A Blog Around The Clock

You have been Expelled.

No, not by me, by your own party.

The Republican party is now a clown car.

The sane, thoughtful conservatives have left it over the years, some prominent ones quite publicly last year, either more openly by stating they are leaving GOP, or a little more carefully, by endorsing Obama for President.

What is left are racist, sexist, homophobic, femiphobic, xenophobic, Creationist, authoritarian, theocratic, cowardly scuzbuckets like Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Bobby Jindal, Steve Sailer, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter and Joe The Plumber.

And the lowlife that came to Palin events to drool at her.

And the most insane Republicans in Congress. The sane ones lost their elections. None of them are left in the House. A couple of them still in the Senate, but will have to switch to Independent if they want to get re-elected in their Blue states. The brand is THAT damaged.

Their platform? Make fun of everything that normal people want.

Good luck with that.

People are judged by who they are friends with. Do you want to be associated with those lunatics?

Why didn’t you get the memo you were Expelled? Because they are too high on endogenous hallucinogens. And they still hope to get your vote. One thing they have no interest in whatsoever are your ideas.

Think about it. What can you do?

Get together with other sane conservatives and try to wrestle the party from those cretins? Good luck.

Get together with other sane conservatives and try to take over another party, e.g., Libertarians? Good luck.

Get together with other sane conservatives and try to form another party? Good luck.

Each of the above three scenarios will produce a party that is almost indistinguishable from the Democrats, who have firmly taken the Center. Tough to compete with a copycat against the Real McCoy. Anything even a little to the right of them is, right now, bordering on insane and totally unpopular because all those ideas have been tried over the past 40 years and each one of them failed miserably.

Join the Democrats? As they are so corporate and straight in the middle, and unlikely, constitutionally (in the sense of their own mindset, not the highest law of the country), to ever move Left, that may be your best bet.

Or just go Independent and watch as the US political ecosystem evolves.

Obama has been the President for just a month. Give it a few more months and watch. It is quite possible that we are entering a very different world.

In this new world, we will have to forget the idea that there are two opposing parties keeping each other in check (even if one of them is full of shit on everything). In it, it will be us keeping check on our elected representatives. In such a world, parties and party affiliation will not be as important as they have been to date. It will take us some time to get used to the idea and to start using it well.

People who get this new world will be relevant in it. Those who don’t will be left behind. GOP will continue to be irrelevant as their modus vivendi is the hating of Democrats and laughing at words they think are funny.

The MSM will be irrelevant as they are still paying attention to what GOP-ers say (as if anyone cares), give them equal time (as if their opinions touch reality), or wonder how the Republicans will stage a come-back (as if this is some kind of inevitable Law Of Nature that this will ever happen).

In the meantime, if you don’t want to be laughed at, quit the GOP. You REALLY don’t want to be associated with that amount of hate, idiocy and obstructionism, do you?

Comments

#1 Joshua Zelinsky
March 1, 2009

I’m pretty sure that Gingrich isn’t a creationist. He certainly has problems but to lump in the same category as Joe the Plumber, Palin or Steve Sailor seems uncalled for.
#2 Coturnix
March 1, 2009

Gingrich is the worst of them. He is also the most dangerous of them because the MSM for years let pass the Rightwingnut notion that he is a “thinker” or someone worth listening to for more than a milisecond (in order to laugh). Remember, the meltdown you see around us – that’s 50% his doing (the other 50% are the folks that came after him and sealed the deal).
#3 Pierce R. Butler
March 1, 2009

There has been no reason for any informed, rational person who wishes well for the United States to become or stay a member of the Republican Party since Nixon’s 1968 campaign.

Since 2000, the Republicans have been wrong about, to a first approximation, everything: their wars, the economy, the Constitution, education, environment, health, science, on and on. Policies aside, they’ve insisted that the most important political factor is “character” – then offered George, Dick, Donald, Karl, John, Sarah, Brownie, L. Paul, Trent, Newt, and so many more.

None of which makes the complacent and complaisant Democrats any better, it should be needless to say.
#4 Coturnix
March 1, 2009

We had some interesting discussions about these things on FriendFeed over the weekend – see this, this and this.
#5 ~C4Chaos
March 1, 2009

woke up on the wrong side of the bed, eh? maybe you should give Don Lemon a piece of your mind http://twitter.com/donlemoncnn/status/1267800370
#6 Coturnix
March 1, 2009

THanks. I just did.
#7 Scott
March 1, 2009

You’re a bit harsh on them, but essentially correct. I’m a life long Republican; even voted for Shrub the first time because I thought he would be like his dad. But, oh boy was I wrong. I don’t think I’ve changed that much, but the Republican Party left me behind a long time ago as they kept moving farther to the right. They’ve lost me for good.
#8 Rob Jase
March 2, 2009

I left the party when Reagan & his voodoo economics came in. Goldwater & Ike would never recognise this evil charicature of their party.
#9 Coriolis
March 2, 2009

Eh I think the more likely solution will be a democratic move to the left, thus leaving more space in the middle for actual moderate republicans. Unlike what we have now with the democrats in the center, the semi-sane republicans on the right and the majority of the republicans being insane.

