After its gathering that ended over the weekend, The Republican National Committee has determined that no need to change the party's agenda and policies exist. The 2012 electoral rout was all because of "bad messaging" rather than flawed policies that a majority of voters saw to be toxic. Sane people simply tend to see policies based on greed, racism, religious extremism, and anti-woman bigotry to be less than appealing. But not in the alternate universe of the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd that now control the GOP. If anything they will seek to double down on their extremism. Just look at Bobby Jindal - he chided the GOP to stop being the "stupid party" yet he has been in the forefront pushing legislation that a majority of Americans - at least those outside of the backwoods swamps of Louisiana - are rejecting. A column in the Washington Post looks at the delusional world of today's Republican Party. Here are excerpts:
Republicans shouldn’t worry that President Obama is trying to destroy the GOP. Why would he bother? The party’s leaders are doing a pretty good job of it themselves.
As they try to understand why the party lost an election it was confident of winning — and why it keeps losing budget showdowns in Congress — Republican grandees are asking the wrong questions. Predictably, they are also coming up with the wrong answers.
They prefer to focus on flawed tactics and ineffectual “messaging” rather than confront the essential problem, which is that voters don’t much care for the policies the GOP espouses.
In post-debacle speeches and interviews, Republicans sound — and there’s no kind way to put this — paranoid and delusional. House Speaker John Boehner said in a speech to the Ripon Society that the Obama administration is trying to “annihilate the Republican Party.” Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s fiscal guru and failed vice presidential candidate, claimed Sunday on “Meet the Press” that Obama seeks “political conquest” of the GOP.
[I]t’s not possible to lead the country from the speaker’s chair, as Boehner can attest. To have a chance at effecting transformative change, you have to win the White House.
And to win the White House, you have to convince voters that the policies you seek to enact are the right ones. This is what the GOP doesn’t seem to understand.
“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the GOP’s brightest young stars, said in a much-anticipated speech last week at the party’s winter meeting. . . . . But Jindal also warned that the party should not “moderate, equivocate or otherwise change our principles” on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, “government growth” and “higher taxes.”
“We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior,” Jindal said. These are noble and stirring words. But the GOP is insane if it does not at least ask why 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Latinos and 73 percent of Asian Americans voted for Obama over Mitt Romney. If minority voters continue to favor the Democratic Party to this extent, then demography will indeed prove to be destiny.
[T]he GOP will have a tough time winning national elections until it has a better understanding of the nation. If Boehner is worried about being swept “into the dustbin of history,” he and other Republicans need to put down the broom.
As noted many times before on this blog, I don't see the GOP changing. The Christofascists and Tea Party lunatics were cynically voted on to city and county GOP committees and it will hard, if not impossible, to dislodge them if they refuse to go willingly. And they will not go willingly. They represent a cancer that has metastasized in the GOP and the only way for the GOP to be "cured" is for it to die or become a permanent minority party. The patients are in control of the asylum.
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