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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The Republican Party Has Sold Out Now in the minority in Congress and saddled with an unpopular president and no ideology, the Republican Party may be in worse shape than it was in 1974 during the depths of Watergate. The GOP is so hopelessly confused it stands for precious little that Americans find attractive and may be in for a long walk in the wilderness. This is due, in part, to the war in Iraq. After the November elections, a CNN poll astonishingly found that more than 60 percent of Americans believe the GOP to be the party of "big government." After McCain-Feingold, prescription drug benefits, No Child Left Behind, the USA Patriot Act, lobbying scandals, bloated energy, farm and transportation bills and unrestricted growth of government along with invasion of personal privacy, who can blame them? The GOP itself has been corrupted by a love of government and, as any student of the Founding Fathers will tell you, all but the most resolute will eventually be seduced by power. The GOP has become its concubine. K Street Republican lobbying firms loutishly advertise their ability to get millions in graft for their clients, and many in the three co-joined Republican coalitions of national defense, social and economic conservatives (which ironically were brought together by an aversion to too much government) are, in their own ways, devotees of government. Some of their various leaders can more faithfully articulate why they need government better than they can state why they don't need government. The foreign policy right, which used to subscribe to the projection of power to only protect American interests, has become dominated by utopian neoconservatism, which substituted U.S. interests for the interests of all civilized nations. The economic right, whose libertarian roots stemmed from a desire to be freed from excessive government taxation and regulations, now supports corporate welfare, subsidies and amnesty for corporate executives who break the law by hiring illegal aliens. Cynical politicians have manipulated the social right. Meddling in the Terri Schiavo case, banning gambling on the Internet and a constitutional amendment defining marriage have helped transform the conservative movement, which was once about the expansion of freedom, into "Big Christian Brother," which is now concerned with the expansion of virtue. It is the height of intellectual dishonesty for a political party to say, out of one side of its mouth, overturn Roe v. Wade because it believes behavioral issues belong at the state level, while out of the other side saying it needs to federalize the private act of marriage. The conservative movement can -- and possibly should -- survive without the Republican Party. But the GOP is a dead duck without conservatism. So conservatives would do well to ask themselves: Is Ronald Reagan's minimalist government philosophy gone? Do they no longer subscribe to "maximum freedom consistent with law and order," as the Gipper said in 1964? Or is the only thing left of Reaganism inside the movement and the GOP his rhetoric? Is his conservative/libertarian philosophy gone with only the windbags remaining? The conservative movement can still heal itself and avoid a bloody civil war, but only if all factions are willing to give up their addiction with government, power and access and again embrace Reagan's small government, do-it-yourself philosophy. The GOP, on the other hand, has not learned any meaningful lessons from November's elections. Resistant to changing its leadership or reconsidering its rendezvous with the oxymoronic "Big Government Conservatism," the party could be in for a long winter of discontent. Craig Shirley is the president of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs in Alexandria and is author of "Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All." He is writing "Rendezvous with Destiny," about the 1980 Reagan campaign.
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Destroying the GOP was part of the NeoCommie (Straussian-Trotskyite) agenda. TROTSKY, STRAUSS, AND THE NEOCONS Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is. ~George W. Bush Look at Freerepublic - the GOP must have been composed of morons in the first place because the majority of them went for it hook line and sinker.
"The desire to rule is the mother of heresies." -- St. John Chrysostom
Yep, and LP was next on the hit list. There are a lot of lost paleo-conservatives, looking for a new home.
Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is. ~George W. Bush Craig Shirley appears to believe that the GOP is a rudderless ship and can simply resolve to set a course. This isn't exactly true. The ERETZ ISRAEL lobby has the party solidly under its control, and incumbents-for-life never commit random acts of selfless patriotism. The consequences of that are only whispered in cloakrooms, and they don't want to know if Hitchcock's MacGuffin is really lurking about waiting for a foolish senator to have a mouth watering attack of conscience. And, besides, if they couldn't steal enough after 8 years in power they don't deserve to hold the reins of govt. It's time for the party of Lincoln to climb into the mausoleum with the rotting corpse of their first despot in chief. They should tear a page from the neocon playbook and join a party that appears to be diametrically opposed to what they once stood for. After all, what's in a name? A Trotskyist by any other name is still a Straussian, and as Jeffords and Lieberman have demonstrated they can expect to retain their seniority, caucus with their former partisans and sell influence like there's no tomorrow, tomorrow. And, someday when that brain-in-a-jar technology is perfected no United States Senator need ever retire again. For now they should just cling on like a cat to a curtain, and someday they'll be commissars with true job security and never suffer the fickle cruelty of the electorate again.
"Not too skinny and not too fat.... She's a real hum dinger and I like it like that"__Mitch Ryder
Judas!
Booyah!
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