Here’s a good item, just posted to an aging comment-thread by the indefatigable JK:
Why Does the Republican Party Exist?
For some real political geekdom, read the last link in the article, on the highway-bill’s pension gimmick.
Also just in from JK: this explanation of Donald Trump’s surging popularity.
16 Comments
Ben Domenech kvetches about Iran, Planned Parenthood, the Ex-Im Bank, and the highway bill.
If he opposes the Iran deal, what is his alternative?
If he opposes medical research using fetal tissue, what is the justification for abandoning promising research seeking cures for intractable diseases?
If he opposes the Ex-Im Bank, what would he tell GE or Boeing workers whose jobs moved to Canada, or small business owners who can no longer sell to third world countries?
If he opposes the highway bill, and presumably opposes raising the gas tax from its 1993 level, why does he think we shouldn’t repair our roads?
Anyone can kvetch. Apparently, that is all Domenech can do.
Not taking the bait this time. We’ve been over all this before. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
I have wondered why the R party exists myself. As the Federalist piece says, slavery is defeated-at least that slavery of the mid 19th century. The Union was preserved whether a third of it wanted to be or not. More recently in the 20th century, Communism has been defeated…well for now anyway. The Republican party is a structure that exists without much purpose other than “at least we ain’t them”. With the Left in control of what used to be the Democratic Party, it has at least a goal–serve its clients. Those being the very rich and powerful, the well off, and then the very poor and dependent. The well off beg the very rich for money so they can appeal to poor people in order to gain their votes.
This set up works. For the Republican party to have a mission, it needs to point out that Democrats have once again enslaved black people and too many poor people, that it has acted as supreme master over unborn children and even the protector of those who would act as plantation over seer in the disposal of their human property…right down to harvesting useful body parts.
The Republican party would need to speak plainly what most of middle America knows: our preserved union is at risk because of lawless government and the allowance of unchecked illegal immigration to render meaningless the idea of American Citizenship. This is being done deliberately. Finally, the defeat of communism? Really? I have written here before that the Cold War has never really ended. One phase of it has. It was a sad and depressing day for American Liberals and the Left especially. The 1990s saw the defeated players reform, retool and relocate right here in America. The final battle against communism was always going to be here with modern day Leninists owning the Democrat party and most of our major institutions.
Instead of being a clear voice of opposition to the re-emerging 19th century style ills brought to us by a morally corrupt “Democratic” party and its lust for total power, the establishment Republicans and their allies have thrown in with the Democrats. The political war will have to first be within and then to the enemy without.
Angelo Codevilla’s book also describes the rest of us as The Country Party. These are independents, Republicans and some Democrats whose members embody the ideas and habits that made America great. The Ruling Class needs disrupting. Whether it be the various TEA Parties, Ted Cruz, Trump, Tom Cotton, Congressman Mark Meadows from my home state, anybody sick and tired of the Unified Ruling Class.
You may’ve not noticed Whitewall (I doubt it though) as you’ve typed, “The Country Party” as opposed to the Country-Club Party – whether that was purposed without your saying so I, cannot discern.
I know this, Washington DC is “Country Club.”
JK, I was reading the blurb about Angelo’s book and saw “country party”…us. You’re right…DC is Country Club alright. Souls are sold to become a member. Seems I recall in Angelo’s book the term “country class” as well. That being us as opposed to them.
This has nothing to do with getting it (as though any argument can be refuted with ad hominem). Domenech’s positions are riddled with contradictions. It’s not as though he has a weak argument. He has no argument at all.
You cannot proclaim that you want to prevent Iran from getting a bomb, when the only thing stopping Iran from becoming nuclear in 2016 is the deal we have. You cannot proclaim that you are pro-life, and then try to eliminate medical research using fetal tissue. You cannot rail against “job killing legislation,” and then praise legislation which kills jobs. You cannot ridicule the accounting presitidigitation in the House highway bill, without recognizing that a political party led by Grover Norquist not only refuses to raise usage fees in real terms, but won’t even raise them in nominal terms from 1993 levels.
You don’t have to take the bait; that’s fine. These are all perfectly reasonable questions, and they show the fatuities in Domenech’s rant. Present a conservative with facts and logic, and it’s like dousing the Wicked Witch of the West with water.
And synonynmically
The Wretched Warlock of the Left needs to find some way to explain to a California 911 operator he’s afflicted, perhaps fatally with dilutional hyponatremia.
