The GOP: Not What It Used to Be

[laPapessaGiovanna]

And he also declared that they went through a bitter divorce. She suicided at 20 yo.

And of course he blamed his opponents for dragging this old story back in the light. Because the voters whose private lives will be determined by this man's policies, don't deserve to know.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

So he was 18. She was 14. What shocks me the most about this is that he was able to marry her when she was 15, with parental consent. I honestly don't understand how that would be legal, if sleeping with her wasn't. If she couldn't give consent to sex I don't think she should be able to give consent to marriage, and nor should anyone on her behalf.

Sadly, many states have no minimum age with parental consent. 
 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States

 

Personally, I believe that 18 should be the minimum. 

Edited May 22, 2021 by GreyhoundFan

[WiseGirl]

It has a certain ring to it.

 

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

 

[47of74]

3 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Yeah I was just coming here myself to make note of Frothy Man on Dog Santorum being invited to leave CNN after his commentary on Native Americans. 

Good for CNN to do this but I wonder how long it'll be till he shows up on OAN, NewsMax, or some other cult outlet whining about being canceled.

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Good for CNN to do this but I wonder how long it'll be till he shows up on OAN, NewsMax, or some other cult outlet whining about being canceled.

He could end up with his own show on Mike Lindell's site.

[GreyhoundFan]

12 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

He could end up with his own show on Mike Lindell's site.

Good, then nobody will see or hear him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read: "Dismissed in 2012, this diagnosis of GOP ills has now become undeniable"

Quote

(CNN)The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or "an apocalyptic cult." It bore a striking headline:

"Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."

It didn't mention Marjorie Taylor Greene, the deadly January 6 insurrection or Donald Trump's Big Lie. In fact, the words "Donald Trump" did not appear at all.

Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.

Their conclusions -- that the GOP had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" -- did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.

"Ultra, ultra liberals" whose views "carry no weight with me," sneered Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

"I thought they overstated things," Republican Charlie Dent, then serving his fourth term in the House from Pennsylvania, recalls now.

"People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon,'" says William Kristol, who was then editing the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. With John Boehner as House speaker and Mitt Romney winning the GOP presidential nomination, Kristol saw the Republican mainstream still in command.

Facing reality

All have since gotten slugged by reality. What ailed the party in 2012 has worsened.

Kristol's magazine, having diverged from Trump-era orthodoxy, no longer exists. Of his earlier sources of reassurance: Boehner fled Congress to author a book decrying his colleagues' dysfunction; Romney has become a pariah as the only Republican senator who twice voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges.

Dent, now a CNN political commentator, quit the House after moderates like him became further marginalized. McConnell was shaken by violence inside the US Capitol for which he declared the defeated Republican President "practically and morally responsible."

"I don't get much satisfaction out of being right," says Mann, now retired in California. "A country, and a system, like ours has to have two strong governing parties. The fact is, we only have one."

"It's a grim picture for the foreseeable future," adds Ornstein. "We have a serious risk of losing our democracy."

GOP office-holders keep showing why.

Denying the scientific facts of climate change no longer suffices. House Republican have made honesty a disqualification for party leadership.

They fired Rep. Liz Cheney as conference chair for refusing to obscure the truth about President Joe Biden's victory. Most rank-and-file Republicans, polls show, believe Trump's lies about voter fraud.

Mann and Ornstein described party leaders' refusal to rein in lawmakers like Allen West of Florida, who falsely asserted that "78 to 81" congressional Democrats were communists. Out of Congress and relocated, West now chairs the Texas GOP.

It's gotten worse

His 2021 successors have grown loonier. Greene won a House seat from Georgia last year after expressing support for bizarre QAnon fantasies, which link Democrats with pedophilia.

When Mann and Ornstein wrote their 2012 piece, Tea Party Republicans had menaced the American economy with a debt crisis. But this year's insurrection created physical menace -- for Capitol Police, lawmakers of both parties, even then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Cheney warns that Trump may incite further violence. She told CNN's Jake Tapper that House GOP colleagues voted against impeaching Trump because they were "afraid, in some instances, for their lives."

A White Missourian who gained fame by pointing a gun at racial justice protesters got invited to speak at Trump's 2020 nominating convention; he has now launched a GOP Senate candidacy. An AEI poll this year found most Republicans agree "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."

