As the wingnuts have foundered, it has been interesting to see how creative they actually get. You can't make some of this stuff up.
Here we have Nick Stone of the Drawnlines Blog. Nick is an avowed PUMA idiot, thinks insane Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is “spot on,” thinks the racist anti-tax teabaggers are a real swell bunch, and is himself a newly minted Republican. Check out his blog. The descent into madness is worth your time. You can literally see his devolution to the dark side. No kidding. He put it on YouTube.
His last two posts make a real case for some sort of mental health professional to intervene:
How We Win
The Case for Charlie Crist
There's two things you aren't going to see in those posts, aside from anything resembling reality: references or facts.
In the first post, Nick decided to lay out a “strategy” to help his Republican Party win elections again. Let’s see how he did.
Without diving too deeply into specific policy…
Fantastic start, Nick! Because we wouldn’t want to delve too deep into specific policy. I mean, you're only a political party, for God's sake! Why bother talking about the policy you believe in when you can talk about winning elections! Yeah!
Hey, if you don’t share your ideas, nobody can discredit them.
The Republican Party stands for a few basic principles:
1) Small, effective, unobtrusive government
Strike one, Nick. It was George W. Bush who grew the government to the largest it has ever been.
That source, by the way, is the conservative – wildly, crazily conservative – Washington Times. (See how that works, Nick? I state a fact, and then link to the proof to back it up.)
And let’s not lay this solely at the feet of "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush. Let’s take a long, hard look at Bush I, for that matter. And Ronald Reagan, the guy who said “government is the problem.” And while we’re at it, why not Nixon and Ford? All of these Republicans grew the size of government.
Quick, name the president that shrank it.
That’s right: Bill Clinton.
Which reminds me: if Republicans really wanted small government, how come they didn’t support Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government initiative?
As for “effective” government, well. This one is all on you to defend.
You can say that “small government” is what the GOP stands for all day long – there is not one single shred of evidence to prove that small-government policies are what GOP leaders would implement were they in power again.
Moving on.
You’re kidding me. This ought to count as two strikes.
First of all, the party that insists on inserting itself into the medical choices of women everywhere can hardly hold the mantle of “personal freedom.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I can shoot down the idea that the GOP is the standard-bearer for “personal freedom” in two words: warrantless wiretapping.
This is the legacy of the last Republican President, and his Vice President who is still out in a big way making his case directly to the American People.
Personal responsibility must be your idea of a joke, too. That same Vice President shot a guy in the face, and the National Rifle Association was silent on the issue when they should have been front and center on “personal responsibility” with respect to gun ownership. I guess that would have been asking for too much.
I have noticed that Republicans talk an awful lot about “personal responsibility,” but none of them ever tell you in any detail what they really mean.
Nick, I’m going to have to ask you to actually use your computer. Read some news, man. According to you, “Light and effective regulation over our industries and investments help level the playing field, but the great latitude of economic choice we enjoy in the USA is the abundant envy of the world.”
Um, you are aware that we are in the global crisis we are in no small part because of something called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which essentially de-regulated banks, insurance companies, and securities companies, doing away with the Glass-Steagall Act.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley is named for – do I really have to do this? – Republican Phil Gramm (who was a disastrous advisor to John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid), Republican Jim Leach, and Republican Thomas Bliley.
In other words, the crisis we’re in right now is the direct result of light and ineffective regulation – light and ineffective regulation given to us by Republican leaders who you would like to see lead again.
You say this, yet it was Republicans gave us Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, a war based on lies, a forgotten war, and shaky ground in places like Iran and North Korea. All of these things have made our country much less safe, not more. American under the Republican watch bears the worst standing it has ever had in the eyes of the world community.
All of this gets better.
Nick describes in his next section how the GOP can again become a majority party. It starts like this:
Meghan McCain wrote about Congressman Aaron Schock…
And that is all you need to know. Any "party strategy" which begins by quoting Meghan McCain – quoting Meghan McCain who is writing about a freshman Republican Congressman! – is beyond fundamentally flawed. It is an epic disaster.
Hey, I’m not going to give Nick too hard a time, here. He’s essentially got the right idea with respect to building a party. In order to build a party, you need to reach out to a broad base of voters:
Targeting voters
We stand to gain much ground with voters in key groups that could be vital to the long-term success of our party. These are groups which are gaining in number, or in which we have lost ground. Some of them are as follow:
1) Suburban and Exurban voters
2) Hispanic, Asian and Black minorities
3) Young voters (16-18, 18-25, 25-30, and 30-35)
4) Women
5) Catholics and Jews
6) Gays and Lesbians
These are all groups that the GOP is losing. I don't think naming the demographic is going to help you win it. You can recognize that you are alienating gays and lesbians all you want. But if your policies -- those darn policies, again! -- actually discriminate against gays and lesbians, then there's a good chance a vast majority of them won't vote for you. Same thing is true for the other demographic breakdowns.
