Posted on 10/12/2013 10:56:54 AM PDT by DanMiller
The thrust of an October 10th article at PJ Media by its founding light, Roger L. Simon, is that Senator Cruz is destroying it. I disagree. Senator Cruz is doing his best to save what little is left of the Republican Party. It may be a lost cause
This has worked so well for Obama and RINOs that they have to do it some more.
According to this article at Commentary Magazine on the morning of October 11th,
If Washington conventional wisdom is right this morning, Republicans are about to start walking away from the ledge onto which they climbed with the government shutdown. Indications are that the House Republican proposals for a short-term extension of the debt ceiling will be the starting point for talks that will end the shutdown as well as ensure that the U.S. doesn’t default. It’s far from clear what the GOP will get in exchange for giving up their leverage over budget negotiations, but no one expects it to be much. If so, President Obama’s stonewalling tactics in which he dared the Republicans to shut down the government will be vindicated. And hardly a soul is talking about the fate of ObamaCare, the defunding of which was supposed to be the whole point of the exercise. [Emphasis added.]
Howard Nemerov posted an article titled Is the Republican Party Committing Suicide? on October 12th at PJ Tatler.
Now that the Republican party plans to “compromise” on Obamacare and the budget, the end is near for the pretense that we have a two party system.. . . .
[T]he GOP has capitulated to Obama’s demands. This, in itself, may not be a death blow, but you must understand the underlying consequences.
The GOP’s actions demonstrate that they accept total blame for the government shutdown, and that what they did was wrong. Three weeks ago, they said it was more important to defund Obamacare than to create a budget resolution. Today, they say that action was wrong, and that all of Obama’s demands were right.
The GOP has acknowledged that slimming down government spending, either through sequester cuts or by the government shutdown, was the wrong thing to do. They acknowledge by their actions that increased government spending and unrestricted government growth are the correct actions, which Obama and the Democrats have declared to be the right path for America.
The GOP’s actions declare to America that anybody who still believes in smaller, more fiscally accountable government has no place in America’s political landscape.
The GOP ostensibly claims support for the Second Amendment, as well as the rest of the Bill of Rights and Constitution. After Obamacare, what new “taxes” will they help dream up? As your tax load increases, do you think there will be money left for guns and ammo?
I agree. What need is there for a Republican Party that is an obedient clone of the Democrat Party? On the other hand, it may not yet have become that. According to this article, at Time-Swampland,
House Republicans left an early morning meeting in the basement of the Capitol on Saturday in agreement: the ball remains in the President’s court. “There is no deal. No negotiations,” said Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.).. . . .
House Republicans left an early morning meeting in the basement of the Capitol on Saturday in agreement: the ball remains in the President’s court. “There is no deal. No negotiations,” said Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.).
. . . .
“I went into the meeting thinking that we might be going to surrender to the President,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who, along with Gohmert and 10 other House Republicans, tried in January to take away the Speaker’s gavel. “What I got out of the meeting is that we’re still standing strong.” [Emphasis added.]
If Rep. Massie turns out to have been correct, and enough Republicans continue to stand strong, may they be fruitful and multiply. Maybe, just maybe, enough Republicans -- including even some RINOs -- are beginning to realize that since President Obama is "He Who Will Not Negotiate," yielding to His whims is senseless. Might the principled views of Senator Cruz have had a role in shaping their positions? I think so.
Bill Whittle argues his position in this video.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjrnmBKwuf8&w=640&h=390]
Plainly, President Obama is a dictatorial jerk and We the People are well on the way to becoming non-essential, except as taxpayers. However -- or perhaps even because of it -- His popularity remains high. On October 12th, Rasmussen reported that its most recent poll gave Him a fifty-one percent approval rating and a forty-eight percent disapproval rating. Since being a dictatorial jerk works quite well for Him, why should He stop? Why not do it with even more vigor, determination and success?
Should principles be abandoned?
Roger L. Simon's PJ Media article, ObamaCare: they Don't Call 'Em The "stupid party" for nothing, argues that
Well, they don’t call ‘em ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.Ironically, however, the person I think most responsible for this (let’s hope temporary) debacle is anything but stupid — Princeton graduate Ted Cruz. [Emphasis added.]
I was quite intrigued with the Texas senator, with whom I agree on many matters, when I first heard about him. A feisty conservative with a Cuban background and a fair amount of smarts — what could be bad?
Well, the human ego, I’m afraid. It seems to get to all of us. Mr. Cruz took his justifiable disdain for ObamaCare and ran with it to such a degree that it became less about the legislation and far more about him, as he, in envious imitation of Rand Paul perhaps, took to the Senate floor and stayed and stayed and stayed until the entire Congress collapsed. [Emphasis added.]
