So today, when incumbent Republicans are threatened from the right by Tea Party challenges, they don’t react by moving right in any substantive way. Not only would it be all but impossible for most of them, it isn’t necessary to shift their positions on issues. Instead, they react with displays of attitude, amping up their pose of confrontation with Barack Obama. You say you’ll shoot Obamacare with a gun? I’ll fry it with a blowtorch! And it turns out that that kind of posturing can be enough to stave off the challenge.I'm sure there are a thousand equally obsolete columns.
June 12, 2014
"There’s no GOP establishment/Tea Party divide, and there never has been."
Wrote WaPo's Greg Sargent last May.
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25 comments:
Greg Sargent has no GOP sources. He is not equipped to have any valuable commentary on internal GOP politics.
His good sources are all Democrats and Dem operatives.
The Washington Post shouldn't even greenlight any of this garbage. It's all smoke from Sargent's empty sandbox.
Yep, he's a genius.
There's no racial divide, either,...
The Democrats are like Miracle Max in The Princess Bride. "Immigration reform is mostly dead. But there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."
Meanwhile immigration reform is lying on a slab, dead. The Democrats pick up its arm and it drops back down, dead.
"I've seen worse."
(also: "It'll take a miracle.")
Didn't I hear "permanent Republican majority" talk in 2004?
Didn't I hear "permanent Democratic majority" talk in 2008?
I'm actually reminded of a Bible verse.
The sun rises, the sun goes down, and hastens back to the place it rises.
The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north,
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full
to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
The Teacher, probably a nom-de-plume chosen by Solomon, was commenting on the cycles of nature.
But I can't think of a better description of most modern politics.
However, I also notice that the cycles of nature aren't perfect. Every once in a while, we get a winter which is horrendously cold and snowy, or a hurricane arrives where it isn't expected.
So I expect lots of back-and-forth (in weather or in politics), but I also kinda-sorta-expect to see a few surprises and non-predicted events.
Thinking about this, it's actually kinda funny:
A black can't mention a racial problem without a Tea Partier attacking - and usually saying something racist - before blaming Democrats for today's race problems.
They're just screwy,...
So Brat is Tea Party. He isn't Tea Party. Tea Party-Curious?
Shoot Obamacare with a gun? He must have been thinking of the 2010 ad by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), where he criticized Obamacare, touted his support for gun rights and memorably shot a hole in the cap-and-trade bill.
"Obsolete" implies that there was some point in the past when this column had insight.
I am thinking that Eric Cantor believed this.
I found the column by Googling something like "There is no such thing as the tea party," which was my thesis. There is no party that one can be a member of. Originally, "tea party" referred to the rallies that we called "tea parties," which is the tag I've used from the beginning.
It's a label. When is it used and for what purposes? It varies from time to time and from person to person.
If "tea party" comes to mean that guy who said you can't get pregnant from rape, no one wants it. If it's the economics professor who slew Cantor, maybe it will suddenly be slapped on everything.
Sargent's problem is that he cannot imagine political thought outside the one-dimensional left-right continuum.
The GOP establishment/Tea Party divide is happening on an entirely different axis.
Tea party as a label is mostly meaningless at this point. Dems use it on Republicans they want to attack. Pundits use it to label unknown Republicans (as in every primary of an incumbent is a Tea party challenge). Poorly funded candidates use it to try to get funding.
SJ said...
Didn't I hear "permanent Republican majority" talk in 2004?
Didn't I hear "permanent Democratic majority" talk in 2008?
To reinforce your point, I remember some airhead reporter claiming the death of the Republican party following Jimmy Carter's very narrow victory in 1976.
De Nial is a creek running through the District of Columbia.
There is no Tea Party as a national organization, and if the IRS has any say there never will be.
TeaParty is an idea. You can't "belong", since there is no official organization. You have to self-identify.
Just remember children, Sarah Palin created the Tea Party Monster by her delusional "death panel" warnings.
Now wake up on the count of three; and whenever you hear the words Tea Party, attack the Dem's enemies to save the world.
To the extent that the Tea Party is made up of libertarians, I fail to see how "Republicans are threatened from the right by Tea Party challenges" makes any sense.
When it comes to Sex, Drugs, R&R, prayer and flag-waving--the "social issues"--libertarians are to the left of Republicans.
Greg Sargent is a flaming twit and almost nothing he says bears much resemblance to reality. He says whatever he wants, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how inconsistent (with himself in previous columns), so long as it pushes the "Dems good, GOP bad" line.
How is the Sargent quote obsolete thinking? Please explain.
If Cantor had followed the strategy outlined by Sargent, he'd probably be heading to re-election today. But he didn't: Cantor's campaign attacked his opponent (many of his ads treated Brat with outright mockery), more than it scorched Obama.
It never occurred to Cantor that he might be outflanked on the right, that's how secure he felt in his own cred with the TP. Wasn't he the one always trying to pull Boehner to right? And wasn't he the one Obama hated?
Especially recently, you seem to have a propensity to select quotations which contradict, rather than support, your assertions. Several reasons for this suggest themselves to me, but I don't like to speculate (except about politicians). I will only say that if you are doing this intentionally, I think you should stop.
The confusion derives from dumbasses like Sargent and his colleagues, and Crack and garage making stuff up.
Tea partiers are ordinary people who have been stimulated to conservative political activism largely by the profligate morons in DC, including establishment Republicans. Their issues are: reducing inefficient, big government; respect for the Constitution; reducing taxation and the national debt.
Are there some misfits associated with the groups? Sure. Are there misfits associated with the Democrats? Sure, notwithstanding media spin.
Crack's problem with conservatives is that he mistakes indifference to whining from blacks to animosity towards them. He is also an aspiring freeloader pretending there is a difference between reparations and welfare.
Garage is simply an ideological dupe like Sargent and most of the mediaswine.
BTW, here's today's quiz: which Tea Party affiliated PAC contributed to Brat's paltry campaign war chest?
bbkingfish: "Especially recently, you seem to have a propensity to select quotations which contradict, rather than support, your assertions."
There is no reason to drag garage into this.
He's still trying to figure out how negative GDP qualifies as economic growth.
Hombre said...
"Tea partiers are ordinary people who have been stimulated to conservative political activism largely by the profligate morons in DC, including establishment Republicans. Their issues are: reducing inefficient, big government; respect for the Constitution; reducing taxation and the national debt."
This makes more sense of the TP than anything you're likely to read in any news outlet. The Tea Party is nothing more than the right wing of the Republican Party...those who consider themselves the "true conservatives." There is absolutely nothing new, or distinctive, about them.
Their issues, as listed by Hombre, have been part of the GOP platform since 1948, at least. The activists have been active on the right all along, but now, they're called the "Tea Party," as the result of a re-branding effort that was necessary to rally the troops after the debacle of 2008.
Dave Brat seems like an upgrade over Cantor, at least to me. But the Dave Brat for Congress website doesn't even mention the Tea Party, or Tea Party values, or anything at all about the Tea Party. Nope...Dave Brat calls himself a Republican, and he swears fealty to what he calls The Republican Creed.
Why is everyone talking about Greg Sargent?
The article I am sent to says it was written by a Paul Waldman.
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