Colin Kicks Back

Josef Stalin was famous for his many purges within the Soviet Communist Party. Stalin was crazed and evil, but he assuredly wasn't stupid. The purges consolidated his power and subsequent actions liquidated any challenges to it. In that, it was a highly effective political tool.

Having said that, Stalin or the Communist party were never obligated to stand for popularly contested elections. That's sort of key, and it just happens to be something that most Republicans are incapable of grasping. However, the modern GOP is beginning to more closely resemble the Marxists of old than anything the democratic process would produce. The Great Republican Purge is more reminiscent of Moscow circa 1937 than anything in U.S history.

What I mean to say is that a political party needs to draw people in to win an election. Getting more votes than the other guy is sort of the point of elections. Ideological purity doesn't win elections. It never has, and it never will. Ask the Libertarians. You may well disagree with me, but you'll be wrong. Don't worry, you're wrong a lot.

The GOP is currently on an insane jihad within their own ranks that, while fun to watch, is politically suicidal. The best part about it is that it seems to be premised on who is "conservative." That makes me smile if only because none of the assholes in that party are particularly conservative, and haven't been for years. Republicans, while full of the word of Jesus as they are empty of His spirit, haven't done anything conservative in at least eight years.

They've done any number of stupid things, of that there can really be no doubt. However, stupidity has only recently become a conservative virtue. What strikes me the most is that the head cheerleaders of the purge are the very same people who are directly responsible for the collapse of the party or said nothing at all as it was occurring.

A couple of weeks ago former vice president Dick Cheney was asked on Face the Nation who he believes is more representative of the Republican Party, Colin Powell or Rush Limbaugh.

SCHIEFFER: Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh said the other day that the party
would probably be better off if Colin Powell left and just became a Democrat.
Colin Powell said Republicans would be better off if they didn’t have Rush
Limbaugh out speaking for them. Where do you come down?

CHENEY: Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go
with Rush Limbaugh, I think. I think my take on it was Colin had already left
the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.

SCHIEFFER: So you think that he’s not a Republican?

CHENEY: I just noted he endorsed the Democratic candidate for president
this time, Barack Obama . I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty
and his interest.

SCHIEFFER: And you said you would take Rush Limbaugh over Colin
Powell.

CHENEY: I would.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

CHENEY: Politically.

As a purely political matter, I can't understand why anyone would want Cheney's opinion on anything. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get as unpopular as Dick Cheney? The fucking guy has lower levels of public support than Phil Spector, which I can understand only in so far as Spector is better at shooting people in the face than is the former vice president.

Cheney was also the brains of an administration that spent more money on nothing than its seven immediate predecessors combined. He was a principal architect of two wars that lacked any sort of planning at all other than saying "We're all going to die and freedom fucking rocks."

On the issues that matter, Colin Powell is twice the conservative that Dick Cheney is. Powell takes a lot of shit from assholes over this, but he was the guy who essentially said "You don't just invade a country full of people who want to kill one another and hope for the best." The Colin Powell school of thought is exactly where the GOP got it's national security gravitas from in the first fucking place. The Bush/Cheney conduct of foreign policy differed from Lyndon Johnson's not at all.

The Bush administration spent over a billion dollars promoting "traditional" marriage, which I don't remember being a constitutional function of the federal government. It also ignores the fact that, given its 4,000 year head start, traditional marriage shouldn't require that much fucking money. That's often overlooked, buried as it was under the trillion dollars of other nonsensical spending during those eight years.

And what was Cheney's response to the psychotic spending spree? He said that "Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter." The problem with that is that it isn't exactly true. Reagan campaigned on eliminating the deficit and balancing the budget. That he failed spectacularly isn't an accomplishment that he was overly proud of.

Furthermore, the idea that Rush Limbaugh is a better asset than Powell is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Limbaugh is a goddamned disc jockey. Better still, were it not for the understanding he came to with the Florida state attorney general's office, he wouldn't even be able to vote. I will say that he knows the virtues of traditional marriage better than most, having been in three of them. He obviously comes from the Rick James school of Republicanism.

Worse, he was the head cheerleader of of the Bush/Cheney liberal excesses in economic and foreign policy. He has absolutely no credibility on anything, and in that, he might be the ideal face of the modern GOP.

