The Democrats don’t seem to like Mitch McConnell very much. That is the impression I am getting from some of the latest fund raising e-mails they have been sending me.
Friend— Mitch McConnell and the Republicans couldn’t care less about what we want.
They only care about blocking every single piece of President Obama’s agenda. That’s why McConnell has led 401 filibusters, including the Republican filibuster against background checks.
But they aren’t going to get away with it. Polls show McConnell’s support has plummeted, meaning we have a real chance to beat him and the Republicans.
In 36 hours we face the first FEC deadline since the latest GOP filibuster of background checks. If we don’t reach our $400,000 goal before this deadline, McConnell will point to it as evidence that grassroots support is waning for sensible reform.
Will you help us defeat Mitch McConnell and the Republicans? If you give $3 by tomorrow’s FEC deadline, we’ll renew your membership (we see you haven’t re-upped yet).
Actually what I want is for President Obama’s destructive agenda to be blocked as much as possible, so it would seem that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are doing exactly what I want.
Rand Paul has written a column for rare.us which I think is full of good advice for the Republicans, that is if they would like to start winning elections again.
Many are saying that the Republican Party must change if we want to remain a viable national party. The advice from some is to become less conservative. These critics believe that the GOP will somehow do better if we become more like the Democratic Party. But why would anyone vote for a lesser version of the Democrats when you can vote for the real thing? It doesn’t make sense and defeats the entire purpose of having two parties.
It is true that Republicans will continue to lose if changes are not made. But some of those changes will require us to become more conservative, especially when it comes to economics. Other changes might not neatly fit into what we currently think of as left or right.
The Republicans will never be able to outspend or outpander the Democrats and they shouldn’t even try. One party, at least, ought to stand for fiscal sanity and keeping the country together instead of trying to divide Americans along racial and class lines.
The GOP is supposed to be the party of limited government but it has not done a very good job of proving it. If Republicans can become the party of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility, we can appeal to millions from all walks of life who genuinely fear for the burden we’re placing on our children.
“Limited government” doesn’t mean no government. It means $2.6 trillion worth of government—the amount of revenue we currently bring in. Over the past number of years, Americans have had to learn to live within their means. Government must do the same and Republicans should be the party that shows how it can be done.
The Republicans have talked a lot about limited government and balanced budgets but have certainly not acted on these beliefs whenever they have had control of the government in recent years. I hope that with the rise of the Tea Party this will change.
We need a strong national defense, but perhaps this does not mean having an overly aggressive foreign policy that puts American troops all over the globe, all the time. After nearly a decade in Iraq and well over a decade in Afghanistan, no one wants to now see a misguided intervention in Syria or Iran, as some from both parties have suggested. A foreign policy that does not try to police the world, does not try to dole out welfare to the world through foreign aid, and that recognizes fiscal limits will be better for our military, our national security and the Republican Party.
The problem here is that somebody is going to have to act as the world’s policeman and like it or not, we are the only ones with the capacity to do so. Besides, would anyone prefer to live in a world dominated by China, or Russia, or the UN? Of course, we do not have to intervene everywhere there is a problem. We can and should pick our battles and there are some situations we should just stay out of. The civil war in Syria is a good example. We probably are going to have to intervene to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It would have been a whole lot easier, and cheaper to take determined (not necessarily military) action against the Iranians years ago, but our leaders have just kept putting the problem off until it has grown.
We need to recognize that the rising generation does not want people put in jail for unduly long sentences for non-violent offenses. No one supports the use of drugs or encourages that kind of behavior, but too many lives have been ruined due to our unfair and unjust mandatory minimum laws. It doesn’t make sense to put someone who has made one mistake in prison with rapists and murderers—sometimes for sentences longer than rapists and murderers. Under our current laws, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama could have been served jail time due to their youthful drug use, and once released from jail, these two men wouldn’t have been employable, much less capable of winning the presidency.
Mandatory minimum sentencing also disproportionately affects those lacking the means to fight back, particularly minorities. This needs to change and Republicans should lead the way.
I am not for legalizing drugs but I think it is obvious to everyone that the War on Drugs has not been very effective. There is a real opportunity for the Republicans to develop effective and just policies here. I should add that many of the more egregious government violations of civil rights have been done in the name of the war on drugs and perhaps we need to seek a better balance between minimizing drug use and respecting civil liberties.
