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Friday, November 14, 2008
Why is it OUR job?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama is reportedly skeptical about putting a U.S. missile defense system in eastern Europe, a system ostensibly built to shoot down Iranian missiles when and if they get them.
Good. Because even if the system works, no one has been able to answer a basic question:
Why is it the financial and military obligation of the US taxpayer — a cost of up to $50 billion over five years — to install a missile defense system to protect Europeans from Iranian missiles, particularly when many of those Europeans don’t want us to protect them in the first place?
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The battle for the conservative soul
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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says Newt Gingrich in a Politico interview: “The Republican Party right now is like a midsize college team trying to play in the Super Bowl. It is pretty hard to say our losses were because of John McCain’s campaign. McCain performed way above plausibility compared to where the Republican president was in the polls. We have to look honestly at what went wrong.”
That is the truth. McCain did better than any other Repubican candidate could have done because he was perceived to be the least Republican among them, and still he couldn’t shake the GOP taint. I’m not a fan of Gingrich, but his
It’s not a broadly held assessment, however. Politico also quoted Greg Mueller, described as “a political consultant who specializes in conservative candidates,” who insisted that the next RNC chairman be an “ideological conservative.”
“It is very unpopular to be a Republican right now, but it is very popular to be a conservative. The conservative brand is the most popular brand in the country, but we didn’t run as conservatives.”
Conservatives keep telling each other that, but the hard truth is that no “real conservative” could even win the Republican nomination, when only other Republicans and conservatives were doing the voting. What passes for “modern conservatism” is an ideology born in the ’60s, reached its culmination in the ’80s and has been living on past glories ever since.
Conservatives who look at what the youth vote did in the past election and at the demographic changes coming in this country and then still insist that returning to the old ways will cure them … well, good luck with that.
Christine Todd Whitman, one of the last of a dying breed of Northeast Republicans, lays it out in a Washington Post piece. Her bottom line:
“Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness. On Nov. 4, the American people very clearly rejected the politics of demonization and division. It’s long past time for the GOP to do the same.”
