Aftermath

Reading a wide assortment of news reports over the last few days, it’s rather sickening to see how the remnants of the Republican Party appear to be coming apart at the seams. The accusations and recriminations are flowing freely, with everyone blaming everyone else for the disastrous loss to the loony left! We have the McCain camp blaming the Palin camp for the election day loss, to which the Palin camp is naturally taking great umbrage. The leadership seems to be in a knife fight over who will take over, and as usual nearly everybody’s mad at the “knuckle dragging” religious right conservatives for some reason or other. The left wing media is gloatingly telling all and sundry about the mistakes, real or imaginary, made by the Republicans while nobody seems to be considering that the policies of the last few years just might have been a major “turn-off” to the American voters! Unfortunately the Democrats have the mistaken idea that their winning of both houses of Congress and the White House is a mandate to push their ideas of socialized medicine, big government, “redistributing” the nations’ wealth, along with massive tax and spend social policies. Personally I don’t think that is what American voters want to at all, and the voting numbers can hardly be considered a democratic landslide. However, we’ll see over the next couple of years just how far loony left agenda can fly.

In the meantime the Republicans, and particularly the moderates, are going to be busily contemplating “what happened”, and I would hope planning a major comeback. But if they plan to be more than also-rans in the next national election, somebody had better do some serious thinking about policies, and even what the Republican Party really stands for! Whenever the Democrats lose a presidential election they blame it on the personal qualities of their candidate. This blame-the-messenger idea allows them to conclude that their message was fine, that the American people are calling for higher taxes, big government, a defeatist foreign policy, and gay marriage. I would hope that the GOP can in the next few days rise above such self disillusionment, and that they don't blame McCain the messenger in place of a seriously flawed message. After all, how could Republicans attack the Democratic policies when the GOP said essentially the same, more spending (which means more taxes), more government, a vague tax cut sometime in the future, no way out of a seemingly endless low-intensity war in the Mid-east, no real plan to solve our economic woes, nothing to solve the porous border and illegal alien problems, no response to wild climate change accusations, and of course no idea of what to do about the continued exodus of American jobs to other countries. Both campaigns had essentially the same universal answer of “throwing more money at the problem”, naturally without mentioning where that money’s supposed to come from. Remember the term “Republicrats”? What happened to the idea of political parties offering us a choice? Mr. McCain’s claim to being a “maverick” was apparently based on his voting with the Democrats in the 10% of the time he wasn’t voting with President Bush. In our modern era many people vote for what they perceive as being the lesser of two evils and it would appear that President-elect Obama was seen as being the lesser evil.

The left has continuously attacked the religious right as being everything from “out of date” to “knuckle dragging rednecks”, and then, to make matters even worse the Republican “neoconservatives” did much the same along with expounding their free spending big government agenda. They pushed the “Patriot Act” through congress, which alienated nearly everybody other than the neo-con’s. Now they continue defending their assault on our freedoms by claiming it a necessary “tool” to protect us from whatever threat can be hurriedly dreamed up by homeland security. Nor do I expect anyone, Republicans or Democrats, to repeal this act as it is just far too handy a device for whomever might want to exercise complete control over the American public. Is it any wonder that half the Republican Party is mad at the other half?! About the only way they’re going to heal that rift is by finding another Barry Goldwater to run under the Republican banner in 2012! (Well, perhaps another Ronald Reagan.)

The exodus of American jobs going overseas could be controlled simply by placing a tremendously high tariff on products being imported from overseas. That might slow down the stampede towards globalization as well. Unfortunately that would also antagonize the free trade people, big business concerns that already own our congress, and of course the remainder of the industrialized world. I suppose that wouldn’t really matter though, as most of ‘em are already mad at us.

We have a new president-elect as of November 4th. Perhaps, in the spirit of bipartisanship and to show that there are no hard feelings, we should show the Democrats and their new president the same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president. Of course that would do little more than continue the hate and divisiveness in this country, and that is something we don’t need if we’re going to remain a world power.

Since Barack Obama won the election we can be sure of one thing... that he will lead the largest expansion of the government's role in the economy since the “New Deal”. This "New New Deal," as some Democrats are calling it, will probably have the same result as the last one, turning a rather painful recession into a long and miserable depression that will see a further erosion of our rather shaky standard of living. Will that set the stage for a GOP president in 2012? Unlikely, as President-to-be Obama will play the hard times into a second term, in the same way FDR did… by blaming everything that happens on his predecessors. The worse things get, the more it will be blamed on "eight years of Republican deregulation, tax cuts and greed", obviously requiring even more government intervention to control. The Liberal media will back that up of course.

About the only good thing that came from the McCain campaign is that he placed Sarah Palin on the national political stage. She might well find herself leading a completely new Conservative movement. Starting tomorrow, if not sooner.