The GOP needs to be the party that embraces immigration while also demanding strong border security. Nobody wants a party that is perceived as wanting to round-up people. We can move the ball forward by offering an immigration policy that humanely deals with the 12 million undocumented immigrants already in the country, but puts the proper security measures in place so that we don’t have to keep revisiting this issue every few decades.
The problem I have with illegal immigrants is that they are here illegally. I do not like the idea of rewarding people who break the law with citizenship. A lot of the discussion on this issue seems to be fairly muddled on that one point. You may call these people “undocumented” but the simple fact of the matter is that they are in violation of the law. If immigration laws are too harsh or if they are unjust, than the laws should be changed, by an act of Congress. As long as the present laws are in place they should be enforced, and the Executive does not, or ought not, have the options of simply deciding not to enforce laws it finds inconvenient.
Fiscal conservatism, a more prudent foreign policy, ending mandatory minimums and immigration reform coupled with border security are but a few issues Republicans can lead on if we want to build the necessary coalitions that will allow us to remain a governing national party.
If we’re going to start winning on the West Coast and in New England, and if we’re going to attract the young, we must change. If we don’t evolve and adapt, the Republican Party will die.
The GOP of old, stale and moss-covered, is largely responsible for our party’s current quandary. Only a new breed of Republican—bold, innovative and dedicated to liberty—can get us out of it.
I hope the Republicans will listen to what Senator Paul has to say. Being the stupid party, they likely will not.
John McCain is not too happy with Rand Paul’s filibuster, especially since it took attention away from his dinner with Barack Obama. Here is an article about it in the Washington Examiner.
Elder Sen. John McCain, who this week engaged in friendly fire when he launched his “maverick” missiles at fellow Republicans seeking clarification on the administration’s drone policies, has upped the ante, deriding Tea Party-backed GOP lawmakers as “wacko birds.”
McCain, who hit the Senate floor Thursday to belittle Sen. Rand Paul‘s filibuster, which succeeded in getting an answer from President Obama that drones won’t be used to kill Americans on U.S. soil, even suggested that the Kentucky senator and his allies, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, don’t represent the GOP mainstream.
“It’s always the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone,” McCain told Huffington Post’s Jon Ward in a story titled “John McCain: Getting Back To Maverick, With An Eye On Retirement.”
He added, “I think it can be harmful if there is a belief among the American people that those people are reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans. They’re not.”
Ward wrote: “I asked McCain to clarify who, specifically, he was talking about.”
McCain said, “Rand Paul, Cruz, Amash, whoever.”
Despite McCain’s view, several GOP leaders, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, praised Paul’s efforts. McConnell even said he was “proud” of Paul, further proof of a growing divide in the Senate Republican caucus.
Conservatives have expressed outrage at McCain’s hit on Paul, raising anew the charges in the 2008 presidential campaign that he is too much of a maverick for the GOP.
“He showed his true colors. He has now attacked Senator Cruz and Senator Paul for basically leading and keeping promises they made to their constituents not too mention their oath to uphold the Constitution,” said one activist.
But the clash also put on display the fight between the old bulls and the new turks for control of the party, other said.
So, who does reflect the views of the majority of Republicans? “Maverick” John McCain, who stabs his fellow Republicans anytime he thinks it will get him good coverage in the New York Times? If actually standing up for conservative principles instead of being defensive and apologetic makes one a “wacko bird”, than we need more wacko birds out there. Maybe the Republicans can start winning elections for a change.
Yet since showing up in D.C., Paul has been exactly what Reason dubbed him: “The most intersting man in the Senate” who has offered specific legislation and made extended arguments for a unified vision of limited government that is not only fully within some great lines of American political tradition but urgently needed in the current moment. Senators who pride themselves on their foreign policy expertise and have free-loaded for decades in D.C. haven’t made a speech as thoughtful and out-front as the one he delivered a while back at The Heritage Foundation, for god’s sake.
Make no mistake: Despite the presence of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), yesterday’s filibuster was a GOP-conducted orchestra. But what was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter? The same with reliable Rand and GOP critic Eugene Robinson and many others who up until yesterday thought little of Rand Paul.
