Republicans are going to win some big victories tonight, and Erick Erickson is depressed:
Rpublicans will probably take the Senate as well as the House on Tuesday. But many of those GOP Senate candidates about to squeak into office are, in my view, political philanderers -- by which I mean that while they pledge their troth to conservative principles, they still carry on outrageous affairs with Big Government....At the same time, Rush Limbaugh tells a skeptical caller that the glass is half full, through bitter tears:
So we might well see a Republican Congress in name after Election Day, but its small-government rhetoric is certainly not going to fool or win over the party base. In 2014, the American public has shown that it hates Washington, D.C., and the Republican leaders in Washington are demonstrating why. They have assembled a team of strategists, consultants, and other political operatives who eat, breathe, and sleep Washington, D.C. Instead of standing for something, they stand for anything they think might get them back into power....
... I think at this point, for me, since what you say, these guys, the current Republican leaders are not conservative, they're not gonna articulate it, that's true. But they're not Obama, either. No matter what you want to say, they're not Obama, and they're not gonna be and do what Obama does. They may not stand up to Obama, but that's not who they are....What the hell is wrong with these people? Even without the White House and the Senate, they have the gun laws and abortion laws and voting laws they want in many states, they have nearly all the Bush tax cuts locked in, Gitmo's still open, the war on terror has never really ended and is gearing up again, we're doing nothing on climate change, immigration reform is postponed, the states have undermined Obamacare (and the Supreme Court will probably kill it eventually), our campaign finance system is custom-crafted to plutocrats' specifications, and the economy is working well exclusively for the only people Republicans care about, those very plutocrats, because after the financial meltdown it was politically impossible to do enough stimulus, politically impossible to build any infrastructure, politically impossible to pass a jobs program. To a huge extent, =conservatives control the agenda. They'll have even more control starting next year. And they're whining?
We had a caller a moment ago who asked me to be careful in talking about a landslide 'cause he's worried, "What if it isn't? Oh, no! It's horrible, and even if we win, what have we won because McConnell and Boehner are worthless. McConnell and Boehner, they're no different than Obama. They're not gonna try to stop Obama.
"They're just gonna try to be placeholders for a while, maybe help get immigration. What's it gonna do?" I said to him, "They're not Obama." ...
None of us control what Boehner does. None of us control what McConnell does. We know they're not conservatives. We know they try to convince people they are whenever they think it's useful, but we know they're not conservatives....
I don't like living that way. I don't like living perpetually in a depression. I don't like living fatalistically. I just don't. I am always gonna try to find the positive. I'm not gonna lie to myself about it, but I'm always gonna try to enjoy life. We only get one life, and I don't intend to live it mad at everybody all the time. I don't intend to live it fatalistically.
I don't intend to live my life telling myself what I believe never has a chance. I'm not gonna do that. Sorry. I'm not speaking to anybody specifically. I'm not reacting to a caller or anything. I just... I'm just sharing a little bit about me with you. I am the mayor of Realville, and a phrase that has become a cliche is something I profoundly believe in: "It is what it is."
I don't pretend that things aren't the way they are and that they are the way I wish they were, but I try to make them that way if they aren't. I know Mitch McConnell is a sad disappointment to people. I know Boehner is a disappointment. But we know who the Republican establishment is....
Those are just some realities. I mean, my life has told me that. I know some of you are new and getting into this and you're holding out hope. I'm not trying to be a downer about any of this. I just believe in accepting what is and dealing with it as best we can at the time....
What more do they want? Oh, yeah -- the elimination of the rest of the twentieth-century social safety net, Georgia-style gun laws in all fifty states, bans on abortion and gay marriage across the country, and the rollback of all regulations on business. And they could conceivably get it all -- all they need to do is run the table in one presidential election cycle. But they're still miserable, even when they're so close. How spoiled can you be?
6 comments:
Well you know what they want. They want America to be like a Jimmy Stewart movie, which they fondly fantasise is how it used to be. They want women back in the kitchen, sodomites back in jail and Those People back in their place. They want the rest of the world to do homage to the USA as the Exceptional Nation saving the human race from Evil.
Most of all, they want to be universally recognised as superior to the rest of mankind so they can push all those funny minority groups around without do-gooders making a fuss about discrimination. Because freedom.
They know they're not going to get any of it, so they're permanently bitter, angry, nasty little men.
You forgot--they want Lena Dunham's head on a pike.
They won't be happy until the last liberal is dead.
And then, they'll turn on one another.
Sadly, most of us won't be around to watch that.
OK, let's say for the sake of argument that the last liberal has been hunted down and summarily executed. What happens next? The conservatives will create another bete noir just as good. Did we skip a beat when communism died and was no longer our mortal enemy? No, we found a perfectly good substitute: terrorism. We are dealing with a fundamental psychological dynamic here: America, the bastion of the pure and the free, is always under attack from dark forces, and there are always domestic symps (usually some sort of treasonous perverts) conniving with them to bring the country down. Concepts like ISIS bringing ebola via the southern border only sounds ludicrous to non-conservatives. To a true American conservative (which is redundant in their view) it has an irresistible plausibility.
Totalitarianism is never satisfied, just as greed is never sated. The never-ending quest for ideological purity is fundamental, and the Right Group cannot rest until it, and only it, is the Only Group That Counts. There will always be an enemy - an Outsider Enemy which will bind the Insiders together in fear and hate, and an Insider Enemy, who must be rooted out to ensure security and comfort (which never actually arrives). This is an old, old story, and yet it's always too surprising and unbelievable for people to grasp.
Erick Erickson will always be a miserable prick.
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