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Title: The Coming Conservative Crack-up
Source:
The American Prospect
URL Source: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles ... he_coming_conservative_crackup
Published: Sep 30, 2008
Author: Paul Waldman
Post Date: 2008-10-01 11:05:03 by iconoclast
Keywords: Parties, future, Conservative
Views: 146
Comments: 7
The Republicans' split over the bailout bill is the latest example of the party's internal divisions. Unless the GOP figures out what it stands for, it's headed for civil war and electoral disaster. In Washington over the last week, there were lots of ideas about what a bailout of Wall Street ought to look like. But none had less chance of becoming law than the plan put out by the core of the House GOP caucus, the conservatives known as the Republican Study Committee. The members of this group (which has more than its share of extremists and buffoons) offered as the cure to our current woes the removal of regulations on businesses and a suspension of the capital-gains tax, as though they were the congressional equivalent of those Japanese soldiers hunkered down on remote islands, unaware that the war had ended years before and that their side lost. Not that anyone much cares what the Republican Study Committee thinks. But its desperate attempt to head off government intervention into the smoothly humming operation of the free market, comical though it might be, tells us something about what our politics will look like after this election. The conservative movement that has dominated American politics for the last three decades is sputtering toward the end of its relevance. Its various factions, so willing in the past to put their differences aside in service of the goal of obtaining and holding power, are heading for a civil war. Whether the movement can remake itself will determine whether progressives are beginning their own long period of ideological supremacy.
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#1. To: All (#0)
Posted without comment.
Minus accident of birth .. GWB, Mgr. Hardees ... McBomb, Mgr. Burger King .. (both flunked out at Hamburger U.)
The conservative crack-up occured with the ushering in of the current Bush regime: open-borders, threatening to sign an assault weapons ban, confiscation of peoples guns in NO after hurricane Katrina, talk of a new world order, and an undeclared war with an unlimited budget.
It's not a conservative crack-up. It's a Respectable Conservative crack-up.
Used to ramble through the park IMHO, the article should have been entitled The Death Spasms of the Faux Conservative Party.
Minus accident of birth .. GWB, Mgr. Hardees ... McBomb, Mgr. Burger King .. (both flunked out at Hamburger U.)
i am pretty sure the GOP stands for bigger government, abuse of power, abrogation of rights, and perverted sexual deviancy. oh yeah, and war.
Many believe in either intelligent design or evolution...but I am opting for unintelligent design, where god is a retarded kid who likes setting army men on fire and leaving his toys out in the rain. Gengis Gandhi, Troubled Genius We come from the land of the ice and snow, On we sweep with threshing oar, Our only goal will be the western shore.
When communism collapsed the far left also said that pure Marxism was never tried. The right is starting to sound like the left when confronted with evidence of the failures with the real world application of their ideologies. The American right wing now has to confront the failure of their ideology the way the American left wing confronted the failure of their ideology in the 70s. It could be that the conservatives of the GOP never implemented their ideology because it was unworkable? Maybe it was workable but the American people - while playing lip service to the conservative economic agenda - really like big govt spending on them? I wonder will Republicans still advocate privatized Social Security? Placing your retirement money in the hands of Wall Street? Let us say in the long run the market recovers and overcomes - what about the retirees that lost out now if that was the program in effect when Bush proposed sending Social Security money to Wall Street 8 years ago? The conservative GOP wing is finished - all they have is gay bashing as a platform now - i.e. cultural issues and war mongering for an American empire. Their economic agenda is discredited.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
I'd say before that. The failed 1990's 'revolution' is what really got the ball rolling. That began 'rally round the party now and we'll pay lip service to whatever issue concerns you later.' Bush Jr was just the final result of that policy. My prediction is that the "D"s are now going though the exact same thing. The stage they are at now is the 'get us a larger majority in congress and control of the white house and we really really promise to do all those nice things we said' phase. At the same time more and more 'one issuers' are being tossed under the bus.
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death." - Me. "If violence solved nothing, then weapons technology would have never advanced past crude clubs and rocks." - Me.
#2. To: iconoclast (#0)
-Schweizerische Schuetzenzeitung (Swiss Shooting Federation) April, 1941
#3. To: iconoclast (#0)
Shadowboxing in the dark
Then you came and caused a spark
That's a four-alarm fire now
#4. To: X-15, Tauzero (#2)
The conservative crack-up occured with the ushering in of the current Bush regime: open-borders, threatening to sign an assault weapons ban, confiscation of peoples guns in NO after hurricane Katrina, talk of a new world order, and an undeclared war with an unlimited budget.
#5. To: iconoclast (#0)
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!
#6. To: iconoclast, X-15, gengis gandhi (#0)
#7. To: X-15 (#2)
The conservative crack-up occured with the ushering in of the current Bush regime: open-borders, threatening to sign an assault weapons ban, confiscation of peoples guns in NO after hurricane Katrina, talk of a new world order, and an undeclared war with an unlimited budget.
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