Cruz never had a real strategy for defunding ObamaCare, his avowed intention in this extravaganza. That was painfully obvious on several occasions, including his appearance on the opening of Megyn Kelly’s new show Monday. He was still dodging about how he intended to defund the new law against a Democratic-controled [sic] Senate that wasn’t about to budge on the issue, even less against a president for whom Affordable Care is, Obama thinks anyway, the one jewel in a very tarnished crown.
No way this defunding would occur, yet Cruz went on and on, dragging us all along with him. He pressed a lot of people’s anger buttons, so that many on talk radio and in Congress felt they had to go along with his Alamo Complex lest they be accused of being wimps or, worse, RINOs. But to what end? [Emphasis added.]
"Alamo complex?" Dr. Ben Carson -- hardly a fire-spewing lunatic wearing a suicide vest -- recently characterized ObamaCare as "the worst thing to happen to the U.S. since slavery."
“It is slavery because it aims to make all of us subservient to the government,” he said. “It was never about health care. It was about control.”Dr. Carson further compared the new health care reform to policies envisioned by Vladimir Lenin, one of the fathers of socialism and communism.
“Socialized medicine is the keystone in the establishment of a socialist state,” Dr. Carson told the audience of some 2,000 supporters of traditional values.
Such a comment may seem paranoid to some, he said, “but I would say if you know anything about history, how could you not bring it up?”
When people in the executive and legislative branch don’t have to participate, but everybody else has to, “that’s not America, that’s Russia,” he added.
Accepting, but only for the sake of argument, that Senator Cruz should have realized that President Obama would not budge on His pride and joy ObamaSlavery, perhaps Senator Cruz should simply have abandoned his principles and skipped that fight. It now seems that President Obama will not negotiate on any aspect of the Government slowdown, or in any meaningful sense on the debt ceiling. Based on the argument that Senator Cruz should not have bothered, should the RINOs just abandon any stray principles that may lurk within them, give President Obama whatever He demands and have done with it? That would be consistent with the arguments against Senator Cruz's position, i.e., if He won't budge, don't bother.
There are multiple problems with yielding to an unyielding President. As Alan Caruba notes here,
The President has been insisting for days that he would not negotiate. Well, we all knew he would not negotiate anything regarding Obamacare, including something sensible like delaying its implementation for a year. He already gave a delay to Big Business. How about the rest of the population?. . . .
This isn’t “politics as usual.” This is one part of the government, the House of Representatives, doing what the Constitution says it must, overseeing the expenditure of every last penny the government spends. And it is two other parts, the Senate and the White House, controlled by the Democratic Party, refusing to compromise. [Emphasis added.]
It is the American people waking up to discover that (1) President Obama is content to inflict as much pain as possible on them and (2) that a frayed and divided Republican Party cannot, will not hold firm to secure some protection against Obamacare and a reduction in government spending.
At this writing, the biggest losers will be the American people. Well, at least those who do not work for the government and live outside the Beltway.
At what point, if ever, might they take a firm and principled stand against President Obama's radical transformation of America? When He stubbornly refuses to negotiate on everything? When He purports to eliminate the debt ceiling by executive decree? When all civilian firearms are confiscated? When Federal troops take over "rebellious" red States? When He declares martial law and dissolves the Congress? When troops start rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue in tanks to arrest any Republicans who won't shut up and go away? Is there any point at which the RINOs will do anything, beyond yield?
Senator Cruz has taken and continues to take a principled stand against ObamaCare -- despite the apparent willingness of many in the Republican Party to bow to the Obama Machine. On October 11th, he and other conservatives
took turns throwing out red-meat lines about the horribleness of the law. Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called Obamacare a “disaster” and a “trainwreck” that violates the Constitution before commending the House of Representatives for “standing strong” amid the government shutdown. Sen.Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said President Obama “didn’t even like the Obamacare law, so he delayed portions of the law for a year.” He added, “We deserve better.”The ObamaCare "roll out" has been a disaster, as even many followers of the legitimate media must know.
Will RINO cave men continue to cave?
The RINOs have tried to surrender, but President Obama has rejected their offers and wants more.
(WASHINGTON) — With talks having stalled between the White House and House Republicans, a bipartisan group in the Senate is polishing a measure that would reopen the government and prevent a first-ever default on the country’s bills.The negotiations in the Senate come as the chamber meets in a rare Saturday session to vote on a Democratic measure to lift the government’s borrowing cap through the end of next year. Republicans are poised to reject it amid talks among the group of rank-and-file senators — talks monitored with the full attention of Senate leaders.
. . . .
Publicly, top House Republicans said negotiations were on track. Obama called House Speaker John Boehner at midafternoon Friday, and Michael Steel, a spokesman for the leader of House Republicans, said, “They agreed that we should all keep talking.”
