The morning talk-radio morons today (Quinn and Rose) were going on about how they need to push harder to the right, and build on 3 solid ideas: Restrict early voting to 1 day, demand picture ID’s for voting, and I can’t recall that last one because I was laughing to hard to hear it.
The half hour or so I was listening they were banging on and on about how OBVIOUS all the election cheating was, and had somehow massaged the numbers so that Romney actually was supposed to win ALL the swing states, but the Dem’s cheated.
Those two are also birthers, with a small national following. They are incredibly Tea Partied up. Tacking HARD to the right will be the game, I think. They are already starting to push that.
They have no support at the local level and therefore they will die at the national level. The three Tea Partiers we have in the primary all lost by huge margins including one incumbent commissioner who join their ranks early on.
Given that they were generally opposed to Romney as being a wishy-washy RINO, I doubt that they see this election as a rebuke of their ideals, and due to gerrymandering the tea party won’t feel that much of a blow back in the mid-term elections, so I don’t see them going away until at least after the 2016 election.
The only way to really purge the disease would be for one of their true believers to make it to a national general election and get trounced with 420+ electoral votes. Only then can they be convinced that their beliefs aren’t actually held by the majority of Americans.
They should run on a platform of not letting so many damned poor people vote, that way they’ll stop losing elections. Hold on, is that right? Yeah, that sounds right.
Politicians can afford to have short memories and delusional ideas, businessmen can’t. Would there even be a Tea Party if it wasn’t for their billionaire backers? those guys just took a major loss this election and they didn’t get to be where they are by backing losers.
Im a moderate Republican, and I haven’t gone anywhere - though I feel really opressed by the current crop of jackasses. There is no way in hell Romney and his ilk represent my opinions. sigh
My co-worker and I were talking about Jindal’s recent rebuke of Romney and what the Republicans need to do. He said if they do those things, they’ll have his vote forever.
I said I’d like to see them stop trying to regulate people’s private lives while de-regulating industry, but with the Christian Right a major power in the party, that will never happen. My other issue with Jindal’s comments in general are that I remember how he talked before the election.
Yeah? Keep thinking that way and be surprised when the Pubbies clean the Democrats’ clocks in the midterms and Tea Party goes through another resurgence cycle.
Jindal’s a wack-job who knows he’s a wack-job, but is also not so stupid that he doesn’t know an opportunity when he sees one. He’ll tamp down the crazy until he gets what he wants, whatever that is, then it’ll be exorcisms for all of us.
The Pubbies could shuck off the Tea Party. And the homophobes, and the anti-Darwin religious nuts. Might as well trim off the gun nut crowd as well. Then they could hold their convention in the Banquet Room at the Holiday Inn out on Route 9. Save some money.
I was listening to an NPR call-in show after the election (theme was pretty much the same as the OP) and a guy from Virginia called in to say that the very last thing the right wing should do, and will do, is water down their moral message. “Because we believe in good and evil. We believe that some things are black and white.” He was dead serious.
It’s not for nothing that Kos called them the American Taliban. The Tea Party coalesced around a sense of victimhood of the pure and righteous, otherwise known as them. They are not a conventional political movement, they’re more like a fanatic cult. Nothing is going to make them blend in or compromise, they can only be marginalized by the Republican party seeing them as a political albatross. Which will only happen through repeated election cycles of failure.
If the midterms result in more Republican seats being lost (not deeply likely, but always possible), then I think we’ll see some more significant efforts at marginalizing.
