Posted on 10/18/2002 11:10:43 AM PDT by brbethke
It's election season again, and once again Republicans all over the country are busy snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I've been watching the campaign ads, both regional and national -- I couldn't avoid 'em if I wanted to -- and listening to the debates, and time and time again I hear Republican candidates making the same fundamental mistakes.
Dammit, people, we are not the Discount Democrats! We are not here to promise the voters "everything the Democrats can give you, but at a lower price!" We will never win by presenting ourselves as the WalMart of American politics!
Instead, just once, I'd love to see a Republican candidate muster the testicular fortitude to throw these questions in the face of his or her Democratic opponent.
"Thanks to the teachers unions, the Democratic Party has been in complete control of our public education system for the last 50 years. In that time the per-pupil cost of public education has skyrocketed, the test scores and graduation rates have plunged, our schools have become combat zones, and every two years you come back and tell us that the problem is that the schools need more tax money.
"Isn't it obvious? What your party has been doing for the past fifty years is bad for our children and doesn't work! Isn't it time to try something else?"
"Forty years ago Lyndon Johnson led the Democratic Party to declare war on poverty. The time has come to admit that the war is over; poverty has won. Today there are more poor Americans than ever before; more out-of-wedlock births and single-parent familes than ever before; more people dependent on government handouts than ever before; and an enormous social service bureaucracy that seems to be more interested in keeping people dependent than in helping them to become self-sufficient.
"Isn't it obvious? What your party has been doing for the past forty years is bad for poor people and doesn't work! Isn't it time to try something else?"
"Look, let's be honest: the Social Security system is a Ponzi Scheme. It's a con game, and if it were being run by a private party instead of the Federal government the people in charge would be arrested and thrown in prison. The Social Security system will not remain solvent -- by design it cannot remain solvent -- and the true wonder is that for 70 years you've managed to keep the con game going by forcing an ever larger number of people to join the system. But the time has come to admit that this system is designed to go bankrupt sooner or later, and it's time to start letting people escape from it while they still have something to save.
"Isn't it obvious? What your party has been doing for the past seventy years is bad for retirees and doesn't work! Isn't it time to try something else?"
"Let's try an analogy that even you can understand. It costs your friends in Hollywood $200 million dollars to make a major movie. But a lot of people can't afford $8.50 a ticket for a first-run show, so Congress enacts a law setting ticket prices at $2 apiece and mandating free video cassettes for the poor. Just how long do you think your friends in Hollywood will keep making new movies for the American market if there's no way they can make a profit doing it?
"Isn't it obvious? What your party wants to do will be bad for the pharmaceutical companies and really bad for the people who depend on new medicines. Can we afford to even try this experiment? Shouldn't we come up with a different plan now?"
"Enron, Enron, Enron: every time you say Enron, I'll say Teamsters Union. How many United Mine Workers officials have done hard time for corruption and witness intimidation? How many non-union workers have been beaten for trying to cross a picket line? Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?
"For more that sixty years the Democratic Party has not just turned a blind eye to union corruption, violence, and mob connections; you have actively benefitted from these things. Your party has stood by, winking and smiling, while corrupt union officials have looted pension funds, rigged union elections, and threatened the families of witnesses in corruption probes.
"You like to say that my party is in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. I say this beats being in bed with unions with proven mob connections. At least pharmaceutical companies don't intentionally kill people!
"Isn't it obvious? What your party has been doing for the past sixty years is bad for union workers but works way too well for you! Don't union workers deserve honest leadership and political representation?"
"Thirty years ago the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party began neutering the American military and Intelligence agencies. Since then Islamic fundamentalists has taken over most of the Middle East, homicidal warlords have taken over most of Africa, and narco-terrorists have gained major ground in South and Central America. We had a brief respite during the Reagan administration when we updated the Navy and modernized the Air Force -- and confronted Soviet Communism head-on, and watched it collapse from its own internal problems -- but immediately afterwards the Democrats squandered the so-called "Peace Dividend" and wasted our inventory of cruise missiles blowing up aspirin factories in the Sudan.
"Now, today, North Korea has the atomic bomb, China has nuclear missiles that can hit any city in the U.S., and Islamic terrorists around the globe are gleefully killing American citizens. At the same time the families of American servicemen and women are living on food stamps, airplanes and helicopters are grounded because they don't have spare parts, and there are Army units that can't train because they don't have ammunition.
"Isn't it obvious? What your party has been doing for the past thirty years is bad for the country and puts American citizens at risk! Isn't it time to try something else?"
"In 1923 H.L. Mencken wrote, 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'
"These 'kitchen table' issues you like to talk about -- education, poverty, social security, prescription drugs -- don't they look just a little hobgoblin-ish to you? The education crisis, the poverty crisis, the social security crisis, the prescription drug crisis: weren't all of these all local issues until the Democratic Party discovered a national crisis? And hasn't your party spent more than half a century telling us that these enormous national, not local, problems can only be solved with equally enormous national programs and obscenely large amounts of taxpayer money?
"And haven't you continued to insist that these problems can only be addressed through ever larger and more expensive government programs, even though all objective evidence seems to indicate that your programs are not working?
"The first and hardest step in addiction recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Isn't it time for you in the Democratic Party to admit that you have an uncontrollable and irrational addiction to big government?
"Isn't it obvious? Time and time again, for more than half a century, your party's solutions have only made the problems you claim to be addressing worse!
"ISN'T IT TIME TO TRY SOMETHING ELSE?"
I agree that Bowles isn't any better than Giddy on his best day,but disagree that it had to be a choice between him and her. There were genuine conservative candidates already living here in NC that wanted that Senate seat,and would have done us proud being there. The problem is Giddy was already annointed by the White House and the RNC in a backroom deal before Jesse even publically said he was retiring. She had the total political and financial support of the White House,the RNC,and the NC-GOP,and this means nobody else had the faintest chance of beating her.
That's your right.
are you immature enough to help elect Bowels just for spite?
No. I'm mature enough to not vote for either candidate,since I have nothing but contempt for them both. If Giddy loses by one vote,so be it.
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