The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet

[mrjarrell]

L. Neil Smith pens a letter to Mr. Gingrich and his Republican cohorts. Hopefully they'll get a few copies, read it and take it to heart. We don't need another fake contract with America. The last one was a sham and we can expect more of the same from them the next go around.

From Libertarian Enterprise:

Dear Newt—
It says here somewhere (I can't find it, now that I need it) that you believe the Republicans can take the House back in 2010, and that you're thinking of resurrecting the famous GOP "Contract with America" which you assert was pivotal in the Congressional "revolution" of 1994.
As a libertarian, I have to admit up front that I was never very sanguine about your "Contract with America", not only because (A) I was never invited to sign my copy of it, or (B) to suggest amendments, or (C) I never believed it had much to do with your party taking the congress for the first time in 40 years (the simple truth is, voters were fed up with Clinton, exactly as they are today with Obama), but because, rather than a phony "Contract with America", what you and your party need most (and have avoided for decades) is contact with America.
Whenever you're out of power, you GOP guys talk a lot of brave, fine-sounding talk about individual liberty. Let you get hold of the reins, however, and what we've witnessed to our disgust, instead, is blind carnage overseas and stultifying oppression at home. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and other places, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the gutting of the Bill of Rights, it all got started on the GOP's watch. Never to forget Waco, which was approved, planned, and rehearsed during the George H.W. Bush regime.
Obama's crew are only taking policies like that to their logical extremes.
And all you Republicans can say is that it worked. I thought it was the left who are into situational ethics. What ever happened to "The ends cannot justify the means?" It is not an adequate ethical defense against an accusation of torture, to claim that the torture worked.
And it's also untrue. But let's set that aside and move on.
The embarrassing truth—the brontosaurus in the broom closet that nobody wants to talk about—is that the Republican Party was never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the 1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in America.
The one and only hope you have (and this will work only if you can persuade us to believe you despite what we've seen you do time and time again) is to lay out a detailed and coherent program that, in a clean sweep, will get the vile, disgusting stench of socialism out of the nation's nostrils once and for all—not secrete another layer of it on top of what the Democrats have added to the evil work of the Republican socialists Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. and George W. Bush, and yes, the wise, benevolant god-king himself, Ronald Reagan.
If you ever really open your eyes and look around you, the first thing you'll discover is that Republicans made the mess we live in today. You made the election of Obama inevitable. If you and Rush Limbaugh had wholeheartedly supported Ron Paul, instead of spending enormous time and effort trying to defame and marginalize him, we wouldn't be in any of these messes right now. But you had to choose somebody else—absolutely anybody else—instead. If you expect to get the country back—and if you want help from anybody else—you will have to acknowledge that, and stop doing the things that made it happen.
And start doing things right.
I believe it was you—when the integrity of the 1994 Republican "revolution" was revealed to be paper thin, and the entire facade began to collapse—who revived Voltaire's cynical observation that "The perfect is the enemy of the good". The truth is that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, the perfect is the enemy of the half-assed. If it weren't for those of us who keep insisting on the perfect, there'd never be any good.
It's vital that you understand that folks at the tea parties and the congressional town hall meetings were—and remain today—just as fed up with Republicans who, through a weakness and stupidity that seem almost genetic with them, failed America utterly (it didn't help that a number of Republicans tried to grab credit for these mostly spontaneous events) as they are with insane and evil Democrats who are gleefully destroying what little remains of their lives, liberty, and property.

More at the source. Definitely worth the short read.

 

[rambone]

. If you and Rush Limbaugh had wholeheartedly supported Ron Paul, instead of spending enormous time and effort trying to defame and marginalize him, we wouldn't be in any of these messes right now.

What did Newt Gingrich do to defame Ron Paul?

 

[mrjarrell]

Don't know. I don't pay much attention to either of them. I would guess he is referring to Gingrich's place in the GOP as a behind the scenes (or not so behind) leader. The GOP did savage the man and his followers, no doubt Newt knew of and probably even encouraged it.