If you're like me, you're probably pretty miffed about the Conservatard platform of "liar liar, let's light effigies on fire." But I am seeing something of a pattern in that RW campaigns usually end up fruitless.
Read below the fold to see my analysis of RW failures.
Well, first let's start with the 2008 election season. The RW noise machine turned it up to high gear to defeat the Democratic advance. I'm sure you all remember the Faux News pushing all this BS about Obama being a secret Muslim, the "terrorist fist jab" he gave to his wife, or the fact that his middle name was Hussein.
The McCain camp wasn't much more civil. McCain tried to be Mr. Nice Guy at first, but when Sarah Palim joined in and campaign season became more heated, McCain realized that it was time to up the ante. Probably one of the more memorable parts of the whole campaign was the fact that McCain kept trying to call into question the motives and asked his followers a rhetorical question to which one audience gave a pretty interesting answer:
You can see McCain grimace briefly at hearing this, but he goes on, unwilling to talk down that person. It was as if he thought it was just some guy being silly, but really it was the sign of how divided we were getting. After the crash of the stock market, McCain knew he was in trouble because he had admitted in a past interview with Tim Russert (rest his soul) that he was inexperienced in dealing with the economy. This and the fact that people began to see that Sarah Palin really was an idiot caused his numbers to slide, so McCain's camp decided it was time to push back and go on the offensive.
Sarah Palin was an entirely new glass of peach tea. She took partisanship and wore it like a hair-clip. She made herself known as a real fiery talker whose most favorite theme was "Us vs. Them". Palin tried her very hardest to make Obama look like he was not "one of us", i.e. a "decent, hard-working, god-fearing, REAL American."
What became of all this hate and partisanship? Failure, absolute failure. The Democrats expanded their majorities in both the House and Senate and Barack Obama won by a clear majority of the vote. However, the conservatives made it clear that they would not accept this election and be willing to be agreeable. As soon as the president entered the White House, they started immediately opposing the president, starting with the stimulus battle.
The Republicans whined and shed their crocodile tears about how the stimulus would burden our children's children with debt and that it would not create jobs. What became of that? The stimulus bill passed. The final product was not a great, broad bill, but it was undoubtedly a GOOD bill. It put much-needed investment into thousands of projects that had been planned out, but had no funds. One example is a new tunnel that was built between NYC and New Jersey. But the Republicans behaved like the stimulus battle was still raging on, claiming the stimulus is doing no good while they were in fact taking credit for it amongst their constituents.
The next thing I wish to discuss is the Sotomayor confirmation battle. Gingrich, Randall Terry, and just about every conservative group got all up in arms and tried to paint her as a radical liberal reverse-racist (rolls eyes). I remember how Randall Terry's anti-choice group Operation Rescue circulated e-mails with a depiction of Sotomayor as half-skeleton, half-human entitled "Defeat Sotomayor." Did they defeat Sotomayor? No, they didn't! What they did accomplish was further marginalizing their support in the Hispanic demographic.
My final conclusion is as follows: Everything the conservatives do serves to do little but further "purify" their ranks by ousting RINOs and practicing thinly-veiled racism.
Whether this will end in the GOP going the way of the Whigs is yet to be seen, but I can only say this for sure: The Democrats and the Republicans have switched places since the 1860's. Back then, the Democrats were the white-dominated, southern-based, conservative political party while the Republicans were the progressive party. Now, the tables are completely turned.