Whither The GOP?

Make no mistake; DC Big Whigs plan to meet today in order to allegedly hammer out a deal on the budget in terms of the debt ceiling.

The results of the debt ceiling will, in quite the nutshell, decide if the GOP is to live or die.

Not in the next week, not in the next month or even perhaps in the next year. But if the Republicans fail to live up to their hoopla and Big Words from last November, the Republicans simply will not care, at all, for the results that they have gone out of their way to create.

Because the Right People, the Moral People, the Good People, the Builders, the Taxpayers, the Creators, the Contributors, the Realists, the honest-to-God Patriots, the Hosts --

-- they are rapidly running out of patience, blood and money.

Their US government has tapped every good vein time and again so that the Leeches are bloated. Hosts and Parasites. The Hosts are dwindling in numbers and the Parasites are increasing, as well as their demands.

And the Republicans continue to turn a deaf ear on the people that put the leadership of the House back into GOP hands.

Even Hugh Hewitt -- a rather amazingly-tolerant GOP'er -- writes:

In advance of Sunday's big meet on the potential big deal, the Washington Post runs "Lament for a Beltway Insider," which it chose to actually title "In debt talks, leaders pressured from below." (The online jump changes that title to "Progressives and tea party lawmakers pressure leaders on debt deal," but the point is the same --the leadership is being told by the party not to compromise.)

Which ought to leave Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor two choices on Sunday if the president doesn't arrive ready to focus exclusively on cutting non-defense spending deeply.

The first choice is saying "no" and leaving when "revenue enhancements" or defense cuts are brought up a second time after firm rejection the first time.

Or saying "Time to consult the public so let's lay your outline out for consideration and input."

If a final "deal" is reached in secrecy on Sunday, the GOP will have lost and the GOP revolt against its leaders will have to begin.

And I couldn't agree more.

Mr Hewitt continues:

GOP volunteers and the Tea Party base --best consulted via Tea Party Patriots and not some D.C. lobbying group claiming to be the Tea Party-- expect the House GOP to win this round and the fall spending battles as well. The House has a veto over whatever happens and the House reflects the last election and the American people's demand --loud, large and sustained-- that the federal government be dramatically scaled back.

They did not vote to erase the home mortgage interest deduction, a disastrous idiocy cooked up by people with zero understanding of home values in the United States. Such a move would instantly devalue every house in America by more than 10%, further adding to the already steep drop in home values that has kept the recessionary feeling clamped into place.

They did not vote to eliminate the tax deduction for church giving or any kind of charitable giving.

They did vote to slice away vast parts of the federal bureaucracy, but they didn't vote to cut the Pentagon. More cuts to the Pentagon endanger the country and will set off a revolt within the GOP quicker than any tax hike.

They would accept raising the retirement age and indeed cutting benefits a tiny bit.

They would cheer the adoption of Paul Ryan's plan or any other plan that preserved medicare for current enrollees but made changes for those a decade or more away from retirement.

Medicaid should be handled by the states these voters say, and capped.

These are the obvious choices favored by a large majority of Americans. The House leadership has to insist on them or walk away.

But the base and historical problem with this is that the GOP -- still -- runs its Messaging Program as primarily subsumed and background, like bad static on a cheap radio. It, even in Prime Power, fails to understand that the power it possessed or possesses is MEANT TO BE WIELDED in all its naked and raw forms, just like the Demorats.

I don't know if I speak for many of the readers of my blog, but I would like to see a GOP coalescence the likes of which has been heretofore unexperienced and unprecedented. I would like to see the logic of the GOP trotted out with insistence, clarity, brevity in all media forms, and those forms hammered forth in stridence, with consistency and unity.

The problem is, with but a handful of exceptions, that there tends to not be a "dime's worth of difference" between the two parties due to their inculcation with corruption, arrogance, imperialism, exclusivity, elitism.

Back-slapping and drinks-all-around at DC watering holes.

"Fuck the public," they say. "We have ours; they'll never get theirs."

As I wrote on April 6th of this year:

Whilst some Republicans manage to excoriate the TEA Party, it is the TEA Party's philosophy that can save this nation now, not backslapping by both sides over drinks and larfs at Bullfeathers, Hawk N' Dove or the Capitol Lounge. Because they know: you are being fleeced.

To that I can only reply, inimically with initial timidity and building temerity:

Perhaps the worm may turn.

BZ