Back when Stephen Harper's supposedly Conservative Party was elected to its first minority government in January of 2006, Liberal stalwarts started muttering about a dark Tory plot to "destroy" the Grits forever. That reached a crescendo in 2011 when the party under Michael Ignatieff was utterly humiliated by voters. They still won't shut the fuck up about it.
Smart Republicans - and more than a few stupid ones - finally reached the obvious conclusion that November 6 presented them with an undeniable existential crisis. They either get their shit together and stop acting like lunatics, pronto, or they cease to exist within a decade.
Four years of GOP, Fox News and fuckhead blogger assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama isn't an idiot and he noticed this, too. He's been using the chaos and infighting in the Republican Party to do whatever the fuck he wants. Even as they hilariously say that he didn't win a mandate at the polls, Republicans are effectively giving Obama one in being unable to sensibly oppose or effectively deal with him. This has lead the usual suspects to decry the President's plot to "destroy" the Republican Party or reverse Reaganism.
One certainly gets that sense from watching and reading Obama's second inaugural address. It was a fantastical wishlist of liberal nonsense that would have little chance of passing a Democratic Congress, let alone the one that is there, but it does seem to ignore the very existence of the GOP. I will grant you that.
The obvious question is "What the fuck did you expect him to do?"
From the very first day of his presidency - and we know from Robert Draper's Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives that the Republican leadership discussed this while Obama was attending his 2009 inaugural balls - the GOP made the very deliberate decision to cooperate with him on nothing, regardless of what he actually proposed. If Obama decided to enact unedited the entire 1996 Republican platform, Republicans would obstruct him for the sole purpose of making him "one-term president."
Well, in Obama's own words, he won. And Republicans not only lost, they lost in the most humiliating way possible. Not only did a do-nothing community organizer kick the shit out of the Republicans twice, he left them divided against themselves.
So I'll repeat my question: "What the fuck do you expect him to do?"
Let's not pretend that the GOP was particularly magnamimous in victory. I remember how, between 2000 and '06, chronic dickheads like Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were crowing triumphalist nonsense about "a permanent Republican majority" to anyone stupid enough to listen. And when Democrats timidly suggested keeping TSA workers unionized, Rove ran ads against Max Cleland - who left three of his fucking limbs in Vietnam - starring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Can we please stop pretending that conservatives are victims here? It's embarrassing. No self-respecting person wants to identify themselves with a cabal of bed-wetting losers.
I'd like to tell Republicans exactly the same thing that I've been telling Liberals here at home for the last six years. The whole point of politics is beat the other side to the maximum possible extent. It's usually not possible to destroy them completely, but when the opportunity presents itself, you fucking well take it. And you sure as shit don't apologize for it afterward.
I've shit-talked the guy endlessly, so it's only fair that I highlight when Erick Erickson says something that I wholeheartedly agree with.
We have too many outrage pimps on both sides of the aisle whipping the respective bases into a frenzy and fury against the other side. I don’t have enough time or energy to be outraged about it all. There are things to be outraged by, but not everything, and certainly not with full energy dedicated to every perceived slight and grievance.
What I am finding is that among conservatives there is too much outrage, piss, and vinegar. It makes our ideas less effective. We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.
Conservatives, frankly, have become purveyors of outrage instead of preachers for a cause. Instead of showing how increasing government harms people, how free markets help people, and how conservative policies benefit all Americans, we scream “Benghazi” and “Fast & Furious.”
We’re off key and off message. We’ve become professional victims dialed up to 10 on the outrage meter. Who the hell wants to listen to conservatives whining and moaning all the time about the outrage du jour? Seriously? Mitt Romney ran a campaign on just how bad things are, but he was rejected by a majority of Americans who felt like he really did not care about them and really had no plans to improve their lives.
I'd honestly like to congratulate Mr. Erickson on both his eloquence and his honesty. Given his audience, I imagine that he'll take endless shit for having written that. God knows that I've been saying exactly the same thing for far longer, much to the displeasure of some of my friends, who are several degrees of magnitude saner than the fans of Red State.
