The Republican Brand: The Party of Yesteryear

GOP marching off the cliff

Here is what the Grand Old Ole Party AKA Republicans want to offer America: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. After months of the circus show, these are the three clowns still standing - I don't know what category to put Ron I live in an Attic Paul.

The three clowns are locked in a contest to out dumb each other. Yes, when one clown says something stupid another clown, not missing a beat, retorts with something even more insane. Just this last week clown Gingrich stated:


 President Obama “surrendered” Thursday when he apologized to the Afghan government for the burning of several Qurans at an American military base near Kabul. source


Not to be out clowned, clown Santorum rushed to the podium to announce:


“This is unacceptable,” Santorum said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The idea that a mistake was made — clearly a mistake, which we should not have apologized for — it was a mistake. There was nothing deliberate.. . .Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that deliberate.” source


These clowns have presented us with the most bizarre presidential primary in American history. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes:


IT’S  finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.

She concludes with a cautionary warning:

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side.

They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by. Read entire column

But this is not healthy for our country as Nonny Mouse states:

...the Republican Party truly is dying. For all intents and purposes, it’s already dead, the only impression of life being the lurching about of animated zombies eating their own brains, leaving the traditional mainstream moderate Republican conservative embarrassed and frustrated. 


The traditional mainstream moderate conservatives aren’t even in reality Republicans any longer, as the party itself has deteriorated from the rot of tea party fanaticism, and Koch Brother corruption, and the constant barrage Fox propaganda posing as journalism, and hate-filled blustering talk shows spewing hydrophobic nonsense, and the jaw-droppingly atrocious bunch of incompetent idiots posing as GOP Presidential candidates. All that is left of a once a respectable political party is the name “Republican” for nostalgic conservatives to cling to.

Which is so not good for our country. If disaffected Republicans ever managed to purge themselves of the zombies and the tea partiers and the Limbaughs and Fox and regrouped as something else, much like New Labour rebranded itself in the UK (although New Labour turned out to be just Tory Lite rather than any sort of improved Labour party), Democrats might finally have genuine opponents again - which would be both a bit scary and a bit hopeful. 


A nation runs best when there's an honorable opposition to keep the ruling party honest, regardless of what party is in power. An honorable opposition represents a very large proportion of the nation’s citizenship, and gives that citizenship a strong voice. An honorable opposition works harder at designing and proposing alternative ideas in the hope that the good they can do will garner them enough votes next go-round at the polls. I’d like to see an honorable opposition again. source