Posted on 09/19/2005 5:53:37 AM PDT by shortstop
Hillary Clinton will win the White House because the Republicans have stopped being Republicans.
Not to diminish her significant abilities and political savvy, but she can campaign til the cows come home and never earn more than 49 percent of the vote on her own.
The margin of victory won’t come from Democrats, it will come from disaffected Republicans.
Not Republicans who are really Democrats, but Republicans who are really Republicans. There aren’t many of them anymore, but they are a swing vote, and they’ve always swung the GOP’s way.
And who knows, maybe there’s enough fear and hatred of Hillary Clinton still bumping around to make conservatives hold their noses and vote for Anybody But Clinton. It’s worked before, and it might work again.
But there’s precious little to recommend the Republican Party to conservatives. It has spurned them, adopting their rhetoric at election time but abandoning it in office.
And by conservatives I mean people who have read and understood the Constitution. People who know what the Founding Fathers were after and have seen those principles guide our nation successfully since. By conservatives I mean people who know what America is supposed to be about, who lean more toward Jefferson and Madison than Marx and Engells.
There is an ever-shrinking knot of people who remember and revere the American spirit and ethic. The freedom-loving, individualistic values which defined this country are increasingly forgotten and spurned.
Even by the Republican Party.
As evidenced by the president’s speech last week from New Orleans.
It would have been a good speech from a Democrat, but from a Republican it was a betrayal. It called for an unrestrained increase in federal spending and a massive increase of federal power while simultaneously sabotaging local control and individual responsibility.
In one fell swoop it saddled our children and grandchildren with additional hundreds of billions of dollars of suffocating debt.
We have a going-nowhere war that is hemorrhaging our federal treasury, a giant free-pills-for-gramma program that will do exactly the same, and now we have the federal government assuming every cost for cleaning up this hurricane, remedying past racial wrongs and providing big new welfare benefits to people who refused to follow an evacuation order.
It makes you wonder where all that money is supposed to come from.
The sad answer is that in the short term it will come from foreign lenders who will then hold the note on America’s future economic vitality. In the long term it will come from even higher taxes for us, our children and their children.
It will sap our liberty and vitality.
And all this came from a Republican president and a Republican Congress.
It was Tom DeLay, supposed conservative Republican leader of the House, who said that the bloated, immoral and fundamentally socialist federal budget had no more room for cuts. He said that everything that could be cut out of it had been cut out of it.
It was, of course, a preposterous statement, a sign of just how dead the Republican spirit has become. Being conservative has been reduced by manipulative party hacks to nothing more than the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments. The principles of small government, free people, individual responsibility and balanced budgets have gone out the window, replaced by warmed over – and enslaving – European-style socialism.
There are no Democrats to blame for this one. As loathsome and wrong as they may be, this can’t be blamed on Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy or Clinton. This is our mess. This is a Republican mess.
And we’re supposed to forget that on election day? We’re supposed to drool like Pavlov’s dogs at the midterm election, to strengthen the GOP hold on Congress, and then line up to elect whoever the party puts up for president?
How dumb do they think we are?
How desperate do they think we are?
Unfortunately, the fact may remain that we will find ourselves so desperate that, like a beaten wife returning to her abuser, we will take the devil we know over the devil we don’t know.
But there will be a loss of enthusiasm, a reluctant vigor, a lack of zeal and commitment.
And that could give Hillary her two or three percent.
And she will have won the White House because the Republicans stopped being Republicans.
Mark my word.
If spending is the only issue we're talking about.
There are other problems as well; I only mentioned one. The prescription drug handout was as bad as a significant chunk of Hillary Care(tm). Failure ever to veto anything, including McCain Feingold and some other unconstitutional doozies, is also quite bad. The decision to rebuild NO is a bigger unconstitutional federal project than anything Bill Clinton did. The PATRIOT Act contains more threats to our liberties than anything Clinton signed.
This guy is worse than the alternative, and that's saying a lot. The only area in which he's better than his liberal counterparts is personal integrity.
Not to worry, in the coming 3-way race in '08, you'll have your opportunity to vote for a conservative or a Republican. It's the only way Hillary will be able to win with 40% or less of the vote.
Name one threat to our liberty in the Patriot Act.
Weakening the fourth amendment is an attack on my liberty, even if, for the next 50 years, it is only ever used against actual guilty terrorists. Our freedom is compromised in the name of safety.
The Patriot Act doesn't give the government any power contra terrorists that it hasn't always had versus, say, mafia dons. If you consider a court-ordered wiretap an intolerable intrusion on your rights, you need to take your anger several decades before the Patriot Act.
BZZZZZZZZZT! Sorry, the correct answer was, "The ability to seize records held by third parties without warrant, notification, subpeona or probable cause does violate the fourth Amendment." But thank you for playing!
you need to take your anger several decades before the Patriot Act.
Oh, I never said the Patriot Act was the beginning of the police state. That's hard to trace exactly--Washington's provocation of the Whiskey Rebellion was a step over the line, as was the Louisiana Purchase... and of course Lincoln killed and buried federalism...
Where does that appear in the Patriot Act? The most controversial section that I'm aware of is the one that allows law enforcement to delay notification that a search has been performed, with permission from a judge. The idea being to prevent tipping off co-conspirators. This has apparently been used in practice in law enforcement for years; the Act just codifies it. They have to get a court order first, and they have to 'fess up eventually.
Again, we might argue whether this goes too far, but it's not new.
And what did we get? A gutted military and 9/11.
You're right about that--but the conclusion isn't that we should "shoot for the moon" and try to hit $3 trillion in 2008. Almost all of the spending Bush authorized is completely unconstitutional, much of it pork. He could have cut the budget to half a trillion and still beefed up the military.
You're almost correct. But the Rat party has moved so far to the left in recent years. But the GOP and the Rat Party of 10 years ago, I would say, yes there isn't much difference.
In fact, the GOP is mostly run today by what we used to call "Scoop Jackson Democrats." Hawkish in international affairs, but liberal fiscally.
And she will have won the White House because the Republicans stopped being Republicans.
Mark my word.
Except, of course, that we are simply too dumb to ever wise up. We'll keep pulling the 'R' lever like a battered wife returning to her husband, who promises he'll stop drinking so much and won't beat her anymore. Deep down we know the abuse won't really stop, but even deeper we secretly think we deserve it.
Conservatives are to Republicans as blacks are to Democrats.
I think, they meant, that, both may have some deep flaws, better vote for the lesser of 2 evils.
Your interpratation of their meaning is correct.
However, I will never, ever compromise my values and "vote" for the lesser of two evils again.
ever
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