I think the handwriting was on the wall for Mitt the day Mrs. Mitt saw him putting the bumper sticker on his campaign bus - the one that read: “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance.”
*He doesn’t look a bit like Jesus
but he talks like a gentleman
just like you imagined when
you were young…*
Certainly what you say is true about the GOP when I was young, but I was old enough to vote in 1972.
But the transition of the GOP from a primarily secular party to one that’s run by religious conservatives to a large degree, has been happening for three decades now. It’s a little late to be taken by surprise. Didn’t the Hatefest in Houston, aka the 1992 GOP Convention, tip you off?
No, in 1976 he was a bit to the right of GOP center, but not by a whole lot; in 1984 he was a bit to its left, but not a whole lot; and by 1996, he was substantially to its left.
You got the ‘without changing’ part basically right, though.
No, there’ve always been blowhards perverting the GOP. Before Rush and Pat, there was Falwell. Before Falwell, there was Agnew. Immediately before Agnew, damned if I know, but if you go back to the first post-WWII decade, there was Joe McCarthy and of course the Old Nixon.
No, I was willing to give Romney a chance because he said that his past views were WRONG. I didn’t really believe him, but most politicians are full of shit. But his bullshit is more believable than McCain’s “I was always a conservative” nonsense while pulling the bayonet from a real conservative’s kidneys…
Huckabee is an evangelical, while feeling the love to everyone to the point of spending tax dollars for immigrants and welfare cases to fornicate against his evangelical calling, but, hey, it might get votes! (It didn’t)
So, we get McCain. You get Hilary or Obama. I hope one of those two will win. I will be on the beach next November drinking happily…
Others have noticed:
This is being mentioned in more than one of the other threads. The “movement conservatives” including the ChristianCons (which Huck has proven aren’t dead yet by far!) are convinced that they can rightfully claim they “made” the GOP what it is now, and it “owes them” (to a greater extent than the Dems “owe” Big Labor, and of course more righteously ;)). So happens, many of the voters in the “movements” (which are likelier to show up for primaries) think social/quasireligious “values” policy IS the answer to what ails us, and anything else must be flimflam from the Big City Establishment Guys trying to keep us down. A lot of the “movement” voters have come to believe, not unreasonably, that the Party has been using them, mostly paying them alot of lip service but only limitedly pushing the establishment of many of those social/quasireligious “values” (mostly due to the realization that one should invest one’s efforts in feasible, results-producing things like, oh, defense, or tax reform; and anyway social engineering is supposed to be a leftist thing to do, right? ;)) . The Huckabee platform is of course the more extreme incarnation of this – you’re supposed to be “conservative” because you’re a Fundamentalist, never mind that your economic positions are in the Bryan/Long tradition of blaming the Big Bad Bankers?
Just how does one go about doing that? Does it require some special training?
This liberal agrees with you, and fervently wishes for a swing back to the Republican Party that What Exit? describes – as elucidator often points out, we need such a counterbalance.
On preview: What RTFirefly and JRDelirious said too.
As a Massachusetts resident who watched him trash the very state he pandered leftward to win the governorship of, using it as merely a springboard for his national ambitions, I am quietly, smugly enjoying the Mittster’s political demise.
What, these?
My **final ** act as a Republican was to vote for McCain on Tuesday. Today I mailed out my party registration change form to become “Unaffiliated.”
I will happily vote for Obama if given the chance in November, if HRC gets the nom, I will vote for her, but not with happiness as I like McCain more. I am just fearful of who the obviously conservative, quietly pro-life McCain would appoint to the Supreme Court. I actually believe he would make a fine CiC and I wish Carl Rove had not destroyed him in the 2000 campaign.
Jim
Maybe he was on the old radio show? 
Against his calling? Do you think the poor in Jesus’ day didn’t fornicate? Huck had some good qualities. I thought Christianity, in its good side, supported the downtrodden and not the CEOs. I’d guess that Huck is a far better Christian than Pat Roberson or Jerry Falwell, but I’m a Jewish atheist, so I might be wrong.
And thanks for the answer on Romney.
Well, we don’t have the baggage of all those MoveOn.org psychopaths.
I think a lot of people bought too deeply into the whole “McCain campaign is ruined” thing. I said McCain’s candidacy was dead in the water not too long ago (I think on these forums) and I genuinely believed that to be the case.
I mean, how viable a candidate are you when your campaign is almost bankrupt because no one is giving you any money?
Basically what happened is a lot of people got fired from the McCain campaign and he stuck around through the early primaries.
