Republicans, a ship of fools

http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/11/republicans-ship-of-fools.html

The Economist’s wake up Call to Republicans
they call the Republicans a Ship of fools

Mike Ghouse,
a Moderate Republican in Dallas, Texas

The Economist is calling the Republicans to “wake up”, (the article follows) and I hope they listen. I have made several calls over the last year, Dick Armey has called it too, and they still are not in touch with the public. They are sold on the foolish idea that the world peace comes from eliminating those who disagree with them, they simply don’t realize that as long we keep threatening others, we cannot be secure and safe.

There is a dire need in our country to have opposition; all the three branches of government are run by one party now, and it is dangerous, as dangerous as it has been in the last eight years.

The last few decades have been disastrous with the agenda of the extremists among Republicans, and they talk about this base, the kind that gathered in McCain election rallies who wanted to do wrong to the leader of the opposition party and foul mouthed. As the Economists put its and I add, all the intelligent people are distancing themselves from the Republican party or have remained silent.

We have to flush out the GOP from the ones who have destroyed our party, our nation, our economy and the respect we have had earned in the community of nations. They have parroted the idea of conservatism without knowing what it is and George Will had rightly pointed it that out to them. We were extremely liberal when it came to fiscal policy, reckless when it came to relationship with the members of the world community and had expanded the government like never before and McCain blew it when he talked about our government buying the houses and yet he called that one, a socialist.

The moderates should become the base and earn the right to govern, the overwhelming majority of American public is moderate who believes in live and let live and who want to get along with every one and enjoy the God given life.

The following members of the Republican party need to consider sitting on the side lines or taking a vacation and let the Republican Party survive; Cheney, Bush, McCain, Rumsfield, Romney, Giuliani and Palin – if they are in the front line, GOP is probably doomed.

The Neocon policy makers have made America and Israel less safe and secure, and have diminished the prospects of peace for a long time to come. They have made their wealth by selling fear and hate and that was their business, and the foolish Republican leadership bought it. We don’t need their advice any more; it has done nothing but wrong. They are the reason we do not have peace in the Middle East, they are the reason we have wars, they are the reason Israel is not secure and they are the reason we have become a part to some of the wrong in the world, be it in Iraq or Palestine.

We the moderate Republicans owe it to our nation and to our democracy to bring the opposition at least in Senate or the House in 2010, and we have to take back the party from the fake conservatives.

I would spend my time on re-building the Republican Party, however negligible my contribution may be. I will be a loud voice to stand up against the short sighted, unstable, chaotic ideas of few in our party. A majority of Republicans are good people and our leadership need to reflect that.

A few of my articles on the subject, a total of 30 were written:

1. http://www.mikeghouse.net/Articles/Savingthe-Republican-Party.asp


2. http://www.mikeghouse.net/Articles/Republicans-Please-put-America-First.asp


3. http://www.mikeghouse.net/Articles/Republican-or-Democrat-which-way.asp


4. http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2007/03/republicans-paid-price-for-neglect.html


5. http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2007/05/republicans-are-screwed.html


6. http://mikeghouse.net/Articles/John-Mcain-the-Bush-lite-Neocon.asp


7. http://mikeghouse.net/Articles/John-McCain.asp


8. http://www.mikeghouse.net/Articles/Will-John-McCain-have-the-decency-to-apologize.asp

Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker and a Writer. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing interfaith, political and civic issues. His comments, news analysis and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website www.MikeGhouse.net. Mike is a Dallasite for nearly three decades and Carrollton is his home town. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com

Republicans, a Ship of fools

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Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12599247

Political parties die from the head down

Illustration by KAL

JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

Time for reflection
How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).

But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.
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