It's official: the GOP has no ideas

It’s official: the Republicans have no ideas.

The Republican “idea machine” has shut down. About a year ago, the Republicans set up a “National Council for a New America”, the GOP’s think tank for its own ideas, to compete with Democratic ideas.

We waited and waited and waited.

It became clear that the GOP had no ideas. Their entire agenda was to tear down Democratic ideas and attack the Democrats themselves. Whenever they were challenged to come up with their own proposals…“the dog ate our homework”. Their promise to hold town meetings across the country to hear ideas from “plain folks”…didn’t do that either – one town hall and they quit.

Now the group is dead. And their excuse? It’s all the Democrats’ fault! Those damn liberals attacked the Council so it couldn’t get going.

Let me see if I get this straight. Over the last year, it’s been the Democrats who have been slamming Republican ideas? And not the other way around?

Sorry, girls. You promised ideas, we waited for you to produce them so we could discuss them, you didn’t produce anything, so the country moved on.

Fast forward a bit. Not long ago the Republicans, still with visions of a 1994 remake in their minds, announced that they were going to repeat the 1994 strategy by announcing a new “contract” with America, this time to be called “Commitment to America”. Presumably it would be a list of things the party promises to do, the ideas it plans to pursue as legislation, and so forth. Right?

Wrong.

It’s a suggestion box.

YOU go to their website, and YOU put the ideas in.

The guy who was stuck setting this up said the goal is for “the public to take ownership.”

As with the failed “Council” effort, the aim was to let common folks do all the work for the “leaders”.

In other words, they are so completely out of ideas, that they’re leaving all the homework to us.

Republican “leadership”. Totally out of gas.

But these same Republicans insist that they must be given control of Congress so that they can turn their ideas into law! Ideas which…they don’t have.



Actually the fact that the GOP “idea factory” is out of business, is hardly a surprise. Just in the last day or two they have shown, over and over, how intellectually bankrupt they really are.

The Republicans have no idea how the Constitution really works -- Sarah Palin went on the air recently and made clear that (a) she’s an idiot, (b) she ridicules knowledge of the Constitution out of spite because she doesn’t have any herself, and (c) she seemingly wants to build a theocracy, like the Iranians did. "Our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man; they come from God….I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple."…If her presidential aspirations don’t pan out, she can always run for Ayatollah.

More cluelessness about the Constitution -- Kit Bond: “And both of these fellows, on Christmas Day and New York in Times Square, have enough evidence that you could convict them. You don't need to Mirandize them. You don't need to give them that warning and potentially shut them up and certainly give them a lawyer who will tell them to be quiet.” So the wingnuts want to take away the Constitutional right to a lawyer, the Constitutional right to citizenship, and the Constitutional right to a Miranda warning, from U.S. citizens who haven’t been convicted of anything…But it’s Obama who’s the terrible threat to the Constitution, right?

The Republicans have no idea how to write legislation, either. Their legislators at the state level are pursuing a really risky strategy. They are trying to show America that the best lawmaking happens at the state level, not the federal level. And then they are doing all they can to disprove that theory, by pursuing their wingnut agenda in one statehouse after another. Florida Republicans are now obsessed with banning sex with animals. Kansas lawmakers want to impose a tax on abortions. Arizona, which has passed an astounding body of stupid legislation recently, on everything from “papers please” to concealed carry, is now working on a law banning “human-animal hybrids”, so all you mermaids and centaurs better hit the road! And this is how they’re trying to persuade us that state-level lawmakers know better than Washington.

The Republicans have no idea how the economy works -- The latest jobs report showed the biggest jump in manufacturing jobs in almost 12 years. The report shot down the GOP assertion that the new jobs were mostly in the government sector. GOP leader Eric Cantor was force to mumble "An employment report that shows job growth is always a good thing, period”, while his boss, John Boehner, went into complete denial/cognitive-dissonance mode: "Where are the jobs?"

The only idea they do have, is racism right out of the gutter. Skeery brown people! AAUUGGHH! -- America is seeing, ever more clearly, that a lot of what they’re hearing from the GOP comes in the form of racial code words and signals. Down in Florida, my hero, Alan Grayson, is under attack from a wingnut candidate who actually went on the air with a picture of a white guy and a brownish guy, asking -- which one looks more like a terrorist? Message: BROWN PEOPLE SCARY! This perfectly mirrors the intent of the new Arizona law: look at the brown guy on the street, doesn’t he look like an illegal? And when people think about all the other racist things the Republicans have said – “Kenyan” as code-word for “black”, “real American” as code for “white” (which would come as a surprise to native Americans) -- Americans are starting to associate the GOP with the stench of a KKK torch.

More mindless racism -- Fox News is now running with a story that illegal immigrants kill 2000 people a year, which the original source admitted was a number that was essentially made-up: it has no basis in fact. The fact is that immigrants are far less likely to commit serious crimes that “real” Americans: they don’t want trouble, because trouble means deportation. As Crooks And Liars noted, the fact that this nonsense has no basis in reality didn’t stop Fox from implying, on the air, that 12 million people are murderous thugs. On no evidence whatsoever.

Some more signs that the American people are realizing how idea-free the Republicans are: first, Crist has pulled ahead. The minute Crist got the Republican stink off his back, he pulled 6 points ahead of Rubio in Florida. And second, the birther solidarity against Obama has begun to crack. The latest ABC poll shows that even among the birthers who think Obama is an illegitimate criminal, one-third of them approve of his job performance. Even the birthers are starting to realize how insane their jihad against Obama really is.


…Oh, wait, they DO have an original idea. They want to dismantle Medicare. Read on!

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_05/023704.php