What alarms them are the evolving demographic, cultural and economic realities of 21st century America. The country continues to become less White, less Christian, less financially rewarding for workers without advanced technical skills or higher education.

The GOP voting base is increasingly dominated by older, blue-collar, evangelical Whites in economically lagging towns and rural areas. Conservative media outlets stoke nativist anger over their loss of status and power.

Democrats have drawn more popular votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections. So in key states like Georgia, using Trump's lies as fuel, Republicans now seek new election rules to help them win.

"I don't like where we're heading, but don't think it's inevitable that we get to that terrible place," says Dent. He recently joined more than 100 prominent Republicans in a letter imploring the GOP to "rededicate itself to founding ideals."

"For the people who want to tell themselves that the Republican Party's salvageable, there's always just enough hope," Kristol says.

McConnell's January condemnation of Trump suggested the most powerful remaining Republican in Washington might chart a new path. After the insurrection was quashed, the seven-term Kentucky senator angrily assailed "criminal behavior" that "tried to disrupt our democracy."

But like his House counterpart Kevin McCarthy, McConnell cares most about recapturing the majority in next year's elections.

For obvious reasons, Trump opposes the House-passed measure creating a bipartisan, 9/11-style commission to investigate the insurrection. Dependent on the former President's support, McCarthy led the overwhelming majority of House Republicans last week in voting no.

McConnell, too, fell in line.

"I've made the decision to oppose the House Democrats' slanted and unbalanced proposal," he said. That virtually ensures it will die in the Senate by Republican filibuster.

 

Here is the full text of the essay referenced in the article:

Quote

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal.

Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. (Some of his progeny, elected in the early 1990s, moved to the Senate and polarized its culture in the same way.)

Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.

The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraskacalled his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections.

In the House, some of the remaining centrist and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats have been targeted for extinction by redistricting, while even ardent tea party Republicans, such as freshman Rep. Alan Nunnelee (Miss.), have faced primary challenges from the right for being too accommodationist. And Mitt Romney’s rhetoric and positions offer no indication that he would govern differently if his party captures the White House and both chambers of Congress.

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

Look ahead to the likely consequences of voters’ choices in the November elections. How would the candidates govern? What could they accomplish? What differences can people expect from a unified Republican or Democratic government, or one divided between the parties?

In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.

I agree that Gingrich and Norquist are some of the chief instigators of the GOP becoming the GQP.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm not sure if anyone has shared this. It's quite good:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one:

 

[WiseGirl]

Yep

 

[fraurosena]

14 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Yep

 

The stupid thing about this is the reasoning. They know that they don't stand a chance of winning if everyone has the ability to cast their votes, so they reckon that the only way to win is to cheat. Instead of simply adjusting your goals to better reflect what the public wants they choose making it nearly impossible to vote and lying and casting ridiculous aspersions about the other party and its followers.

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Instead of simply adjusting your goals to better reflect what the public wants

They'll never change their goals:

1. Remain in power forever
2. Keep women and minorities "in their place"
3. Make money for themselves and their wealthy friends
4. Repeat 1-3 until they die

[WiseGirl]

He's baaaack...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/politics/paul-ryan-donald-trump-gop-reagan-presidential-library-republicans/index.html

Paul Ryan that is....

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

He's baaaack...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/politics/paul-ryan-donald-trump-gop-reagan-presidential-library-republicans/index.html

Paul Ryan that is....

Too bad he didn't do anything about the tangerine takeover when he was a party leader.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Becky]

So MTG = Jesus. Got it. That doesn’t quite match up with what I learned in Sunday School, though. 

[Flossie]

So Jesus is now a woman?  Wouldn't that make him lgbtq, thus a liberal?

[WiseGirl]

Truth

 

[ADoyle90815]

Florida Orange Fuckface wishes he were worshiped like Jesus.

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't think I shared this, apologies if I have. Jeb!'s son is begging for orange support in the most pathetic manner possible:

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited June 4, 2021 by Cartmann99
cleaning up messes

[Cartmann99]

Jeb's son is such an embarrassment.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

I wanted to refresh my memory on the exact contents of the 2020 Republican Party platform, but when I follow the link, this is what I get:

Spoiler