Meep Meep, Ctd

A reader looks at what Obama has done to the Republicans:

The GOP has wedged itself into a position that is, essentially, bankrupt from a policy standpoint.  The party has been so focused on electoral gaming that it has managed to install a set of politicians who know little and care less about actually governing.  All they know and care about is getting elected.  In our existing climate, that no longer works - and faced with complex issues, with gray areas, that demand  they are simply out of their league.  Furthermore, and perhaps most interestingly, they have put together a set of competing coalitions and messages that simply does not allow them to move in any meaningful way on policy.  How do you balance the teabaggers and the fiscal conservatives?  How can you make meaningful budget cuts when what you need to cut are policies you put into place?  How can you be for personal responsibility and against gay marriage?  How can you espouse non-intervention and then the Iraq war?  How can you be for fiscal responsibility and support Medicare part D?

Finally, when you spend a year or more calling the president a socialist, you simply cannot cooperate with his policy, at all - even when significant pieces of that policy are, in fact, what you yourself have espoused (e.g.: allowing interstate health insurance competition, cost transparency within exchanges, etc.)

Just bankrupt, across the board.

The real conservative here is Obama, bizarrely enough.  And these nitwits don't see it.

To have Sarah Palin as the leader of the current GOP and McCain as her pathetic, bitter side-kick is about as fatal to the right's long-term goals as putting Cheney up in 2012. And ask yourself: how has the GOP managed this past year to reverse its disastrous slide among racial minorities? Without some outreach to blacks and Hispanics and Asians, the GOP is doomed. But the party that called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, that demonized a healthcare plan extremely popular among Hispanics, and that seems increasingly represented by the likes of Dobbs and Tancredo has only further isolated itself from the mainstream.

It was their choice, but Obama gave them the rope. And the higher they get on the fumes of tea-party revolt instead of crafting actual policies to address actual problems, the worse it will get for them. Sure, they may win a few seats and galvanize their base next fall. But for what? A protest is not a party and a cable propaganda outlet is not a government.