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Showing posts with label GOP Primaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GOP Primaries. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Someone Please Notice Mike Huckabee

With the GOP clown car filled up to max cap, Mike Huckabee needed to do something to get noticed. This task was especially difficult given the Donald's suckage of all of the air out the room. So, he offered up some right wing blog commenting porn and compared Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler.

I was not offended by what he said as many others are now pretending to be in the media. For me, it was simply another shining example of the type of people are country has to deal with on a daily basis. They start with a straw man (Obama is helping Iran) and then sashay into appeal to fear (Obama is helping Iran kill Jews). They top it off with a false equivalency (Obama is helping Iran kill Jews like Hitler!). This tactic works every time for the audience he is targeting: the GOP base.

Conservatives become more animated when anger, hate and fear are all involved.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Not A Good Sign

Voter turnout thus far in the GOP primaries has been very low. In fact, it is lower than 2008 and that is not a good sign for the eventual nominee. A recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Center for the Study of the American Electorate details the numbers.

Overall, voter turnout so far is 11.5% of the 68.1 million citizens eligible to vote in the 13 states. That's a drop from a 13.2% voter turnout rate in the same states four years ago. 

And there really wasn't that much enthusiasm back then either. But what about the key battleground states? In Florida, 1.6 million people voted in 2012 compared to 1.9 million in the 2008 GOP primaries. In Nevada, the turnout in 2008 was 44,000. This year it was 32,000. That's nearly a 25 percent drop off. And in Colorado voter turnout was down about 7 percent this year in comparison to 2012.

Does this mean good things for the president?

Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Big Three

Thomas Friedman hit a grand slam with his recent column in the New York Times entitled, "We Need a Second Party." In so many ways, he echoes much of the analysis that I have been discussing on here for the last few years.

There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub. 

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions.

Damn straight.

I predicted after the president got elected that we were seeing the end of the Republican Party. I was wrong in the timing of my prediction and didn't take into account the hate, anger, and fear that would bubble up after we elected Barack Obama. Obviously, I was naive in thinking that we were (ahem) past certain things but we aren't. I also failed to consider such low voter turnout in the midterms (42 percent or less in most areas). That always means a problem for the Democrats as old people are the ones who always turn out and vote and many of them are Republican.

Yet today the writing is on the wall. We are seeing it now with their nominating process in the presidential primaries. They can't seem to settle on one candidate and are now desperately trying to spin their chaos as some sort of fight that will make them all stronger. That's not going to happen.

Instead, what we see are the very serious cracks in a coalition that is at war with itself and cannot survive. Sure, they'll always be able to have a decent showing in Congress but with the current edition garnering the lowest approval ratings ever, how long will even that last? As Friedman notes,

Because when I look at America’s three greatest challenges today, I don’t see the Republican candidates offering realistic answers to any of them.

That's right. Because they are too bent on winning the argument and proving the other side wrong. In short, they are being childish.

Friedman lays out a series of points which I am going to issue as challenges to my regular, conservative/libertarian readers. Here they are.

1. Respond to the challenges and opportunities of an era in which globalization and the information technology revolution have dramatically intensified, creating a hyperconnected world. How would you foster education, innovation in talent for our country? What would you do to be a HIE (high-imagination-enabling countries) as opposed to a LIE (low-imagination-enabling countries)? Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

2. Offer a realistic answer to our debt and entitlement obligations. Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

3. How would you power the future? Again, realistic answers not the current dogma being spewed by conservatives. Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

These are Big Three in a perfectly concise nutshell. What I've seen so far from the split pea soup that is the GOP these days doesn't even come close to addressing any of these issues seriously. I'm hoping that my right leaning readers are better than that and can honestly look at some real solutions.

Well?

Monday, January 30, 2012

Election Video Calvacade

I've been saving a few videos from the last couple of weeks and today I figured I'd put them all up at once.

On a number of levels, it's really been nauseating to watch the Republican primaries. Here's a great example of what I am talking about.


This level of ignorance, anger and hatred simply stuns me. But it's not just this kind of shit because...well...I expect this stuff from the right...the whole Barack X thing and all. What I don't expect is this.

