Posted on 03/25/2013 10:12:07 AM PDT by jazusamo
Many ideas presented as "new" are just rehashes of old ideas that have been tried before — and have failed before. So it is no surprise that the recent "Growth and Opportunity Project" report to the Republican National Committee is a classic example of what previous generations called "Me too" Republicanism.
These are Republicans who think that the key to winning elections is to do more of what the Democrats are doing. In effect, they say "me too" on issues such as immigration, in hopes of gaining more new votes than they lose by betraying their existing supporters.
In the wake of last year's presidential election debacle for the Republicans, the explanation preferred by "moderate" Republicans has been that the GOP has been too narrowly ideological, and needs to reach out to minorities, women and young people, rather than just to conservatives.
In the words of the "Growth and Opportunity Project," the problem is that conservative Republican candidates have been "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac."
But the report itself says that the Republicans' election problems have been at the national level, not at the state level, where a majority of the governors are Republicans. Are the Republican moderates suggesting that the reason Mitt Romney lost in 2012 is that he was driving around in a conservative cul-de-sac? Romney was as mushy a moderate as Senator John McCain was before him — and as many other Republican losers in presidential elections have been, going all the way back to the 1940s. The only Republican candidate who might fit the charge of being a complete conservative was Ronald Reagan, who won two landslide elections.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Reading Thomas Sowell makes you smarter
I wish HE would run for president
Tom Sowell and I agree completely on all this!
Polls and focus groups are not a substitute for thought.
You make a very good point. At times I think to myself that the column starts off a lttle slow but the further into it the better it gets.
I wrote a paper in graduate school about “the demise of journalistic storytelling.”
Everything needs to be encapsulated in a title, subtitle, by-line, or the first sentence of an essay anymore. It’s tragic how short everyone’s attention span has become.
I think back to Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn and the absolute walls of text, page to page, very few page breaks, but you are so engrossed in the narrative that you don’t notice.
Nowadays kids stop reading if there are more than 3 lines of text.
The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell
1 - “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
2 - “I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s” money.”
3 - “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
4 - “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”
5 - “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
6 - “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
7 - “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”
8 - “I think this man (Obama) really does believe he can change the world, and people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians.”
9 - “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”
10 - “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”
11 - “Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.”
12 - “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
It gets worse even at the university level.
You’re telling me! I spent several years slogging through the Liberal swamps. I was docked grades in many classes for ardently disagreeing and discrediting professors who viewed me as a threat for proving them wrong. I was force fed so much Liberal, Progressive, queer ideology that it’s a miracle I came out unscathed.
Those are classics...Thanks, IM.
Sowell always nails it. I really hate the GOP sometimes because to some extent it is the rich detatched idiots and their consultants that are screwing us in the grassroots. Id think they’d know something about marketing ideas but they don’t and that is the problem. Reagan and Newt Gingrich to a lesser degree understood how to sell ideas. People like Lee Atwater knew how to drive people into our camp and if they couldn’t drive them into our camp they alienated them from the other camp which is often just as important. Thankfully we have a few dozen Tea Party minded folks who are changing the game. Hopefully it will be soon enough.
So, it was a normal university experience for ya. ;-)
For the most part, yep. I went in a Republican and came out a conservative.
Another great article from Dr. Sowell. Thanks for the ping jaz.
Have I told anyone lately how much I admire and respect Dr. Sowell?
We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. It's name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God." -- Mark Twain
The term RINOs no longer fits since these idiots are in control of the party. Maybe we should call them unicorns instead because only in a fantasy world will their ideas get them the results they think they will.
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