It’s certainly not happening right now, but I think it could, eventually.
#10 Greg
March 2, 2009

Spent my whole life right of center. That part of the playground scares me now. Spent my childhood in Canada, so some of the evils of so-called “socialism” aren’t actually as scary to me as they are to others, but at the end of the day, I have to give the Democrats credit for having an INTELLECT in the oval office. Political crazies aside, this might be a change that’s at least worth watching.
#11 Rich
March 2, 2009

We’re gone now from the party. I’ve kept my party affiliation as a firewall against the crazies in the primaries. Having seen the wingnuts up close and personal had an interesting effect. I had assumed that being a moderate Republican mapped to being a conservative Democrat. Not so. It maps to moderate Democrat. I found I was to the left of the Blue Dogs.
#12 Comrade PhysioProf
March 2, 2009

I’m pretty sure that Gingrich isn’t a creationist. He certainly has problems but to lump in the same category as Joe the Plumber, Palin or Steve Sailor seems uncalled for.

HAhAhAHAHAHAHAH!!! More apologetics!! Dude, it’s delusional and/or lying “moderates” like you that bear primary responsibility for enabling the real off-the-deep-end wackaloon sick-fuck Republicans to have driven this nation into the motherfucking ditch. Get a fucking grip!
#13 DaleP
March 2, 2009

You said:
In this new world, we will have to forget the idea that there are two opposing parties keeping each other in check (even if one of them is full of shit on everything). In it, it will be us keeping check on our elected representatives. In such a world, parties and party affiliation will not be as important as they have been to date.
—————-

This is closer to what the founders had in mind. They set up so many competing centers of power, in order to make it harder for coherent parties to form. The contest necessary for good government would develop for each issue separately from the competing interest groups. They enabled limited government in order to make it easier for people to hold their representatives accountable. Parties quickly formed anyway. It will be remarkable if their experiment in self-government is revived in some measure today.
#14 Leonard Williams
March 2, 2009

WHEN I THINK OF THE MODERN DAY REPUBLICANS, I THINK OF SARAH PALIN, AND HOW CLOSE SHE COULD HAVE BEEN TO LIVING IN THE WHITE HOUSE. THAT’S SCARY, AND THE WHOLE WORLD WOULD BE WATCHING. I THINK OF ALL THE “WINGNUTS,” WHO WERE DROOLING AT HER EVERY MOVEMENT, AND READY TO CALL DECENT MAN A TERRORIST, WHILE DISPLAYING AN ATTACK DOG MENTALITY. THE REPUBLICANS WERE PREACHING ABSTINENCE, AND FAMILY VALUES, BUT WHEN PALIN’S DAUGHTER BECAME THE CENTER OF ATTENTION DUE TO UNPROTECTED SEX, ALL OF A SUDDEN, A PREGNANT TEENAGER WAS ABOUT TO BRING JOY INTO THE FAMILY. SUCH A DISCONNECT. PALIN’S INTERVIEWS WITH KATIE AND CHARLIE GIBSON WERE EYE OPENERS TOO, BUT IT DIDN’T SEEM TO HAVE ANY NEGATIVE EFFECT ON HER “POSSE.” THESE “NUT” WOULD FOLLOW HER THROUGH A FOREST FIRE WEARING KEROSENE JACKETS. I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHY..
#15 Michael Tobis
April 28, 2009

I hope you are right but I think the talks of realignment is premature. Obama won the popular by less than 8 %; a reversal in one vote out of every 25 would swing it the other way.

His high standing in the polls is likely to reverse as the fact that the economy has completely changed state becomes clear. His promises to restore the country to a long term growth trajectory are almost as hopeless as they are misguided. Hanging his hat on the economy is bad enough, throwing his hat in with conventional economists may be worse.

Most of the US public does not think clearly, and continues to be befuddled by vapid nonsense from the press and paranoid lunacy from the grass roots. Anger, viciousness, hostility, and xenophobia mixed with gullibility and mob mentality remain strong forces.

So I hope you are right, but I fear that the worst is yet to come.
#16 Coturnix
April 28, 2009

Who will run, and on what platform? It is us vs. government now, not Reps vs. Dems. Once the media realizes this (or dies), people will realize it as well.

Their only hope is Governors, and a slow/painful cleansing of rightwing fanatics from the party. Tough luck on that as they are in charge and the reasonable people are gone or kicked out, not having anything close to the numbers needed to stage a coup d’etat within the party and set it on a more rational trajectory.