 

A conservative audience yelling at Mitt Romney for not releasing his tax returns? Wow. Good thing the OWS narrative is dead.

This one blew me away.



Wait, huh? I thought conservatives were all about Jesus. WTF??!!? I submit that nearly all conservatives think that the Golden Rule is a bunch of pussy nonsense and that everything about "loving thy enemy" goes in one ear and out the other.

We've only been through two primaries and one caucus and there's already enough crazy for a whole year. And if you think the rest of the primary is going to be nuts, wait until the general election starts. The Barack X mouth foamers are going to go completely fucking batshit.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

An Actual Derangement

With Newt Gingrich winning the South Carolina primaries yesterday, the path to the GOP nomination has become quite muddied. It looks like this one is going to go on for awhile and Mitt's inevitability is now seriously in question.

As I watched former Speaker Gingrich's acceptance speech, I chuckled. The right always seems to have a great propensity for characterizing their opponents weaknesses in such a way that they end up explaining their insanity much more clearly. Remember when Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome?" Well, I think the right (as clearly seen last night in the form of Ginrgrich and his supporters) have some taken their warped perception of this Bush "derangement" and actually achieved more perfectly what Krauthammer was describing but with President Obama instead. Here is Newt's victory speech  in its entirety.


At about 12 minutes in, Newt starts talking about President Obama. He says that the "centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinksy?"

Uh...huh?

Who beyond right wing bloggers know what he is talking about? I suppose the Tea Party folks do as Saul Alinksy was required reading, not for "researching the enemy" but for their own organizational purposes.

"Radical left wingers and people that don't like the classical America?" What Obama is he talking about? The one who said this when he accepted his Nobel Peace prize?

The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

And has backed it up with actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya? I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

"Food stamp president?" Is that the one added 2.3 million private sector jobs and has reduced public sector employment by 600,000 jobs? The one who averted another Depression after the mess Bush and the GOP left us in back in 2008? Again, I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

"An american president who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country" This is so unbelievably ridiculous that I'm at a loss for words.

"President Obama is a president so weak that he makes Jimmy Carter look strong." Let's see...bin Laden=dead. Al Alawki=dead. Hundreds of sorties by drones in Pakistan. Gaddafi=dead. Al Qaeda significantly damaged with ongoing US attacks. And a back channel warning from the president to the Supreme Leader of Iran which was repeated later in public. “We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said. “That’s another red line for us and … we will respond to them.” Again, I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

It's obvious that Newt and much of the right have created a fictional Obama...one that is all these things...because they can't run against the real one.  It's much more appropriate to characterize their's as derangement when you compare their fictional creation with the anger and frustration that formed over the very clear incompetence from the Bush Administration which ended up costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of debt, it's not even a fucking contest.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Iowa Post Mortem

I think the results last night in Iowa speak volumes. The GOP is split into three distinct groups. First, you have the business wing/old guard who support Mitt Romney, the winner by a mere 8 votes. Then you have Rick Santorum who represents the conservative evangelical and came in second. Finally, the libertarian wing, represented by Ron Paul who came in third but managed to garner 28, 219 votes (around 3,000 less than Romney and Santorum). I honestly thought that Paul would pull it out considering the lack of campaigning Romney has done in Iowa. If he had won, though, the Iowa Caucuses would've become less relevant and more of a joke. I certainly wouldn't want that as most of my in laws live there and I have grown quite fond of the Hawkeye state.

This split tells me that the right is going to have some serious problems on its hand in the future. Taken alone, each of these wings can't mount a national election capable of beating most Democrats. And they don't seem to function well together with the libertarian wing despising the old guard as much as they do the Democrats. This libertarian wing is also filled with young people who don't much like social conservatism either and they're honest about it as opposed to the old guard who snickers behind their backs at how useful the conservative Christians are as puppets. Yet, they all need each other in order to be a party. It's this sort of dysfunction that usually erodes families to the point of very serious problems.

I still say the Mittster is going to be the nominee but it won't be easy. Two thirds of the base simply don't like him. But they are at least united in their hatred of Blackie McHitler who is on a mission to steal their luggage so at least that's something.