Privately, the channel between the White House and the House wasn’t bearing fruit, said aides on both sides. The aides required anonymity because the talks were private and they weren’t authorized to discuss them by name.
President Obama has rejected a short term debt ceiling increase because it would mean just kicking the can down a short road to the holidays. Then, it would have to be kicked again. He wants to kick the can down a long if not endless road and avoid any meaningful discussions about a budget.
“It wouldn’t be wise, as some suggest, to just kick the debt-ceiling can down the road for a couple months, and flirt with a first-ever intentional default right in the middle of the holiday shopping season,” Obama said in his Saturday radio and Internet address.
That's an Obama Flip Flop, of the sort which we should by now have come to expect.
This has every appearance of being an ad-hoc strategy. The president knows he has the GOP by the short hairs and will now extract maximum concessions, humiliating Republicans in the bargain.
Bryan Peterson notes at PJ Tatler that
I’ve written a piece or two on how the 1990s shutdown had a far less dramatic effect than the current media lets on. It didn’t actually change very much in the next election. It did play a role in forcing Bill Clinton to agree to the Republicans’ balanced budgets. (It also introduced him to Monica Lewinsky.) No shutdown now, however, is likely to have much effect on Barack Obama’s policy or strategy. He’s just a very different political animal from Clinton. He doesn’t want any real budget at all. A strategy that worked on Clinton is not guaranteed to work on Obama or change much in Congress. [Emphasis added.]
The Republican Party seems not to be doing well.
The right wing
Here's an October 11th Town Hall "conservative" cartoon.
The rest of the Republican Party
This screen shot of a recent Gallup Poll indicates that the Republican Party is not doing well.
How could that be? Might significant numbers of those who still call themselves "Republicans" not have a "favorable" view of their party because it is fractured and has been dominated by those willing to cave in to Democrats far too often? That's my view. Might significant numbers of Democrats now be proud of their party and their President for their apparent steadfastness? The Republican Party may have outlived its usefulness and it may soon be time to euthanize it (before it commits suicide) so that the nation can look for better ways of finding a better path.
How does one negotiate with He Who Will Not Negotiate?
Victor Davis Hanson, in an article published several days ago at PJ Media titled Obama as Chaos, wrote,
Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama’s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.
. . . .
When the president laments the loss of civility and reminds the public that he uses “calm” rhetoric during the impasse, we know he has accused his opponents of being on an “ideological crusade” and of being hostage takers and blackmailers who have “a gun held to the head of the American people,” while his top media adviser Dan Pfeiffer has said that they had “a bomb strapped to their chest.”
When the president insists that the Republican effort to hold up the budget is unprecedented, we automatically deduce that, in fact, the action has many precedents, and on frequent prior occasions was a favored ploy of Democrats to gain leverage over Republican administrations.
In short, whenever the president prefaces a sweeping statement with one of his many emphatics — “make no mistake about it,” “I’m not making this up,” “in point of fact,” “let me be perfectly clear” — we know that the reverse is always true. For Obama, how something is said matters far more than what is said. If he stumbles, as is his wont, through an un-teleprompted remark that on rare occasions can be mostly accurate, that is a serious lapse; if, more frequently, he mellifluously asserts a teleprompted falsehood, there is little worry. The result is not so much untruth, lies, or distortions, as virtual chaos. Is what he says untrue, contradictory of what he said or did earlier, or just nonsensical?
. . . .
Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos? [Emphasis added.]
Even attempting to negotiate with a chaotic President Obama and his obedient minions can be a very taxing experience. In that context, the word "taxing" has a double meaning, neither of which is good or otherwise conducive to negotiating.
Conclusion
I still think this old guy would be a pretty good President, even though he died years ago.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uzbruyrCRE&w=640&h=390]
Maybe I'll just climb into a fantasy machine and stay there, where Grandpa Jones can also be cloned into as many CongressCritters as there are seats there.
Look at it this way. We have to ask ourselves about who’s destroying the Republican Party. With the Democratic Party there is absolutely no doubt...
If Obamacare continues to get bad press for months to come, Cruz is going to look like Superman.
If the conservatives can change the direction of the party, they have the option to use this for a campaign slogan:
Vote Republican for a Change.
This is to presume that the Republican party is “to big to fail”.
No one person could make a vital, strong and committed political party fail. A REAL party would not fall to infighting and backstabbing for no advantage in electoral competitiveness. Arguing how many angels may dance upon the head of a pin is not only pointless and fruitless, it destroys party discipline and squanders political capital.
The Republican party has allowed itself to die by inches, not because there was dialogue between members, but because there was NOT. So much energy has been wasted, dribbled away on petty differences in doctrine, and a wish to silence dissent, that those thus silenced are reduced to smoldering anger. Like a fire in a haystack, this smoldering anger devours the stack from within, leaving a hollowed-out shell which suddenly collapses, igniting the remaining part of the stack and burning everything to the ground.
