That’s because they are a Borg, Kevin, operating with a hive-mind, directed by preprepared talking points that bear zero relationship or even any causal link to reality.
The Democrats attempt to do this sometimes, when they’ve agreed on some short-term strategy. The Republicans do it all the time.
Republicans, because they are a revolutionary party, understand the necessity and utility of democratic centralism.
The GOP are the most important Leninist party left in the parliamentary world.
The optimum strategy for Democrats, logically, therefore, must be to run right out and do the same thing, only better.
My take is that the bulk of the Republican coalition wants, in one or more ways, to stop time or even turn back the clock. As their power slips slowly (glacially) away, they’re left only with the power to say no and block (or slow) progress. This is what we’ll see until such time that changing demographics forces them to find another way.
Basically, this evolution is playing out in California but they’re many years ahead of the country as a hole. First the Repubs held power and bent the state to conform with their agenda. Then they overstepped and the state repudiated them, but they continued to hold enough power to gum up the levers of government and keep things messed up. Finally the populace rejected them so soundly they lost most of their power. Now they’re in a process of finally having to reconcile with the reality of a shrinking base and figure out a new way forward. They’re nowhere near settling on a reform strategy but the necessity has become so obvious it’s forced them as a party to grapple.
country as a whole. “hole” must have been a freudian slip.
Agreed on the history, maybe on the predictions.
“Now they’re in a process of finally having to reconcile with the reality of a shrinking base”
I think I found the flaw! The modern Teabagger-infested GOP doesn’t do reality. The question is, can they get enough buy-in on their fantasy world (“ACORN voter-fraud conspiracy!!!1!”) to help them steal some elections.
Wait, what?
“preprepared talking points”?
Sorry, but gotta wonder what part of the “pre” in “prepared” was deemed inadequate to the task, such that it required “squaring”.
You can prepare dinner or pre-prepare dinner.
Hm. OK. Stipulating that I recognize this is relatively trivial stuff. (Otoh, clarity of expression seems to me always worth striving for, and I’d argue that needlessly redundant neologisms such as “preprepared” are its enemy!)
But, since you opted to engage: what part of “pre-preparation” of dinner isn’t covered by “preparation” of dinner. I think all the activity you’re referring to is simply “preparation”. The fact that some is done earlier and some just before eating doesn’t change that. I’d suggest something like “staged preparation” (some preparation a significant time in advance, the rest at the last minute — but it’s all still “preparation”!) is perfectly adequate to describe what I think you mean.
Who gets to define what goes into the “progressive voting score”? And to what extent does the GOP automatically attack anything that that is in the “progressive voting score” just to “irritate the liberals”. The reaction to Heritage-designed, Romney-prototyped Obamacare shows that conservative “principles” amount to whatever Rush and Ann Coulter think.
Who gets to define what goes into the “progressive voting score”?
Exactly. It’s a fascinating graph but the basic data has been mapped many times before. It highlights the data in a way that makes a couple of things more visiblt. But for similar data, turn the 2013-14 graph at this page 90 degrees right and you have nearly the same thing:
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/roots_of_shutdown_go_local_to_cover_house_republicans.php?p
age=all
I had to drill down 4 levels or so on the O’Donnell graph to get to the criteria that make up the progressive score. A lot of the issues there don’t even show up on many conservative issue ratings so this result only seems natural. This scale is based on “what makes a progressive” according to one organization and not “what makes a conservative”. Had the scale been designed with conservative isses such that the perfect conservative scored 100%, results might be a bit altered. Here’s where they got it:
http://progressivepunch.org
So I suspect the near flat line of conservatives could be heavily influenced by their methodology. There might be a bit more slope to it if conservative measures were used instead of progressive.
Well, who is the “conservative” Queen Bee these days? Who exactly is determining and writing the prepared talking points, distributing them and advocating the mindless repetition of them? Who’s the brains of the operation?
It certainly doesn’t seem to be any elected official. Rover? The Kochs, whose money now seems to be found in elections everywhere? The absurd Priebus and RNC Central? Reid and the Dems have been making some attempts to tar the Queen Kochs of late.
The now-established tactic of Late Conservatism is to find the weak point (Obamacare implementation this cycle) and then flood the national electorate with an ocean of lies on the subject, preparing the way with their Noise Machine (Fox, Rushbo et. al.), while gaming the useless corporate media. As the election nears, the now bottomless Citizens United plutocrat money funds the non-stop waves of false attack ads, which lib’ruls have no hope of countering, and which there is no accepted institution to debunk. The lies thus become the reality for a stupendous mass of voters.
Thus the electorate ends up believing for example that Dems undermined Medicare to fund Obamacare and Repubs sought to protect it, of all insanity. With complicated policy subjects, it is very easy to lie and mislead the great mass of voters, who are woefully uninformed yet quite certain they understand everything.
While Davis chides that one can’t model themselves on monsters, in war one must also fight fire with fire. This is extremely difficult when the enemy’s tactic is brazen lying spread coast to coast via plutocrat money. We certainly shouldn’t fight lies with more lies, nor do we have the funds to do so.
So how do lib’ruls get to the Queen Bee? A manipulated, largely uninterested and propagandized electorate certainly isn’t going to figure out either the truth or the method of their manipulation. The “marketplace of ideas” is polluted.
Finally Drum makes the critical observation that “pinkish districts” seem not to care that their Repub votes EXACTLY like the hardest line Cruzite. This is the root of the problem, that Repubs in “moderate” districts have no fear of what they are enabling. Once the voters have been rendered toothless, the system is wrecked.
Don’t forget that the GOP smears even the Blue Doggiest of Blue Dogs(like Cooper of TN) as baby killers and the like even though they almost always vote with the GOP on anything on importance.
Ugh! Should be “on anything of importance.”