The filibuster succeeded precisely because it wasn’t a cheap partisan ploy but because the substance under discussion – why won’t the president of the United States, his attorney general, and his nominee to head the CIA explain their views on limits to their power? – transcends anything so banal or ephemeral as party affiliation or ideological score-settling.
The chills started early in the filibuster as Paul said things along the lines of, “If you’re gonna kill people in America [as terrorists], you need rules and we need to know your rules,” and “To be bombed in your sleep – there’s nothing American, nothing constitutional, about that” (these quotes are paraphrases). Those are not the words of a career politician trying to gain an advantage during the next round of horse-trading over a pork-barrel project. They are the words of a patriot who puts his country first and they inspire accordingly.
A year or so ago, we were debating whether the government had the right to force its citizens to engage in particular economic activity – that was the heart of the fight over the mandate to buy insurance in Obamacare. That overreach – and the fear that a government that can make you buy something can also theoretically make you eat broccoli – was at the heart of Rand Paul’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruled that in fact, the federal government not only has the right to regulate commercial transactions that take place anywhere in these United States, it has the right to force them to take place.
And now, we’re arguing over whether the president of the United States in his role as commander in chief in an ill-defined, barely articulated “global war on terror” has the right to kill U.S. citizens without presenting any sort of charges to any sort of court. In fact, it’s worse than that, since the president won’t even share his rationale for what he may or may not believe with the country’s legislature.
By foregounding the issues of limited government, transparency, and oversight as they relate specifically to the most obvious and brazen threat to civil liberties imaginable, Rand Paul and his filibuster have also tied a direct line to a far more wide-ranging and urgently needed conversation about what sort of government we have in America – and what sort of government we should have.
I am glad to see that somebody in Washington is doing his job. There needs to be some sort of discussion about when and where it is appropriate to use drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, not just their potential use against American citizens in the United States, but our general strategy abroad. I fear we have been too ready to trust the executive with these sort of life and death decisions. We might have had good cause in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, but perhaps it is time to step back and reconsider what we are trying to accomplish in the War on Terror and how we should go about it. This needs to be a bi-partisan discussion, if possible.
Meanwhile, I am starting to like Rand Paul. I understand that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and some of the other establishment Republicans aren’t too happy with Paul. Well, they are the ones who have been running the GOP into the ground by not standing for much of anything.
The election of 1876 was one of those elections like the election of 1824 in which the loser of the election became the president. Unlike such previous disputed elections, such as the elections in 1824 and 1800, the problem in 1876 was not that no candidate achieved a majority there were only two candidates, or that there was some quirk in the electoral process. The problem with the election of 1876 was a combination of outright fraud and confusion in counting the ballots in the three remaining states of the former Confederacy that were still occupied by federal forces; South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana.
The year 1876 was the centennial of the United States. The year began with great celebration for the one hundred years that the nation had been independent. The feelings of most people were optimistic and cheerful about the future. America had, to be sure, fought a terrible Civil War only a decade before, and the South was still rebuilding. Still,the country was prosperous and at peace, and was rapidly settling the West.
The campaign season began well. President Ulysses S. Grant had wanted to run for a third term but between the two term tradition and the series of scandals that had marred his administration, there was little enthusiasm for Grant. In fact the most important issue of the election was reforming the civil service and ending corruption in government. Therefore, both parties wanted reforming candidates untouched by any unsavory associations. This ruled out Congressman James G. Blaine, a Republican from Maine who had had some apparently unethical dealings with the Union Pacific Railroad. Instead, the Republicans nominated Rutherford B Hayes, the reforming Governor of Ohio. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden from New York. He had prosecuted Boss Tweed when he served as District Attorney and as Governor, he had fought the Canal Ring.
Rutherford B. Hayes
The candidates were both honest men and there wasn’t much difference in the two party platforms, so naturally, to keep things interesting, both sides attacked each other ferociously, making this election one of the nastiest elections in history. The Democrats were delighted to point out the corruption in the Grant administration and in the Reconstruction governments in the South. The Republicans accused the Democrats of being traitors who had supported the Confederacy during the war. The real fun though, did not begin until after the election.
