The current Republican Party
The Republican Party Civil War, which we have been talking about for many years, hit a critical point yesterday, as U.S. House members kicked Congresswoman Liz Cheney out of her number three House leadership post as House Republican Conference Chair. Cheney’s crime was simply to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and declare that Joe Biden is America’s legitimately accepted president, as every U.S. state formally has done, thus rejecting the “Big Lie” promoted by Donald Trump that his 7 million popular vote, 74 electoral vote loss to Biden in the 2020 election was somehow the result of a massive fraud. Trump even fomented an unprecedented, deadly terrorist attack on our U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election results based on his Big Lie. Not coincidentally, this week, more than 100 Republican former office holders, including cabinet members, national security officials, ambassadors, state governors and others, are threatening to leave the GOP and form a third party. According to this group, “forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism” are threatening to take over the Republican Party, putting our country’s freedoms at risk. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the Republican Party has moved well beyond “disarray” (a favorite word that the mainstream media frequently and incorrectly apply to the Democrats) and into full-blown crisis.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2012 elections, 2020 Election, Autopsy Report, Big Lie, Congress, Donald Trump, GOP, insurrection, January 6, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney, Republicans, U.S. Capitol, U.S. House
Donald Trump, GOP destroyer
First it was Donald Trump destroying the Republican Party brand by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” denigrating John McCain‘s military service and calling a female professional who had to pump breast milk for her baby “disgusting.” But as Trump has surged in GOP polls and sucked all the air out of the room, other Republican presidential candidates have had to scramble for attention. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham pulled stunts involving chain saws, fire and baseball bats. But Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie apparently have decided the best way to compete with Trump is to out-Trump Trump in making outrageous statements.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2012 elections, 2016 Elections, Bridgegate, Chris Christie, Donald Trump, GOP, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Morning Joe, MSNBC, Rand Paul, Republican Party
Jeb Bush embraces his brother George W. Bush
President Barack Obama‘s 2012 re-election campaign created a narrative against Willard Mitt Romney early, and this narrative (“Mr. Moneybags/Elite/1%”) was hugely successful. The Obama campaign followed Messaging Maxim #4: Feed the Narrative. Now, in 2015, Republicans are already actively running against Hillary Clinton, the current front-runner for the Democratic Party 2016 Presidential nomination. It’s time to do the same thing and begin defining John Ellis (“Jeb”) Bush, the current Republican Party front-runner. There are plenty of examples that prove Bush is another Republican far-right extremist who would be bad for America:
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The best political communication in the world ultimately won’t help politicians if their actions don’t match their rhetoric. President George H.W. Bush learned this lesson when he campaigned in 1988 on “read my lips, no new taxes” and then lost both credibility with and votes from Republicans when, as President, he signed a tax increase. The Republican Party and President Obama each face similar challenges today.
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A couple of actions by Congressional Republicans hours apart this past Tuesday night and Wednesday morning demonstrated how the Republican Party is in open warfare with itself. First, House Republicans were sharply divided in their vote to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, atypically, did not make a speech on the House floor in support of the vote. Boehner’s second in command, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, not only voted against his speaker and the fiscal cliff deal, he spoke out against it for all to hear. The Republican fiscal cliff vote tally in the House went against Speaker Boehner, with only 85 voting “yea” and 151 voting “nay” (the bill passed due to the overwhelming Democratic “yea” vote). This follows an embarrassing failure by Boehner to bring his own fiscal cliff “plan B” bill up for a vote in the House on December 20.
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It has been Republican dogma for the past several years or longer that “we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” Kowtowing to private citizen Grover Norquist and his “no tax increase in any form, under any circumstances” pledge, Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have heretofore rejected any kind of balanced approach to shrinking the U.S. debt and deficit that involves raising revenues in any way. In one famous moment at their August 11, 2011 debate in Iowa, the Republican presidential candidates all rejected even a hypothetical solution that consisted of a ten to one ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. However, in the wake of their considerable defeat in the 2012 elections, the Republican wall against raising revenues is now crumbling.
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