If one's record in office was always something to be judged in the ideologically pure Republican Party, Ronald Reagan himself would never have been given the presidential nomination. As governor of California, Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in the state's history until that time and signed the single most liberal abortion law in the pre-Roe era. And as president, Reagan was phenomenally restrained when it came to the use of military power. In today's atmosphere Reagan himself would be drummed out of the self-described "Party of Reagan."

Oh, by the way, as White House chief of staff, Dick Cheney headed the campaign against Reagan in 1976 Republican primaries.

An earlier comment Cheney made to Bob Schieffer is even more enlightening.

SCHIEFFER: Let’s talk quickly about your party, the Republican Party. A lot
of controversy. Arlen Specter has left. He said there’s no room for moderates in
the party anymore. You said last week the party should not moderate. But what
are you going to do? I mean, you can purify the party to the point that it’s too
small to ever get elected to anything. How do you broaden the appeal of your
party, and yet do you think there’s a place for moderates?

CHENEY: Oh, sure. I think there is room for moderates in the Republican
Party. I think partly it’s a semantic problem. I don’t think the party ought to
move dramatically to the left, for example, in order to try to redefine its
base.

We are what we are. We’re Republicans. We have certain things we
believe in. And maintaining our loyalty and commitment to those principles is
vital to our success.

What the fuck? I mean what the fucking fuck? Precisely which principles did the Bush administration and the Republican Congress maintain their loyalty and commitment to? Can you name three? I can't. The fact is that the Bush/Cheney ticket was reelected promising to spend a trillion dollars more than John Kerry and John Edwards. They're fiscal conservatives in the same way that Ottis Toole was a great first date. Worse still, Carter was more of a foreign policy conservative as president than was Bush.

The reference to the base is interesting and demonstrates just how much Cheney has forgotten about electoral politics. If you agree that the Republican base has traditionally been white, working class men, you have no choice but to agree that the base absolutely has to be redefined if the GOP has any hope of surviving the next decade. White, working class men now comprise a grand total of 15% of the electorate and there are fewer and fewer Electoral College states that they carry on their own.

Christ, even conservatives are self-identifying as Republicans less and less. The Republican base is virtually non-existent and lives in about five states. Unless and until the GOP increases its appeal to Hispanics, women and voters under thirty, they're going to get destroyed in election after election. You can only write off so much of Obama's victory to his personal appeal, but demographics explain how he won states like Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina in excruciating detail.

If the GOP would like a California U.S Senate seat next year, Arnold Schwarzenegger - as damaged as he is - could probably win one for them. But why would he do that, only to have morons like Cheney and Limbaugh shithammering him every fifteen seconds for doing nothing other than maintaining the party's political viability in an ideologically hostile state? Why would anyone subject themselves to the abuse of a pork-hounding nobody like Mitch McConnell, a pillhead fucking D.J and the number two in a failed administration with the approval rating of a third-tier member of the Manson Family?

That people like Cheney and Limbaugh actually want Colin Powell - and presumably his supporters - to leave the Republican Party tells you everything you need to know about how closely they've examined the party's prospects. Powell remains one of the most admired men in America and Cheney and Limbaugh are almost universally loathed by the demographic groups that are increasingly dominating American politics.

Well, General Powell's been listening to the asshole choir and he wants you to know that he's sick of their shit. That's why he's launching his counter offensive this morning on Face the Nation. Being a general and all, I think he might know a thing or two about counter offensives. From what we've seen of late, all Cheney and Limbaugh know anything about is gettin' Whiggy with it.

I could understand them better if they would rather be right than elected. But given the last eight years, they don't appear to even want to be right. Just because your socialism happens to be more corporate and Jesusy than the other guy's doesn't mean that you aren't a socialist.

If voters didn't know that Obama was a big-spending liberal last year, they should have. As a general rule, that's what Democrats are. But if people like Cheney and Limbaugh don't even bother to excuse or explain the the Bush record, no one should take either of them seriously. Christ, given his record in office, why isn't anyone questioning Cheney's Republican credentials?

Since this is Memorial Day weekend in the United States, I'm pretty sure that my legion of American readers aren't going to be here or watching the Sunday shows. Therefore, I'll watch Face the Nation and if Powell has anything at all interesting to say, I'll report it to you.

God, I'm good to you people.

Update: Oh lookee, lookee!


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