Samuel J. Tilden
When the votes were counted, Tilden won the popular vote over Hayes by 4,300,000 to 4,000,000. The electoral vote was what counted, though, and here things were less certain. To win in the electoral college required 185 votes. Tilden received 184 votes, mostly in the south but including New York and Indiana, while Hayes got 165 votes in the north and west. There was a problem with four states; Oregon, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana.
Oregon was relatively simple. Hayes had won the popular vote there, but one of the electors was a postmaster and the constitution does not permit federal office holders to be electors. The Democratic governor of Oregon selected a Democrat to replace him. The Republicans announced that Hayes had won Oregon’s three electoral votes, while the Democrats insisted that the correct count was one for Tilden and two for Hayes.
The Southern states were more difficult. To say that the elections were marked by fraud would be a tremendous understatement. There was marked voter intimidation. The Democrats tried to keep as many Blacks from voting as they could, while the Republicans tried to make sure the Blacks could vote as many times as they wanted. There was bribery, ballot box stuffing, and outright fraud. It will probably never be certain who actually won in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana but Louisiana and Florida sent in two sets of returns while Florida managed to come up with three.
Congress had the responsibility of deciding which returns accurately reflected the votes in the disputed states. It was an act that would be sure to create controversy no matter what they decided. As it happened the House of Representatives was controlled by the Democrats, while the Republicans had the majority in the Senate. The two houses fought bitterly but finally agreed to establish an Electoral Commission composed of five Senators, five Representatives, and five Supreme Court justices. Eight of these men were Republicans and seven were Democrats, and somehow all of their votes ended up being 8 to 7 in favor of Hayes, making Rutherford Hayes the next president.
Naturally, the Democrats were not at all happy with this result, especially in the south. They accepted the decision of the commission without any serious trouble though. Tilden urged acceptance of the decision and many southern Democrats came to believe that Hayes was a president they could work with. Democratic leaders met with their Republican counterparts, even while the commission was working and agreed to accept whatever the decision of the commission might be in exchange for the next president agreeing to remove the remaining federal troops out of the South. The compromise of 1877 preserved the Union and ended what could have been a very messy political crisis. It also ended the Reconstruction Era and helped to heal the divisions caused by the Civil War. Unfortunately it also meant abandoning the cause of civil rights for the freed slaves. Southern Democrats swiftly took control of the southern state governments and disenfranchised the Blacks as soon as they could. They would have to wait almost another century to get there rights.
Rutherford B. Hayes turned out to be a decent president who pushed for civil service reform. He wasn’t able to do very much because of the circumstances of his election and decided not to run again in 1880.
I had good reason to be anxious. We didn’t do so well in the election. There is no way around the fact that this has been a major defeat for the cause of freedom. We get to spend another four years under Obama’s incompetent management.
Well, I have spent the required day in mourning, whining about the death of the Republic on Facebook and now it is time to get back to work. I think that it is always better to see the bright side of life, so I will try to make the best of it.
Well, things are not quite as bad as they seem. Obama hardly won by a landslide. In the popular vote, Obama won 60,841,109 votes while Romney got 57,941,258 votes. I guess 50-48% against a sitting President isn’t too bad, although we could have done better. In the Electoral College it is 303 for Obama and 206 for Romney with Florida and its 29 votes still undecided. The final map looks like this.
It could have been better, but it could have been worse, but it wasn’t a landslide. Here is what a landslide looks like.
Election of 1964
or
The election of 1984
In both these cases, and in 1972 and others the opposing party was absolutely routed. This isn’t the case here. In Congress, we did better than one might expect suggesting that Obama’s coattails were short. We only lost two seats in the Senate making it 53-45 with two independents. This is a lot better situation than we had after 2008 when the Democrats had nearly a filibuster proof majority. We also held our own in the House of Representatives. We moved from 242-193 to 233-193 with several seats still being decided. If we didn’t win, at least we didn’t lose and I think we can call Congress a draw.
Things are a little better at the State level. We have 30 Republican governors, up from 21 in 2008 and 20 in 2010. I don’t have solid information about party control of the state legislatures, but it seems to be a draw there with neither party making any major gains.
