaptation of I Love Lucy. You know, "You got some splainin' to do." Joe the Plumber's opinions are Twilight Zone-esque. Steele is not quite as ready for prime time as is Alan Keyes. You might think they are somehow Through the Looking Glass, but I am leaning towards Oz as a metaphor.
One must guess ( either that or go under cover and infiltrate the ranks of the Flying Monkeys) at why the party of Goldwater or Eisenhower or even Nixon, could imagine that caricatures of the order of Jindal and Steele could reprise the stature and dignity of the once Grand Old Party. My guess is that the old order of fiscal conservatives has been discouraged with the potency of their traditional arguments and has retreated. Safe and so demure, behind the gates and attack dogs, why not delegate the workings of party and message to the red meat professionals? After all they gave us the "Southern Strategy", the "Welfare Queen", the "Government is the Problem." All worthy of the Wicked Witch of the West. Such criminally deceptive geniuses should be able to handle this little (sniff) populist uprising. What do you mean we can't use water cannon?
No my dear conservatives, this time you might need to come out from behind the curtain. Because the fire and fury your party apparatus displays to frighten and intimidate is no longer working on a public that knows full well by whom it has been ravaged. Yes officer, I was assaulted and robbed and I will testify. It was the defendant, the sweaty clown with the $500 shoes.
Come out from behind the curtain and own a quarter century of deceit proffered in lieu of an honest argument. As Oz, you fear public discovery of your true self. But that is not to be feared. Believe it or not, Americans generally agree that people with money should be allowed to keep it, if they earned it and did not harm others in order to get it. Right now, Dorothy and company are not your enemy, you are. Dorothy and the rest of us just want to go back to Kansas and you are increasingly seen as just getting in the way.
As you continue to allow the party, snake oil salesmen to fan the flames of division and unrest, you set the stage of a conflict which is becoming about nothing but your wealth. You hope that the 20% of the public that is the unrepentant Republican base will be enough to secure you in a castle keep, while the world is forced to eat its seed corn. Nations and monarchies have fallen clinging to just as vain a hope.
Minimal government is as good a thing as fiscal responsibility. The trouble is that you have let your party be hijacked by elements who do not care any more about responsibility than a Kansas cow flop. You have become the party of easy money that dismantled the New Deal, protections that were critical in helping you to keep your easy money. You oversaw depredation of American wages, destruction of American industries and cannibalization of American companies, all for an easy buck. You need to face up to this and repent on behalf of the criminal class that led you here. If you do, you can rejoin in the national dialogue.
Otherwise, you will have to continue to make the case that the Brownian motion of profligate consumption and the vicissitudes of speculation should determine the fate of our nation, and of civilization. You will end up trying to explain how it is that government can't live beyond its means, while every sinew of business is devoted to getting the public to live beyond its means. I mean really, can you run even a business with no plan? How can you run a government with no plan other than to frighten the public?
Come on, turn off the jumbotron and the flame effects and come out and talk to us. Jeeze, I feel like a hostage negotiator.