As long as we cats were taking a stroll through the wacky world of Free Republic, we decided to check their reactions to this recent analysis by The New York Times about the pickle the Republican Party finds itself in.
From our side of the political spectrum — opposite of the Freeps', of course — we thought the article was fascinating. Not because it told us any particularly new news, but because it 1) tied the GOP's current dilemma into a neat little package, and 2) succinctly portrayed the so-called "Establishment Republicans" as what they are: clueless. We could picture the expressions on their older, white male faces: classic George W. Bush, learning for the first time that the World Trade Center was under attack.
This kind of amazed us, until we remembered the famed Republican sense of entitlement (currently personified by Jeb! Bush). The GOP elite thought they could pander to the worst instincts of the hard right — and then stiff them on the issues they hold near and dear — and pay no political price, forever. Now, that's arrogant.
Thanks to the miracle of the Interwebs, however, we've seen the Freeper rage building for years now — so we're not exactly reaching for the smelling salts. As one Freeper said of the New York Times piece: "We’ve been split for the last two Presidential elections. Took them a while to figure this out." We cats couldn't agree more. After all, we've seen countless comments that were anti-John McCain, anti-Mitt Romney, anti-Mitch McConnell, anti-John Boehner, anti-Paul Ryan, and anti-anti-anti-nearly everybody inside the Beltway with an "R" after his name since we started this blog back in 2008.
The teabags feel wronged over everything they think the Republican Party has failed to do. Some of it is imaginary ("They never stood up to Obama!"), some of it is real (the Bush Administration did expand Medicare and wasted trillions in Iraq), and some of it was just kinda out of the GOP's control (marriage equality). And they never take comfort in the fact that an abortion is a lot damned harder to get than it used to be, that the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, that guns are everywhere, or that the Republicans currently control the House, the Senate and most of the states — everything but the White House. All of this scares us to death — but the Freepers are just wet-cat mad, because in their view, nothing is ever enough.
We can tell those deer-in-the-headlights Republican elites when it all started going off the rails for them. It was when John McCain, then a 71-year-old cancer survivor, plucked a crazy former Alaskan mayor out of obscurity and lifted her to national prominence by nominating her for a job she was completely unqualified for. To us cats, it was a grave disservice to the country that nearly bordered on treason. But for the GOP, the rise of Sarah Palin — even though she later became a cartoon — is the point at which the frustrated and restive haters who make up the party base became the awakened giant, filled with a terrible resolve.
Does John McCain feel any responsibility for all this? We doubt it. Which would usually make us HISS at his idiocy — but since we love watching the travails of the GOP, it makes us PURR.
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