Now, the downside. It doesn’t look as if Obamacare is going to be repealed. This is bad since the federal government can hardly afford a new set of entitlements and the population doesn’t need to be even more dependent on the government. Well, if we can’t end it, we must make it palatable. The Republicans ought to find ways of adjusting and tweaking this monstrosity in order to bring it more in line with Conservative principles. I suggest arguing for more control and funding at the state level and, down the road when it is obviously not working, introduce the idea of re-privatizing health care.
Demographics seem to be against us. I do not think that the changing composition of the American population means the end of the Republican party. This is only certain if you think that party affiliation and policy preferences are somehow hardwired into various races and ethnic groups. How racist is that? We need to do more work on this. I do not believe that the Republicans should try to play identity politics the way the Democrats do. This won’t convince anyone and the people most susceptible to this sort of thing will always go for the Democrats. We certainly should not waste our time courting “civil rights” organizations like the NAACP. These groups are under the control of the Left and their sole purpose, these days, is electing Democrats. The concerns of the people they purport to represent are a distant second to them. I am not sure what the answer is, but there must be some way to persuade minorities that Conservative principles benefit them too.
We have to gain control of the media narrative. I know we have Fox News, talk radio, and the Internet, but more needs to be done. The Mainstream Media is weaker than it once was, but too many people still get their news from them. They have to be made irrevelant.I suggest that Republican politicians treat the MSM as it really is, the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and react accordingly. This means not giving them interviews, giving their reporters accommodations on campaign buses, etc. They shouldn’t complain about media bias, though. When asked, they should state dismissively, “Well, CBS (or the New York Times, etc) is old media and we prefer to spend our campaign resources on more relevant outlets”. Make it clear that they are just no longer important enough to bother with. And, we also need to fight more against the slanders of the Left. Don’t let them get away with calling us racist, bigoted, Nazis, etc. Point out the general nastiness and mendacity of the Left.
Why we are on the subject, can we stop calling them Liberals or Progressives. They are neither. Truth in advertising demands we call them what they are; Socialists, Marxists, Statists, anything but Liberal. Their intellectual forebears are not such great Liberal thinkers as John Locke or John Stuart Mill. They are rather Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Let’s not form circular firing squads or fight each other. There are lessons to be learned from this defeat, but we cannot abandon or throw under the bus any Republican factions. We win by growing the party, not purging it.
Well, those are my thoughts, whatever that may be worth.
As Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
and
“You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
I have just gotten home from voting. As usual, I voted an almost entirely Republican straight ticket. To be honest, I wish there were good people in both parties that I could support, but the Democrats have turned so far into Leftist ideology that even the decent people among them running for office simply cannot be trusted to behave decently. In any event, I voted for Mitt Romney for President, Mike Pence for Governor, and Richard Mourdock for Senator, along with the Republican candidates for Congress, State Legislator, and various local offices. There were four judges asking to be retained. I voted no for all four.
I have to say that I am very anxious about this election. I do not see how our country will survive another four years with Obama as President. I wish I knew who will win, but I simply have no idea.
I was going for a bit of alliteration there. Anyway that is the conclusion one must draw from this really offensive shirt at a Romney/Ryan event, as reported by Buzzfeed.
The Getty Images photo was taken at a Romney/Ryan campaign event in Lancaster, Ohio on Friday. A Romney spokesperson commented that the shirt was “reprehensible and has no place in this election.”
Of course, it is just barely possible that this man was a plant to make the Romney Campaign look like racists. Would the Democrats do something like that. Well, consider Mary Frances Berry‘s response on the question of whether branding the Tea Party as racist is effective.
Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.
I am not certain whether Ms. Berry approves if this strategy or not, but she believes it to be effective. Other Democrats with fewer qualms about this sort of thing would have no problem sending a man with this shirt in. On the other hand, every movement, party and candidate attracts their share of idiots, crazies and losers. I think he is a plant, though. It is odd how many Liberals have jumped on this lone example as proof of Conservative racism.
Here they go again. I found this at slate.com through the Drudge Report.
S.C. Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian, never a loss for a quick quip, tossed a few stinging one-liners at the Wednesday delegation breakfast.
On Gov. Nikki Haley participating in daily news briefings in a basement studio at the NASCAR Hall of Fame: “She was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun.”
His opinion on why he thinks Republicans dislike education funding: “An educated population would not elect a Nikki Haley.”