I think McCain’s campaign was doing terribly for awhile, but I think it’s somewhat easy to pinpoint why his campaign stayed alive. Look who he was running against, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani. Well, Giuliani didn’t even seriously challenge in any of the primaries prior to Florida, an extremely flawed strategy (or possibly not, since Giuliani probably would not have had a chance of winning any of the prior primaries in any case, he just wasn’t a very well supported candidate in general.) McCain has been down this road before, he’s experienced at running in the primaries. He has a better idea of what works and what doesn’t work than any of the other GOP hopefuls.
Furthermore, he got his name out there in a big way in 2000. Prior to the 2000 primaries almost no one knew who John McCain was, after, he was a national figure. In the eight years that followed he never let himself fall out of the spotlight. So while Romney and Huckabee had some swellings of support, I think McCain had a lot of “passive” supporters in states like California, New York, South Carolina and et cetera that we didn’t take into account.
I also think that Romney and Huckabee effectively split their votes since they were both essentially appealing to the same sort of voters, conservative Republicans.
What core values do you feel that John McCain is compromising?
John McCain is actually a very conservative candidate, for example he’s been firmly pro-life for years. In fact, I’ve always wondered why McCain appealed to some Democrats because McCain is very conservative. He’s a maverick on campaign finance and a few other issues, and he’s not one to toe the line just to toe the line, he’s willing to be bipartisan. But his core political stances put him firmly on the right.
I hear from a lot of conservatives that they won’t vote for John McCain, but I think he is the most firmly conservative candidate across the board. Huckabee has a lot of economic policies that make him completely unacceptable as a “conservative”, Romney has in his political career had a lot of really liberal social policies (I mostly don’t vote on those sorts of issues, but Romney has a pretty liberal record on those issues.) McCain is pretty conservative across the board, aside from Fred Thompson I can’t really think of another candidate in the primaries who was genuinely more conservative than McCain. McCain doesn’t act like some Southern Baptist Preacher (well, I guess for Huckabee it isn’t an act) to court the fundamentalist christian vote, but his actual political positions place him more firmly on the right than Huckabee is imo.
Doesn’t matter, they’re balanced out by the Daily Kos Nazis! 
Maybe, too, the way McCain was mishandled by Rove in the 2000 primaries, combined with buyers’ remorse WRT W, left some Pubs thinking he deserved another chance.
Indeed. The shift in the political spectrum has caused the two parties to overlap. Voters now choose between two extremely narrow ideologies. The Democratic Party is to the right of left. There has been, as JRDelirious said, a political social engineering over the last twenty-five to thirty years. Many or most people now believe that progressive ideas are radical or communist and candidates like Edwards are fruit cakes. The evangelical and values voters are normal. People have been heavily influenced by ultraconservative talk radio, blogs, and traditional news sources with no or little investigative journalism.
In many ways, we have authoritarian control through the media. The bias information dominated by ultraconservative think tanks usually makes media headlines. When was the last time anyone watched an investigative report on the homeless or poverty? These human interest stories seldom get coverage.
I hope McCain and the crash and burn of Mitt indicates a shift on the right to a more moderate right ideology.
BTW I think this alludes to something I posted on another thread on the same issues: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9453492#post9453492
BTW originally I meant my “social engineering” comment to contrast how for some commentators, when policy is adopted to favor X behavior [racial/gender equality, marriage, home ownership, safe products, whatever], it’s called social engineering when the left does it, but it’s called protecting us from social engineering when the right does it. It’s still policy to encourage us to act a certain way. FWIW I don’t consider the generalized more-conservative-than-Europe (for SOME things) vibe as being fundamentally “engineered”: the modern USA DID evolve a society receptive to the “conservative mainstream” message to begin with, what they did was smartly capitalize on that to maximize their effect. What riles the ideologues on both sides is that the complexity of the system results in only getting it to point in a general direction, not going exactly where they want.
Just the Limbaugh ,Fox Gnus Psychos.
Rush Limbaugh may actually belong in a mental health facility, that much I’ll concede. However the anti-Fox News rhetoric I see in liberal circles is really pretty baseless. It’s no more accurate than the accusations of bias leveled at CNN.
From what I’ve seen yes, both news channels have an editorial bias. But Fox news actually has a range of pundits from extremely conservative to relatively moderate. From everything I’ve seen, the actual news reporting of both Fox News and CNN, while not perfectly unbiased, is no worse than most other outlets out there.
Talk about damning with faint praise.