Yes, it is a black eye for the conservative movement. I agree. And who gave the conservative movement that black eye? The Liberal Media? NOPE. The democrats? NOPE. The Obama administration? NOPE.
When you have "representatives" of the republican party such as McCain and King going on CNN, cBS, NBC referring to the shutdown as the GOP controlled House shutdown it's almost impossible to change the minds of the American people. I mean, if part of the party concedes responsibility while nobody on the democrat side blames themselves - it's going to be hard to change the national consensus.
The real enemy are the RINOs that attacked Ted Cruz and the Tea Party. If I were a non- tea party republican I would not be able to condone such a dishonest act. McCain, Graham, King could only do such as thing if they dislike conservative republicans in their own party more than they dislike the most leftists of the democrat left.
These RINOs need to go by being primaried. If they win the primary, the Tea Party candidate needs to run against them as an independent. We need to rid ourselves of "republicans" who aid the democrats by attacking conservatives within their own party. They are MORE dangerous to the republican party than democrats could even think of being.
The conservatives will lose that black eye after they give the RINOs a black eye back
# 1 - Don’t trust Rassmussen. I relied on them during the Presidency. If they were right, Romney should be sitting in the White House. Their polling is a rolling poll taken each day.
# 2 - Virginia has the same problem as New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts - large urban enclaves controlled by Democrats for years. In Virginia’s case, its the Baltimore/Washington D.C. enclave.
# 3 - Those bastards McCain, Boehner and McConnell et al need to go. THEY screwed this whole thing up, NOT Cruz and the Tea Party. In 1776 their philosophy would have been to leave the British alone - eventually they will go back across the Pond and take the Hessians with them.
#4 - Either the Tea Party comes up ahead in the primaries and succeeds in taking voer COngress from the Establishment GOP or we need to form our own Party.
#5 - The urban areas will never go away. One of the reasons we have lost in the past is because we write them off. We don’t have to win big, but we have to win SOMETHING there.
# 6 - NEVER GIVE UP. KEEP FIGHTING. More wars have been won or lost over morale in history than over technology.
Here is a legit question, then, what can be done to make sure the conservative public image remains intact enough so that they actually can keep the House and win a majority in the Senate? They have about 13 months to do so, what can they do, and what progress is being made so that by Nov of next year, the public is still not holding the House GOP solely responsible for the shutdown and voting based on those feelings?
Thing is, the last prolonged shutdown, in 1996, led to Clinton winning election and a massive Democrat victory in Congress too. I think this is one reason why older Republicans, even those who agreed with the principles behind the shutdown, were not nearly as enthusiastic as Team Cruz to begin with. They may have remembered what happened in 1996 and feared that conservatives and Republicans did not have the ability to explain themselves that they would need to stop a repeat of it. As conservative stalwarts like PJ O Rourke and Thomas Sowell himself have said, this has been a serious issue with conservatives/Republicans for decades now.
So what do we do and what progress has been made as of now?
Absolutely correct!