Tag: GOP Incompetence

Insular Republicans Set to Harm GOP’s National Ambitions

Buck Banks

They are totally insulated from public opinion on this because of redistricting. Republicans are gonna continue to hold the House. But then we’ll head into the 2016 presidential election where the electorate is likely to be 2 percent less white than it was in 2012 and 4 percent less white than it was in 2008. This is a simple math equation.

— GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, in an interview with the New York Times, on the harm House Republicans will do to the GOP’s national ambitions by not supporting immigration reform.

Could It Be that Republicans are Just Too Stupid to Govern?

Buck Banks

But there’s another alternative worth considering: What if House members are trying to act in their self-interest; they’re just exceptionally bad at figuring out what that is? What if they’re, you know, kinda dumb? For example, if you’re a House Republican, presumably you have some policy preferences: You’d like to massively cut taxes for the wealthy, you’d like to slash spending for the poor, you’d like to privatize Social Security and voucherize Medicare. In short, you’d like to enact the Ryan plan in its full, Randian glory. But, of course, there’s no way to do that as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House. And, unfortunately, as long as you’re committed to acting crazy — threatening needless government shutdowns; insisting that Obamacare is the greatest assault on freedom since the Nazi march across Europe; failing to fix massive electoral liabilities, like your perceived hostility to Latinos —you may preserve your House majority. But it’s going to be damn-near impossible for a Republican to win the presidency.

— Noam Scheiber, writing in the New Republic, considers whether the threat by House Republicans to shut the government down over Obamacare is rational, albeit with perverse incentives.

Most GOPers Think Party Leaders are Heading in the Wrong Direction

Buck Banks

52%

Of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents think the GOP leadership is taking the party in the wrong direction while just 37% think it’s headed in the right direction, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds. “That disaffection is apparent in another measure: Just 21% of Americans in this survey identify themselves as Republicans, matching the fewest since November 2009. GOP allegiance has dropped from an annual average of 31% in 2003 to annual averages of 23 or 24% the past five years straight.”

GOP Will Have to Lose Another Campaign to Learn from the Last One

Buck Banks

They know they have a political problem–that’s obvious. But I don’t think they’ve come to grips with the fundamental issue, which is their governing philosophy. I think they’re going to have to lose one more.

— Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, quoted by The Atlantic, on whether the Republican Party learned lessons from its defeat in 2012.

Wrong Man: John McCain Doubles Down on Criticism of Administration’s Benghazi Report While Ignoring His Own Record of Misstating Facts

Jon Ponder

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After U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice met today with her most vocal critics, GOP Sens. John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Kelly Ayotte, to discuss events after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the three senators rushed to the microphones to double down on their insistence that Rice had played a role in a conspiracy by the Obama White House to cover up the fact that the attack was a terrorist plot — this in spite of the fact that the president himself labeled it a terror attack within 24 hours after it occurred.

“When Ronald Reagan stood up for workers of Gdansk in Poland, when he stood up for the people of Czechoslovakia in Prague Spring, and America did”
– John McCain, incorrectly ascribing actions to Pres. Reagan, who was governor of California during the Prague Spring

On one of the Sunday shows, Graham compared the conspiracy to the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan-era scandal in which top Reagan official, including his secretary of defense, only escaped serving time in prison because they were pardoned by their alleged co-conspirator, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, after he was elected president. A more realistic assessment came from the Washington Post editorial board, which referred to the Benghazi non-scandal as “bizarre.”

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect — and certainly the most hypocritical part of it — is that it is McCain who is leading the charge against Rice simply because she went on the Sunday shows and said something that proved to be incorrect. No senator has appeared on more Sunday shows than John McCain, and few politicians (who were not currently on the payroll of Fox News) have made as many statements that proved to be wrong.

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