Are women destroying the GOP?

The Republicans are a falling stock today. Ridge is tapdancing on whether Bush stole the 2004 election (on Rachel Maddow he was even arguing with the dust jacket of his own book), Grassley is tapdancing on what he meant when he called for Obamacare to be killed, Huckabee is tapdancing on what he meant when he said Obama would have killed Kennedy, Steele tapdancing about wha he meant when he said Medicare was great, and then Medicare was lousy, and then Obama was attacking Medicare, and….And anti-reform doctors have been caught trying to terrify patients with lies about health reform, just like the Republicans.

Obama’s stock: rising. He is close to getting the 50 Senators he needs to pass a reconciliation bill. He is publicly pushing back repeatedly at the media for failing to expose the GOP’s lies. That may be one reason why the media narrative on health care is changing yet again: although the fundamentals of health care haven’t changed, the media was calling reform inevitable in June, a dead issue in July, and now they’re saying it’s looking good again. Likewise Gallup shows Obama’s approval ratings starting to creep up again. And with GOP presidential hopefuls like Huckabee and Palin crashing and burning, some Republicans are actually touting Cheney as a presidential prospect for 2012, apparently realizing that the GOP had better seek to regain power via national security issues because health care isn’t going to get them there.

But our third stock pick is Republican women: sell, sell, sell! Sarah Palin started a solid month of GOP caterwauling with the nonsense about death panels. Some disagree with me, but I think this issue is backfiring badly on the GOP, by making them all look like fools and sucking up a month’s worth of oxygen that the GOP could have used to wage a more credible argument against UHC, such as the cost issue. I really think Palin wrecked the GOP effort against health reform. Not to be outdone, Michelle Bachmann – God’s gift to political satire – is imploring her allies to starve themselves and slit their wrists to stop health care, which pretty much speaks for itself.

And now Lynn “Great White Hope” Jenkins is trying to out-Palin Palin, or perhaps out-Bachmann Bachmann. Jenkins sneered at a working mom who couldn’t afford insurance, and hasn’t taken her toddler to a doctor in almost two years; Jenkins barked at her – “Go be a grown-up and go buy the insurance!” Can you grasp the message the GOP is conveying to working women across the country with that? All those women struggling to hold their families together in an economy ravaged by GOP incompetence and corruption? “Fuck you, we don’t care, stop whining and be a grownup”. These are the very blue-collar salt-of-the-earth kinda folks the GOP depends on, and they’re deliberately driving them away.