“Hello, my name is Columbia, and you killed my country.
I want my country back, you son of bitch.”
See any similarity? I wrote about this subject during the 2010 primaries. The theme wasn’t circular firing squads, but “what is it about suicide you don’t understand?” And again after we moved quarters over here to UP in 2011, there was “Scratching at Scabs on the Ship of Fools,” a title I still like. Same theme.
Well, this isn’t really about the Republican Party or the little film clip. Things have changed dramatically since those two other articles were written on the subject of vanity and circular firing squads, and today I can find no profit in continued lamentations about the GOP’s absence in the battle, or unwillingness to step outside the box, a box the Democrats designed and built, in order to move this fight forward.
Nothing we said or tried to do could prevent that firing squad from taking place on cue in 2012.
Wherever we need to be to fight this fight in any way that can win, the Republican Party won’t be there. Nor will much of the conservative pundit class. In fact, how you should measure them is whether they are there, or off stroking their beards.
My son and I discussed this at length the other day, and he’s right, the GOP’s failure is part cultural (they’ve never able to fight dirty in the streets, they’re just too suburban and naive) and in part because any serious fight against the Democrats is also a fight against the Ruling Class, of which they are members. They have to make an existential choice, and they don’t want to have to.
There simply is no hill they are willing to plant their flag and defend to the end. Burke had the GOP in mind when he wrote of evil triumphing when good men do nothing. Of all the better “good men” we’ve sent to Washington since 2010, I’d like to see them have their own conclave and map out a strategy forward, that will enable them to either become a force to be reckoned with inside the system, or step outside of it.
And learn to throw shoes.
It’s a new day and new way. There are several ways this can be accomplished, simply by gently moving outside the field the Democrats and media have designed for us.
Considering all the “new normals” this second Obama term has ushered in already…a permanent 8% (actually14% jobless rate), a permanent “defeated” Al Qaeda killing Americans abroad, permanent $3/gallon gas, permanent home fuel cost increases, a permanent diminished small business class, permanent increased taxes on the working middle class, permanent diminished health service, a permanent vibrant stock market with no visible relationship to the economic health of the nation…none of which will be considered newsworthy anymore by the media, because they are now normal.
You’d think these best “good men” could come up with a more strident and edged strategy to keep those issues in the people’s minds.
Joe Wilson was right.
Now you know how I feel.
