READ THIS, BUT THEN AGAIN YOU PROBABLY KNOW THIS ALREADY ~ "A part of the Republican dilemma lies in the party’s disproportionate dependence on white southern voters. These voters are well to the right of the rest of the nation and they elect the dominant block of hard-right conservatives in the House. Of the 234 Republican members of the House, 97 — two fifths — come from the 11 Confederate states, and these 97 are almost uniformly opposed to negotiation of any kind with Democrats. It is the southern conservatives who, along with their northern Tea Party colleagues, seek to kill immigration reform and who insisted on removing the food stamp program from the recently passed Farm Bill. These members of the House are what Feehery describes as “nostalgia” Republicans who define conservatism as “the ability to fight progress.” They produce a flood of statements and declarations that Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, calls “offensive and bizarre” and which he claims are turning his party into “the stupid party.” It is these politicians whom the opinion writers of the Wall Street Journal had in mind to when they wrote The dumbest strategy is to follow the Steve King anti-immigration caucus and simply let the Senate [Immigration] bill die while further militarizing the border. This may please the loudest voices on talk radio, but it ignores the millions of evangelical Christians, Catholic conservatives, business owners and free-marketers who support reform. The G.O.P. can support a true conservative opportunity society or become a party of closed minds and borders. The Republican Party is struggling to resolve the conflict between its pragmatic establishment wing and its ideological-suicidal wing. Speaking right after President Obama’s re-election, Haley Barbour, a former governor of Mississippi and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, summarized the party’s dilemma succinctly. At a meeting in Las Vegas of the Republican Governors Association, Barbour said: “We’ve got to give our political organizational activity a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.” ~ from the article
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 16:54:41 +0000
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