Posted on 05/31/2008 10:53:25 AM PDT by Dawnsblood
I cannot remember who first called the Republican Party the "stupid party," but recent events show that our party has earned this name. The very issues with which the Democrats are attacking the Republicans in the current campaign are issues on which Democrats are especially vulnerable. However, the stupid party seems not to have noticed.
First, look at Social Security. Obviously, Social Security must be reformed, the sooner the better. But when President Bush asked Congress to reform it, and permit private accounts to be included in Social Security, Congress (which was controlled by the stupid party at the time) refused. Congressional Democrats exclaimed that this would be "risky." Not one Republican pointed out that if the same amount of money as is paid into Social Security were used to purchase an annuity from an insurance company, it would return between five and eight times what Social Security would return.
In other countries, in which retirement funds have been reformed to include private accounts, retirees actually receive much higher returns for what they have paid in than Americans.
If one considers insurance companies "risky," one could purchase several annuities instead of one. If one bought four annuities, and two of the insurance companies failed (when did the last insurance company fail, to the extent that the insured had no coverage at all?) the retiree would still receive two and one half times what he would have received from the current system. The stupid party could not make this case.
Congressional Democrats, who have gullibly swallowed the global warming hoax, insist that we must all switch to toxic light bulbs. There are several problems with these light bulbs, none of which a single member of the stupid party has articulated. One of the most pressing, in my mind, is the threat that eventually, enough of these light bulbs will end up in landfills to begin to poison our ground water with mercury.
Yet, whatever may be the threat, the reality is that everyone in America would have to use these bulbs for 100 years before there would be any result at all in CO2 levels. The stupid party is unable to think of a single reason these light bulbs are a bad idea.
We are told that by the year 2011 we can expect rolling brownouts in Maryland, since there will not be sufficient electrical power to satisfy expected demand. Has anyone in the stupid party pointed out that Democrats have blocked the construction of nuclear power plants for many years?
How is it that Democrats with degrees in political science can trump the arguments of the engineers who design these plants? Have you ever heard anyone from the stupid party point out that every single day, most coal-fired power plants release more radioactivity, in the form of a radioactive isotope of thorium, than the total released at Three Mile Island?
Democrats have blocked Americans from drilling off the coast of Florida, but have done nothing about the plans of China to extract our oil less than 50 miles from Florida. Democrats have blocked the construction of oil refineries for the last 30 years. Democrats have refused to permit us to extract shale oil, the most abundant oil resource in the world. If the stupid party cannot pin the tag on Democrats for the price of gasoline at the pump, let alone any of these other issues, they will deserve the defeat which seems certain this November.
Interesting.
They ought to call it the Reagan Party - might get more attention.
I can’t figure out why Republicans don’t just do what Reagan would have done in any situation....unless they prefer to be losers.
GOP is neither stupid nor timid. In fact it has no psychological attributes. The directors and members of the Party might have those qualities but the Party is a legal person without mental powers such as a comatose patient might be.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder what the difference is. Aren’t you??? Both are destroying our children and grandchildren’s futures.
FYI:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NbakN7SLdbk&feature=related#
Has anyone in the stupid party pointed out that Democrats have blocked the construction of nuclear power plants for many years?No other country can match America's overall technological prowess and yet, because of the collusion of evil Democrats with Stupid Republicans, we now take a far back seat to the FRENCH in nuclear power.
At a certain point, when your responsibilities are grave enough, and your stupidities are severe enough, you cease to become merely Stupid and pass on into the ranks of Evil.
John McStupid, are you listening?
To the contrary. George Washington went out of his way in his farewell address as our First President to quite literally beg us not to get involved with political parties.
For a full read of the speech - lengthy - but should be mandatory reading for all "citizens" of the Republic - can be read at this link http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/farewell/text.html!
And you are correct there is scant difference between to two "major political parties".
Furthermore, I am sure that most Americans don't realize they don't even need to belong to a "Political Party" to vote.
The "Two Parties", you mention have a death lock on our political process.
The only real "change" will come about when a majority of the electorate are fed up enough to do as I have done and scream from the top of the longs I am mad as HELL and I am not going to play your games any longer!
I have, as a start to that end, made that declaration!