“All wet” probably ain’t gonna get an ambulance to roll – maybe the PD if only because there’s the possibility of reasonable suspicion he’s used more than 3.5 gallons of water running the dishwasher.
No doubt Mr. Domenech would give the same answers to the questions posed above that our host, or any traditional conservative, would:
1) That no deal with Iran is better than one that makes them flush with cash, immediately opens the door to prosperous trading, gives them a clear path to nuclear arms, and commits the U.S. to defending that nuclear program against attack or sabotage;
2) That medical research can make do without our government’s actively subsidizing the murder and gruesome dismemberment of near-term babies and the cold-blooded hawking of their remains;
3) That there is no reason whatsoever for the hard-working taxpayers of America’s middle class to have their pockets picked to provide fiscal assistance to gigantic international corporations;
4) That interstate-highway infrastructure maintenance, being one of the few legitimate activities of the Federal government, should be able to be paid for without the need for pork-laden legislation that depends on accounting fraud to make the numbers add up. Surely a nation that could pay for its highway system in the 1950’s, when adjusted revenue was far less than it is today, can find the funds somewhere in the folds of its grotesque obesity to perform this necessary function. If this means cutting or eliminating funding elsewhere, so much the better.
No, Peter, this has everything to do with “getting it”, in the sense that choosing a position on any complex issue involves valuations and priorities, affinities and aversions, that are axiomatic and personal. When I said that you “don’t get it”, I mean that you have demonstrated again and again in these threads that we have so little common ground with regard to these axioms and valuations that arguing about them is almost always completely fruitless.
Furthermore, your appeal to “logic” is laughable even on its own terms, as when you write:
Of course you can — and should! — beginning with the simple fact that the program you defend destroys the lives of more than a million innocent unborn humans each year: over 53 million since 1973.
For perspective, that’s more children snuffed out than the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, the District of Columbia, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Kansas, Utah, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, and Oregon.
On the other side of the balance is some “promising” medical research. Whether embryonic stem-cell research has saved any lives at all is questionable. (Adult stem cells have, but of course they are easily available without murdering and butchering the unborn.)
So: on the one hand, 53 million innocent lives intentionally terminated. (That’s more than eight Holocausts.) On the other, some “promising” ideas that depend on the taking, and grisly desecration, of human life for their further exploration. The “pro-life” position seems quite self-evidently clear, I think. It is one thing to argue that this slaughter shall remain legal, but it is quite another to insist that taxpayers fund it.
But, as I said, you just don’t get it. And this is why I am so reluctant to take the troll-bait.
Not germane to the original thread, but a comment on the “abortion” issue in the micro, which handily demonstrates a typical paradigm shift in the left’s argument.
Long ago, as a young woman, I followed the abortion debate rather closely, being very gung-ho for “women’s rights”. Yes, yours truly, libertybelle, held many liberal views on social issues. Abortion began as an issue centered on the “viability of the fetus”. The Left sold this argument that “the fetus” was just a bunch of cells, not viable outside the womb, and therefore not a human life.
Science advanced and the “viability” issue timeline in human gestation grew, as doctors could save more previously “non-viable” fetuses”. So the Left changed the terms of the debate, to “a woman’s right to choose”, deftly sidestepping the “viability” issue, which had become problematic for them to argue.
When the real issues creep into the Left’s argument, in the macro, they invariably change the terms of the debate, through pervasive propaganda campaigns where they introduce the new, accepted terminology. They are always arguing for issues cloaked as giving a voice to a powerless group, whereas the Right spends its time arguing against the Left, following the Left’s terms and terminology.
A champion of the little guy or a the champion of the status quo is how it plays out.
Libertybelle,
Even a full-term newborn isn’t “viable” without round-the-clock support.
Right, JD – as we see here: in constant dollars the Federal government in 1956, when the Interstate Highway system began, took in less than a quarter of what it takes in today. It managed to pay for the highway system then; it should be able to do so now.
Heck Malcolm,
I’d wager +/-70% of the US population … and apparently +/-90% of the Ex/Im’s largesse isn’t “viable” without round-the-clock support either.
And there you have it: our people as the Great Infant, and Washington as the Great Tit.
Pair of Tits Malcolm.
Remember we’ve got *two* Parties.
(Admitting that mighta taken more than one succinct line.)