There’s a moment in the classic John Hughes movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” when the John Candy character (Del Griffith) asks the Steve Martin character (Neil Page) if he has ever traveled by bus before. When the answer is no Griffith says, “I don’t think your mood is going to improve any.” Republicans assessing future prospects are in the same fix. The outlook is not a mood enhancer.
I had not previously been one to believe that any single election marked the end of a political party. The Republicans were not done for when they were slaughtered in the 1964 presidential election, despite predictions of their demise, just as the Democrats were not washed up when President Reagan won 49 states in 1980. But one has to wonder if, this time, we’re headed toward a one party system.
Having given it considerable thought since Election Day last November, I don’t see a scenario whereby the Republicans recover in the new America, an America where Republican principles and values have been rejected by a majority of voters. I agree with everything Senator Marco Rubio said in his rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, but most Americans no longer do. As demonstrated by the results of the last election, they don’t want smaller government and more emphasis on individual initiative, they want a big government taking care of them. With the Democrats established as the party of “free stuff,” what are the Republicans going to do to compete, become the party of even more free stuff?
And speaking of Senator Rubio, all the talk of him being the Republican savior is a waste of breath because, should he be the Republican nominee, the Democrats will destroy him. A party that got away with accusing a decent man like Mitt Romney of murdering the wife of an ex-employee will stop at nothing.
They got away with such an outrageous accusation, of course, because the Democrats and the mainstream media are now one and the same. It’s now the Mediacrat Party, a party that controls the message reaching most Americans with the power to institutionalize themselves as the party of good and the Republicans as the party of evil. And once perceptions are set in place, especially in this era of the low information voter knowing more about Kim Kardashian than the president’s destructive policies, it’s virtually impossible to reverse them. I used to lament that Mediacrats do a more effective job of lying than Republicans do of telling the truth, but that doesn’t matter anymore because the former’s lies are portrayed in the media as truth and the latter’s truths as lies.
But getting back to Senator Rubio, the destruction is already underway, with the Mediacrats declaring his career over because he interrupted his State of the Union response to sip a drink of water. “Saturday Night Live” will probably pile on with a skit this weekend, and the five-second incident will be blown up over time to a full scale disaster and presidential disqualifier. Mediacrat attack line: “His dry mouth affected only him but sucking dry the middle class will affect you.”
With almost half of Americans dependent on the government in one way or another, and the Mediacrats established in peoples’ minds as the party of government, I don’t see how the Republicans can reinvent themselves in a way that leads to electoral success at the federal level. However many millions of Americans look to the government for assistance now, there will be millions more, and therefore millions more Mediacrat voters, by 2016. The Republicans will be portrayed as the party that “wants to take away your benefits.”
And let’s not lose sight of the probability that 11 million illegal aliens will be U.S. citizens by 2016, all Mediacrat voters to thank President Obama. They’ll be followed to the voting booths in later years by their children and their children’s children, etc. Add to this the fact that the Mediacrats have most of the votes of blacks, Latinos and women, and it becomes even more difficult to imagine a Republican reemergence.
Free enterprise, entrepreneurship, hard work, personal responsibility, maintaining liberty — all were rejected by most voters in the last election in favor of President Obama’s fundamental transformation of America. Even the Republicans championing tax cuts is meaningless to the almost 50% of Americans who pay no taxes, and will become even more meaningless as the number of taxpayers shrinks even further. It would appear that the Mediacrats have checkmated the Republicans at every turn.
It is said that what begins in California eventually spreads to the rest of the country. Last year Republican registration in California fell below 30% for the first time in history. Democrats now have control of the legislature in such numbers that they can pass whatever they want. The Republican Party in California is beyond irrelevant, it’s a joke. California today, all of America tomorrow?
President Obama and the Mediacrats are already campaigning to win back the House in 2014. It may not be a question of whether they’ll do it but how many seats they’ll do it by. Based on the bleak way things look now it’s hard to bet against them.
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