I fully realize, at my age, I won't see the end of the revolution, we as citizens must make, that will end that death lock the Republicans and Democrats have on our political process, but a start must be made.
Unfortunately, many that post on this "Conservative Forum" are still stuck on the "we must vote for the lessor of two evils argument". I was "stuck on stupid" for a long time myself.
No longer - see my tag line.
Please add me to your Florida Freeper list. Thanks.
This is not a "Republican Forum"! Never was and I am certain that as long as Jim owns this site, it never will be.
So "dump away"!
bttt
Thanks for the bump. It would be nice to see millions of Americans “get it”!
No. we need to start another revolution.
Why start from scratch when the GOP already has the structure and apparatus to function as a a political party ?
We just need to throw the RINO's and feckless ass clowns out one by one
When I look at the whole picture...(that I'm aware of)....'they'-the powers that be, are fearsome/frightening in their plans for our nation......plans to do us harm.
There is no one clamoring to defend us and lead us out of this morass.
It's almost as if we're hypnotized and awaiting our doom......
May God have mercy....may He yet have mercy on us and relieve us from this bleak future for our Republic.
“We need to start another party.....”
We should call it the Republican Party....’cause we sure don’t have one now.
You are correct. No Third Party, just new conservative leadership up front. After all, it is the contributors like us who create them in the first place. It is time for a real unified program from every Freeper to the RNC telling them what we want them to do. With a few hundred thousands of names , the RNC might, just might pick up their attention. Their coffers are not full right now and it shows that the BASE is just not giving carte blanche but rather are designating monies to individuals. That is what I have done for the last two years.
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
Here is the link for this article:
I agree generally, but doubt the Republicans are able to reform themselves enough to become a realistic alternative to the Dems. The level of corruption of both parties is too large to continue with them any longer.
Also this:
Social Security does not need to be reformed, it needs to be Destroyed. It is socialism, and all conservatives need to realize that.
Oil drilling off Florida was opposed not only by Dems, but by Republicans like Jeb Bush and others in the Repub leadership. It’s NIMBY.
The reason France is able to use nuvlear power so efficiently is because they developed a standard template for small, efficient nuclear plants and reproduce that across France. In the US, each nuclear plant is individually designed and engineered with the latest technology.
Nuclear engineering in the US is like German tanks in WWII. Each new model was superior, but they kept changing models resulting in an inability to get a standard model in enough numbers into the field.
Yes, I am aware that the Founding Fathers were against the two party system.
But I did not learn that in the public school, that’s for sure!
I must admit that I voted for Arnie here in California, and I can plainly see the sad results. Never again. I do believe that more people are going to go in this direction as time goes on.
Thanks for the link! I love to collect links of a historical bent. Helps with homeschooling.
Why do you think we have had the success and longevity as a Republic for as long as we have? It is because we don't promote coups to change government. But it is still "our Republic"! The responsibility belongs to each and every citizen. That is why I know I will not be around to see the change necessary to end the "rule" of the "two political parties". And I enter into my action of supporting neither knowing full well that enough citizens may never make that choice. In fact, if I was a betting man, I would not bet on any success at all being made in that regard.
However, I, for one, am finished playing by "their rules". I will vote henceforth based upon principle and not pragmatism. Will my effort, in and of itself, make any difference? Not even a pebbles ripple on a calm ocean!
But I can only do what I can only do. We each make that decision and you will not see me castigating anyone posting here for their desire to continue bowing to the rules the parties have them playing by.
I for one, will, at this point in time, not vote for either the Democrat nor the Republican nominee this November. But I don't wish to put my feet in concrete until November 4th when I make the final choice. Never is forever and one would be a liar to really say "never". Trust me I know, from experience. I can't tell you how many times in my long life I have said "never again" just to eat those words at some future point.
So do what you believe you must do, but base your choice on your principles.
Exactly, and Romney is a perfect example of the cross over between the two. If McCain picks that guy I will sckareeem bloody murder.
..pragmatism has not been my game, and I hope never will.
I also believe we are speeding toward a NAU....
I believe there are only a few good men in political office who are truly looking out for our interests-(Jeff Sessions, Duncan Hunter, & a few more)....and they are not powerful or plentiful enough to stop this bullet train...
..save God.
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