New GOP Role Models - Foreigners!
Yeah, if you can believe it.
The Base, the rancid cream of the Republican Party, must be a tad confused by their Party's leadership and their elected representatives. What must be confusing their tiny little minds is the fact that instead of searching out acceptable American role models to re-brand and re-inspire the Party faithful, the leadership is looking toward foreign exemplars.
I'm not of The Base, so I can understand why the Party leaders are reluctant to try and find acceptable domestic role models. I mean, be fair - who are they going to find? Nixon? Reagan? Hoover?
First we have Representative Eric Cantor (R-Asinine), the Minority Whip. Cantor talks to Newt Gingrich the way some people speak to God, trying to get some pointers on how to turn the clock back to 1994 and resurrect the GOP majority in the House. He must be bogarting the Imodium to keep from shitting himself at the prospect that the stimulus bill may actually succeed in restarting the economy.
But Cantor also looks to Winston Churchill as an inspiration, particularly his role in leading Britain's Conservative Party during the late 1930s.
Okay.
Leave aside the fact that Churchill wasn't American. The fact is that Churchill switched parties a number of times in the course of his political career (from Conservative to Labour and back again) when he saw a greater opportunity for advancement in one party over another. As First Lord of the Admiralty (in a Labour Government) he excoriated the Conservative Party leadership over events in Ireland.
The fact also remains that Churchill seconded Neville Chamberlain's nomination as Prime Minister and it was Chamberlain's policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer that started to pull Britain out of the Great Depression. Churchill was regarded as a bit of a crank, a fact that helped keep him out of government for most of the 30s until he became First Lord in 1939.
The GOP will harp upon Churchill's stance against appeasement, but he had kinder things to say about Hitler in the early 30s than he had to say about Stalin (it must be remembered that he advocated strangling the nascent Soviet government in its cradle back in 1919).
So much for Rep. Cantor and his Churchill fetish.
Now we hear from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Creep), who has gone on record as saying
"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban . . . And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes."
Yeah, you have to hand it to the Taliban insurgency. They do a bang-up job of disrupting and changing a person's entire processes.
Usually by beheading them, or blowing them up with high explosives.
To be serious for a moment, Rep. Sessions' remarks were odious on their face. I'm certain that no one in this country (apart from maybe the Aryan Nations) wants to be associated with the gaggle of unwashed troublemakers currently infesting Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, Sessions could have helped to erase that insurgency - if he and his Party's leadership under the benevolent command of President George W. Bush hadn't taken their eyes off the Taliban, let them go, and attacked a country that posed no imminent threat and hadn't attacked us (indeed, had had nothing to do with 9/11).
But as long as the GOP leadership are happily coming up with entirely new ways to sabotage themselves and shoot themselves in the feet, I'm quite content to watch the GOP become even more marginalized and irrelevant.
The Base, the rancid cream of the Republican Party, must be a tad confused by their Party's leadership and their elected representatives. What must be confusing their tiny little minds is the fact that instead of searching out acceptable American role models to re-brand and re-inspire the Party faithful, the leadership is looking toward foreign exemplars.
I'm not of The Base, so I can understand why the Party leaders are reluctant to try and find acceptable domestic role models. I mean, be fair - who are they going to find? Nixon? Reagan? Hoover?
First we have Representative Eric Cantor (R-Asinine), the Minority Whip. Cantor talks to Newt Gingrich the way some people speak to God, trying to get some pointers on how to turn the clock back to 1994 and resurrect the GOP majority in the House. He must be bogarting the Imodium to keep from shitting himself at the prospect that the stimulus bill may actually succeed in restarting the economy.
But Cantor also looks to Winston Churchill as an inspiration, particularly his role in leading Britain's Conservative Party during the late 1930s.
Okay.
Leave aside the fact that Churchill wasn't American. The fact is that Churchill switched parties a number of times in the course of his political career (from Conservative to Labour and back again) when he saw a greater opportunity for advancement in one party over another. As First Lord of the Admiralty (in a Labour Government) he excoriated the Conservative Party leadership over events in Ireland.
The fact also remains that Churchill seconded Neville Chamberlain's nomination as Prime Minister and it was Chamberlain's policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer that started to pull Britain out of the Great Depression. Churchill was regarded as a bit of a crank, a fact that helped keep him out of government for most of the 30s until he became First Lord in 1939.
The GOP will harp upon Churchill's stance against appeasement, but he had kinder things to say about Hitler in the early 30s than he had to say about Stalin (it must be remembered that he advocated strangling the nascent Soviet government in its cradle back in 1919).
So much for Rep. Cantor and his Churchill fetish.
Now we hear from Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Creep), who has gone on record as saying
"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban . . . And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes."
Yeah, you have to hand it to the Taliban insurgency. They do a bang-up job of disrupting and changing a person's entire processes.
Usually by beheading them, or blowing them up with high explosives.
To be serious for a moment, Rep. Sessions' remarks were odious on their face. I'm certain that no one in this country (apart from maybe the Aryan Nations) wants to be associated with the gaggle of unwashed troublemakers currently infesting Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, Sessions could have helped to erase that insurgency - if he and his Party's leadership under the benevolent command of President George W. Bush hadn't taken their eyes off the Taliban, let them go, and attacked a country that posed no imminent threat and hadn't attacked us (indeed, had had nothing to do with 9/11).
But as long as the GOP leadership are happily coming up with entirely new ways to sabotage themselves and shoot themselves in the feet, I'm quite content to watch the GOP become even more marginalized and irrelevant.
posted by Walt at 7:18 AM
1 Comments:
Actually, Churchill's mother was American, so he could certainly have become an American very easily.
He did switch Parties a number of times,but he was never a member of the Labour Party. The sequence goes Conservative-Liberal-Conservative.
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