The "weak" GOP.

For the GOP are they going the way of the
Dinosaurs ?

The Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan wrote recently how the Iraq war may have damaged the Republican party as a whole. The Truth is far from the war. The Republican party it's self is "burned out" , if you look at some of the Republican's themselves with the exception of Mitt Romney , they all sound like Sarah Palin . If that's the case the GOP is full of young Reagan wannabees who have 
" conservatism" so wrapped up like a Gordian knot that the party has no flexibility on any issues. Conservatives are doubling down on the same thing they've done for the last four years. Their biggest problem isn't the President, their biggest problem is the rift in the party that is being caused by American demographics and social views shifting towards more Democratic views while "Tea Party" types are pulling in the opposite direction. One side of the Republican split is going to have to give up on these issues and secede them to the Democratic Party which has the electoral calculus on its side. Given the Republican warming to immigration reform that virtually mirrors the President's plan, it seems the TP Republicans are the ones that are going to have to put a sock in it. Next, it'll be bills like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and same-sex marriage, unless the courts manage to save Republicans the trouble and declare DOMA and Prop 8 unconstitutional.

Peggy Noonan added :

NOONAN: You know, I tend to think that the go GOP's central problems have to do with things we don't talk all that much about. One is what happened in 2008 and the continuing repercussions of the crash. The repercussions where the party stands, what its positions are on how to create growth, that is becoming in part within the party, a rising disagreement -- not disagreement, but a rising difference of emphasis between those who are saying the way we have to go is growth right now and those who are saying we've got to handle this debt and deficit thing. They're sort of different approaches.
Another is that I think the Republican Party has to make clear what its foreign policy is. It has had two wars for the past 12 years, people are still settling in and thinking -- I mean, the voters have said, we don't like that. We're not for that. The Republican Party has to make clear what it stands for and it's going to have to have a little bit of debate to get there.So I think those two big things, and the policies that spring from them, will make all of the difference and so will an eventual compelling presidential candidate, somebody who is involved right now is going to work his way through. At the end of the day, it is the candidates who resolve a lot of unresolved things by taking a stand and speaking for forcefully for it.

The Voter's sent a message with the Obama
win .

Most of  all the GOP has  a lot of weak candidates that ran for  for office . Read a few statistics about the "Red" States.  They are the least educated, the fattest, the most divorced, have the highest poverty rates and suck the most assistance out of the Federal Government...consistently taking more out than they pay in.  So you can add to those statistics.."the most ignorant" . Most all the dirty laundry has been at the GOP's door step . Recently . The Office of Congressional Ethics is investigating alleged "improprieties" in Michele Bachmann's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, according to the Daily Beast's John Avlon. I always get a chuckle when I see the words Senate and Ethics combined in the same sentence. It seems that the Party has fizzed out . In today's Washington Post, Republican scribe Michael Gerson makes yet another case for Republican reform: A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors. First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is necessary, particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia.

So I beat up the GOP here, next I am tell you about The Democratic Party. Until then............

NOTES & COMMENTS:

The war bankrupted the country, financially at home and politically on the world stage; confirmed the Middle East's worst fears of American imperialism and anything-goes-in-the-name-of-oil; gave haters reason to hate us; and gave a new generation of otherwise moderate Middle Easterners a reason to grow up disliking and mistrusting us, and to not feel terribly upset when American men, women and children were killed there or elsewhere. The war also marked the extreme rightward tilt of the Republican party (thank you for noting how the warmongers attacked the anti-war folks as unpatriotic. In retrospect, those who stood up to this were the true patriots, and those who beat the drums of war - especially those who profited from it, were the real traitors). The economic calamity at home that followed was exacerbated by the financial misadventure of the war, and gave the extreme right wing's anti-government voice the opportunity to further hobble those things that government can and should do well. Imagine how much weaker support for Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden would have been had there been no Iraq! Imagine how many hundreds of billions of dollars could have been saved, and how many thousands of lives could have been saved, had we not provided so much fuel for the Bin Laden hate. Imagine how much more achievable Middle East peace would have become. Imagine the hundreds of billions of dollars that could have instead either never been spent, or could have been invested in America's future (affordable college, early childhood intervention [healthcare, literacy, etc], repair of crumbling infrastructure).

So many of the challenges we'll face for the next generation will be traced back to this war as the tipping point where Republicans (and Democrats too) sold out America. It will be seen as the moment America lost her way trying to serve as the world's oil-protecting policeman, all while the rest of the world invested at home to educate their kids to kick our butts on the world economic stage.

It's time for Republican's and Democrats alike to admit that blind ideals of American exceptionalism are counterproductive to our future. We're fast becoming a third rate country by so many measures: graduation rates, literacy, math skills, the number of engineers/scientists/mathematicians graduated per year, infant mortality. Wake up people. Better days are ahead only if we own up to what needs to be fixed.