I could care less if the Republican Party survives the Obama years. But I do think traditional conservatism can and should. But a few things are going to be necessary for that to happen.
You know why geriatric Tea Partiers loved the Ryan Plan so much? Because it didn't affect them. They were exempted from it's harsher provisions, and it's pretty easy to tell everybody to go fuck themselves when they have no skin in the game. Before the second Ryan Plan, these same assholes were marching on Washington with "Government hands off Medicare" signs. The best ones spelled "government" wrong, too.
Second, if you believe as I do that the debt is an existential crisis, start fucking acting like it. That means that your goddamned political base doesn't get a pass. The GOP presented the War on Terror as an existential crisis, but only asked one half of one percent of the American people - those in the volunteer military - to do anything about it. Everybody else could go shopping. And now they're doing exactly the same thing with the budget.
And please don't say that "at least we're better than Obama." All that does is convince me that nobody's serious.
Third, poll after poll after poll is showing that Americans are getting more libertarian on social issues. Not only that, they're getting that way faster than anyone could have expected. Just look at how attitudes have shifted on gay marriage and marijuanna legalization in eight years.
Conservatives can no longer say that government is the problem, but only until it comes out against something we don't like. You're either for a small government with limited powers, or you aren't. And you sure as shit can't be taken seriously about the size of government when your presidential candidates and media types are endlessly rhapsodizing about fuck pills!
Are you going to lose Evangelical Christians that way? Maybe. But you've already started losing everybody else. If American conservatism doesn't become younger, duskier, more libertarian and less religious soon, it will become a fringe.
Fourth, the American people couldn't have been clearer in preferring Obama to the perverted mess that American conservatism has become. You need to work with that and persuade them otherwise. Cooperate when you can, negotiate when you should and oppose when you must. You've had it your way for four years and what did it get you? A Democratic president and Senate and Republican House that's at war with itself is fucking where.
Fifth, not everything is an outrage or a threat to the Republic. Stop acting like it is. You sound like liberals. For example, the Affordable Care Act might be incredibly bad policy, but it isn't "an effort to destroy capitalism itself." That's doubly true when you campaign saying that you're going to keep all the popular (and ungodly expensive) parts of it.
Unless somebody changed the literature when I wasn't looking, retarded hysteria is not a conservative virtue.
Sixth, "personal responsibility" is more than a goddamned slogan. When you fuck up, cop to it. When was the last time you saw a Republican take responsibilty for anything at all. And it's not like there's been a shortage of Republican fuck-ups in the last dozen years.
You can't, for example, say that the Goddamned Liberal Media is irrelevant and ineffective, yet capable of thwarting you at every turn. Well, I guess you can because you won't stop. But it makes you look like a shithead and no one will take you seriously.
Seventh, if you only do it once (and I wouldn't recommend doing it much more than that) listen to people like Jonah Goldberg when he says things like this.
The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.
A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument. Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.
Eighth, it would be great if we stop defending the indefensible. There's nothing funnier to me than Canadian conservatives that take every shot they can at Obama, but defend Stephen Harper for doing exactly the same things he did, only more so. Canada's Conservative government is still running expensive television ads touting a massive stimulus program that ended four years ago. Over a third of the Obama stimulus was tax cuts, which wasn't true of Harper's old-timey "throw a blizzard of money at every pothole in the country" program. We don't just look stupid when we do this, we look dishonest.
It's also time to face the fact that Republicans are just as responsible for the debt explosion as Democrats, if not more so. Admitting that doesn't enable our opponents nearly as much as continuing to lie about it does. If you insist on hanging a Paul Ryan poster over your bed, you should understand that he voted for every single debt-creating bill Congress passed between 1997 and 2008. Period.
A wilderness period isn't just good for the soul, it's good for the mind. Richard Nixon said that losing the 1960 election made him a better president in 1968. Reagan almost certainly would have been a worse president if he was nominated and elected in 1968 or '76. Churchill also wrote pretty extensively about the virtues of a wilderness period.
Having said that, a wilderness period does you no good if all you do with it is build a bigger a echo chamber with which to feed some insane persecution complex. If this time is used to do nothing but humor those who see this as something other than satire, we're fucked.
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