Dan
Paul Ryan hooked to “Obamacare forever” is a sure sign republicans have learned nothing and plan to forfeit the 2016 elections. They’d rather fight and demean Ted Cruz than Obama. They take their orders from the WH and from leftist media and consultants - while ignoring and insulting their voter base.
Indeed. I was tuning in to Kudlow this morning to hear his initial monologue slamming Cruz's actions; and stating that the republicans were wrong, and so on. He was all for funding the government, raising the debt ceiling, etc.
I turned him right off.
Don't know what he's thinking, but it's not conservatism. Straight line defeatism more likely.
Not at all. So sad that it’s true.
The day that The Patriot Act was signed into law, Republican lawmakers have been looked at, by a large group of Americans, as traitors.
The continuing action to curtail American civil liberties, and swallowed by Republicans, since The Patriot Act, is what started my examining The Libertarian Party.
The majority of Republicans today, including those that were combatting Sarah Palin’s possible political future, now, see Americans looking at them with ‘faces set like flint’, to borrow a term.
The majority of Republican lawmakers, and their created dominions, must be toppled, if America is to survive as a free nation.
The new crowd of Republicans, ‘get it’.
Sounds like I won’t be reading PJ Media again any time soon.
RUBIO, CHRISTIE, RYAN, CORKER, ALEXANDER, COLLINS, AND ANY ONE CONSIDERED A RINO AND SPENT MORE THAN 1 TERM IN THE POWER HOUSE!
In Whitaker Chambers “Witness”,he describes the communist strategy of creating Chaos,then come riding In on your white horse to solve the chaos,like Obama coming to the rescue with single payer after his signature achievement Obamacare flops.
That has always been the source of the monikers "The Stupid Party" and "Circular Firing Squad".
I retain a bit of loyalty to the site, since I wrote there for a couple of years. When it started focusing on "lifestyle" stuff and "RINO" Rick Moran (assigned to edit too many of my submissions) rejected those with the substance of which he disagreed, I anticipated an unfortunate change of direction and stopped. The money PJ Media paid for each article ($100.00) was useful as well as needed, but I decided that there are more important things. Hence, I now write almost exclusively at my own little blog.
PJ Media still has some good stuff, particularly Bill Whittle's videos. Many of Whittle's videos are also available at YouTube. Although it's necessary to be selective, it's also useful to learn what the RINOs are thinking. You might find the comments on Roger L. Simon's linked article interesting. Almost without exception, they are adverse. Ditto the comments on most of Rick Moran's articles.
I was pleased when LTC West joined PJ Media and even happier when he distanced himself from it, because if you compare his Next Generation videos with videos of his other appearances you will see, rather quickly, that in the Next Generation videos he comes off as stif, as though reading from a script. He does not seem that way elsewhere.
Obviously, I haven't abandoned the site as a reference source, but it has become less appealing.
Republican conservatives under the banner of the “tea party movement” is not mainstream but “moderate Me Too republicans” (now refered to as democrat lite) is. This is the new “mantra” led off by the AP and supported by a NBC phoney poll the media is using given to them by the Demo-Com central commandantura. CNN’s Van Jones was on 10/10/13 am 890’s WLS morning show. Jones opened his fly and started flashing the same pitch. And was told to zip it. .It’s just sad the GOPES continue with their stupid Pustch to purge conservatives.The question is will some historian in a future year reviewing the demise of the Republican party make the claim the Republican leadership of this era were working with the socialist/communists to purge the party of the conservatives ? BTW (by the way) WLS’s morning show hosts has been doing a decent job of exposing these demo-com media poseurs spreading that message.
The media could be given a sound trashing by conservative talk shows just citing the stuff they were using to incite racial strife which has resulted in black youths (mainly) attacks on whites and hispanics resulting in deaths. But it’s not even being approached. Not only (pardon the pun) collectively, but individually. Doing so would clearly point out that the visual and print media will are deep in the socialist agenda sewer with the regime. They are creating an America its citizens does not know.
Because each one of the media alphabet soup kitchens individually cooked up socialist concoctions following the cue given them by The POTUS Obama. Falling all over each other defending Obama’s mere comments “If I had a son” and “That could have been me” utterances which served as cues to the direction the propapganda was to take.
The fact that The POTUS embelished one statement after another. And as POTUS had to have full knowledge of the circumstaces of the Florida episode which in essence was a black on black episode. Yet POTUS Obama decided to manipulate the facts into a full blown racial incident to furthur a socialist concept and inflame a political base makes the Je Accuse Dreyfus scandal look like French pastry.
Letting POTUS Obama and his media get away with this travesty particularly by the clueless political opposition boggles the mind. But the facts are that’s what the conservative movement called the “tea party” is dealing with.
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