But what really seems lost on Nick is that the GOP is losing them for a reason. Do I really need to enumerate those reasons?
Well, we haven’t even gotten to my favorite post yet: Nick’s endorsement of Charlie Crist for Senate. It really is quite something.
Charlie Crist has been the champion of the people of the state of Florida.
No, he hasn’t. He’s been a champion for himself, pretty much from Day One.
He’s risen above party politics when necessary, promoted conservative ideals when possible, and stood for what’s right even when he’s stood alone.
No, he hasn’t. He’s done what he needed to in order to advance his political career.
Really? Have you seen the way they govern our state and themselves?
While I strongly believe it’s a loss for our state to take Charlie out of the governor’s mansion, it is highly apparent how great a senator he’ll make. Simply put, he’s tough and he knows how to govern.
No, he’s not, and no, he doesn’t.
Don’t take my word for it! According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Crist enjoys across the board thumbs up from Floridians. Voters gave him 68%, 68%, and 66% (Republicans, Independents, and Democrats respectively) approval ratings, and a surprisingly low number of both Republicans (25%) and Democrats (20%) gave him negative marks. Let me be clear. Those are HUGE ratings for a governor that inherited an economic slowdown, mounting bills, a housing crisis, and a massive revenue downturn.
Nick, I don’t believe it, but you got this one right. Good for you. Two points of caution: one, polls are kind of finicky. Don’t you think that maybe – just maybe – people will begin to figure out that their state is circling the drain and the guy at the helm was Charlie? If he’s in Washington on a six-year run, what does he care? It's called cut and run. Two, Crist enjoys high ratings because he tells people what they like to hear in a soothing, calm voice. It’s part of the political survival piece.
Crist consistently enjoys such high approval ratings because he’s stood for Floridians from day one.
What, are you writing their campaign propaganda for them?
After winning the election in 2006, Crist immediately moved forward to champion an across the board property tax cut for Floridians in the wake of escalating insurance premiums and skyrocketing property values. People were hurting and needed help to stay in their homes, and Charlie delivered by championing Amendment 1 to our state constitution.
Charlie delivered a dagger to the heart of Florida, the thirteenth lowest tax burden in the nation, with Amendment 1.
Why did he push so hard for Amendment 1? Well, the assumption is that he wanted to be vice president, or at least to deliver Florida for the GOP nominee by running as an anti-tax governor in a huge swing state. He managed neither, and now – bitter – he wants to bolster his resume.
By the way, Nick, I don’t know if you paid any attention at all, but the Florida budget crisis – created in no small part by the short-sighted and hurtful Amendment 1 – is ongoing.
And to really blow your mind, your beloved small-government Governor has just signed the budget into law, breaking is no-tax-increase tax pledge.
Which causes you a problem in the next point you make:
On spending, Crist has advocated for more school spending and more infrastructure spending, two areas where Florida is severely lagging behind other states. In the classroom, Florida spends in the bottom quarter of states per pupil overall and second-worst in terms of dollars per student by citizen wealth. That’s appalling.
That is appalling. Too bad he never did anything about it.
The most egregious example I can think of right now is his further diminishing the Bright Futures scholarship fund.
And that, Nick, is the difference between empty rhetoric that can sound good, and leadership that means something.
Many claim that he is not conservative enough. The sharpest criticisms were lobbed at him for supporting the president’s stimulus bill, which conservatives including myself saw as pork-laiden waste of the people’s money which would ultimately yield more long-term damage than benefit.
So, those tax cuts which were the largest single portion of the stimulus bill weren’t appealing to Republicans after all? I don’t get it.
This is actually the worst of all worlds, because while Crist stood with Obama and supported the stimulus, he allowed the Florida Legislature to gut many of the important pieces, including money for extending unemployment benefits.
Let it be said that Crist has been the governor of all the people of Florida, not just conservatives. He knows how to prioritize and balance realities with goals. He has been the champion of the homeowner, the student, the worker, the farmer, and the consumer. He’s a tough voice for progress and accountability, and a compassionate advocate for the people of Florida. He’s got both the rhetoric and the resume, and he means what he says.
There’s not one word of this that is true. At all. You enumerate so many things, Nick – but where’s the proof? What has the governor done for "all the people"? He drove an already sinking economy further into the ditch -- and then promptly bailed out to run for Senate when he realized it was beyond his ability to fix. He has hurt students, workers, farmers, and consumers. He has done nothing -- not one thing -- to help any of those constituencies. Nick, Charlie Crist is not a tough voice for anything.
So stop it, Nick. And next time, try that whole "policy" thing. And back it up with some facts.
Let us know when you're back out of the wilderness. We'll be waiting.
H/T to Saintpetersblog 2.0, I guess, for the original link -- dude, what are you doing linking to stuff like this?
Yeah, I really didn't like the article either, but linking to it doesn't mean I endorse it. I sort through all the stuff I read on this race and I thought Nick's perspective was, um, unique.
Posted by: Saint Petersblog | May 28, 2009 at 10:54 AM