That is nice, yet another comparison of a Republican to a Nazi. I hope this doesn’t become a regular campaign theme this election season.
And, speaking of the Democratic Convention, the Democrats keep calling Republicans extremists, yet look at what is going on there. God has somehow become controversial. I read about this at Yahoo News.
Needled by Mitt Romney and other Republicans, Democrats hurriedly rewrote their convention platform Wednesday to add a mention of God and declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel after President Barack Obama intervened to order the changes.
The embarrassing reversal was compounded by chaos and uncertainty on the convention floor, requiring three votes before a ruling that the amendments had been approved. Many in the audience booed the decision.
The revisions came as Obama struggles to win support from white working-class voters, many of whom have strong religious beliefs, and as Republicans try to woo Jewish voters and contributors away from the Democratic Party. Republicans claimed the platform omissions suggested Obama was weak in his defense of Israel and out of touch with mainstream Americans.
GOP officials argued that not taking a position on Jerusalem’s status in the party platform raised questions about Obama’s support for the Mideast ally. Romney said omitting God “suggests a party that is increasingly out of touch with the mainstream of the American people.”
“I think this party is veering further and further away into an extreme wing that Americans don’t recognize,” Romney said.
Ronald Reagan used to say that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Party left him. I think it must be increasingly obvious that the Democrats have long ago left behind the average American.
The 2012 Democratic party will officially adopt an extreme position on the issue of abortion on Tuesday. According to a copy of the party platform, which was released online just before midnight on Monday, “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”
That last part–”regardless of ability to pay”–is an endorsement of taxpayer-funded abortions, a policy that President Obama has personally endorsed. Obama wants Medicaid to pay directly for elective abortions, and Obamacare will allow beneficiaries to use federal subsidies to purchase health care plans that cover elective abortions. According to a 2009 Quinnipiac poll, 72 percent of voters oppose public funding of abortion and 23 percent support it. In other words, public funding of abortion–a policy President Obama actively supports–is as unpopular as banning abortion in the case of rape, a policy on which the media have focused their attention over the past two weeks despite the fact that neither presidential candidate supports it.
I do not believe that abortion is the issue that is topmost on many Americans’ minds right now and I don’t really understand why the Democrats are spending any time at all on it, especially in taking such an extreme position, unless they really don’t want to talk about the economy. I can’t say I blame them for not wanting to emphasize Obama’s dismal record.
I have saidbefore that Barack Obama is not in any way like Adolf Hitler and any such comparisons are despicable. Now, I feel I have to say the same about the Republican nominees. Mitt Romney is not Hitler and the Republicans are not the Nazis. If there is anyone reading this who sincerely believes that either of the two major American political parties are anything like the Nazis than I have to say that you have become completely unhinged by political passion. I should also say that Paul Ryan is not Joseph Goebbels despite what the leader of the California delegation to the Democratic convention might happen to believe. Here are the details at ABCnews.
The chairman of the California delegation to the Democrats’ convention was criticized by both parties for comparing Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday, John Burton said, “They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie. Joseph Goebbels . It’s the big lie, you keep repeating it.” Goebbels was the minister of propaganda during Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Burton was referring specifically to Ryan, whose speech at the Republican convention in Tampa last week has been criticized by Democrats for inaccuracies.
At least the Democrats chastised him, this time.
President Obama’s campaign rejected Burton’s comments just hours before their convention kicked off.
“That obviously doesn’t reflect the views of the campaign,” said Obama for America National Press Secretary Ben LaBolt. “That doesn’t have any place in the political discourse here in Charlotte.”
Burton later issued a statement claiming he didn’t actually call Republicans Nazis and noting he didn’t actually use the word “Nazi” — though he made repeated references to Goebbels.
“If Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, or the Republicans are insulted by my describing their campaign tactic as the big lie — I most humbly apologize to them or anyone who might have been offended by that comment,” he said.
I think we are going to see a lot more of this in the next few months. The Democrats can’t run on President Obama’s sterling record of accomplishments so all they can do is demonize their opponents. If that involves comparing them to some of the most evil men in history, than so be it.
Oh, by the way, Paul Ryan didn’t lie in his speech. Sorry if that disrupts the narrative.
