70 Replies to “The New America”

  1. “The funny thing is, all those groups that voted Obama in again are the same ones that will get hurt most if/when he tanks the US economy: low-earning immigrants, low-skilled workers, single moms, inner city blacks, young college graduates.
    And I don’t have one iota of sympathy for any of them.”
    Well ,if its ok for Chris (tingle up my leg )Mathews to say he is glad Hurricane Sandy occured because it gave Obama the election then I guess it is OK for me to hope for what you just suggested.

  2. ET, I disagree with you about the reasons for the hispanic vote. It’s not simply about government largesse. Step back for a minute and look at the broad context. For years now, illegal immigration has been a central issue in the US. It’s not going away, and nearly all of this illegal immigration is hispanic.
    What has the general response of the Republican party been? A beat-down on hispanics generally. You know as well as I do what all of the traditional right wing nostrums for this are. More guns, walls, guards, sirens in the night enforcing evictions, yadda, yadda. Do you think that hispanics don’t know that they are generally under attack from the right wing regardless of whether or not they are citizens of the US or illegals? Of course they perceive it that way.
    It should be agonizingly obvious by now that in a very few years a majority of American citizens will be of non-caucasian origin. And the Republican party has NO plan for this.
    Canada’s Conservative Party does. What do you think Jason Kenney’s been doing for the past eight to 10 years? Fact is, the Republican party is too caught up in its hidebount obsolete thinking about social issues, mostly as a result of various extreme right wing splinter groups. It’s evolve or die.
    The US immigration system badly needs reform. Canada has taken strong steps under a conservative government to do just that. Until the Republicans make serious proposals for immigration reform they are dead, dead, dead. And if it keeps on as it’s going, Texas will be the next state the Democrats claim in a presidential election before this decade is out.
    The fact of the matter is that however much we may dislike this fact, huge numbers of people DO self-define by race.
    Why didn’t the GOP win more Senate races? Same kind of thing. The topic is supposed to be America’s disintegrating economy and some bonehead from the SocCons pokes his head up and bleats about abortion. Then another one does it. REPUBLICANS, not Democrats, raised this as an issue in the campaign. This is called bending over and begging someone to kick your a$$.
    And there’s a reason for this. It’s called party discipline. Democrats have lots of vicious arguments among themselves, but when it comes to an election, they’re united even if they have as little to run on as Obama and his non-achievements. But not Republicans. Various lunatic fringes within the party carry on their feuds in public long after the leader has been chosen.
    And the public sees this. If a leader can’t rule his own house, and in the Republicans that’s difficult to say the least, then they’re not fit to rule the country.
    No, QNDPS, they didn’t vote for Obama just because he’s a minority. Since you put it in racial terms, hispanics don’t much like blacks. They voted for Obama because he’s been promising immigration reform and the Republicans have been systematically opposing it. That’s the public perception among hispanics, and in general terms they are right.

  3. Frog said”
    “Do you failed math at high school?”
    Stick to your first language, slang french…..
    As for ET, it is the Dumbocrats who have shown themselves for their crass pandering to various racial and economic groups, allowing themselves to be bought out for a few half-hearted words, and their “we’re not them” meme.
    As Rush said today, they voted for Santa Claus yesterday, that’s about as smart as the US electorate is, or at least 50.5% of them are.

  4. Obama is not yet finished with America. I believe it is now a Third World country. I do. What is the vast difference between the US and some failed African military dictatorship? You have a spiteful, vengeful, bitter man who will take the knives to ALL of his opponents (unsupportive Democrats, newspapers that backed Romney, disenchanted voters, the Catholic Church and Republicans of any stripe) and will continue dismantling the American economy and global influence. The money is drying up and unemployment is high. How, with a sixteen trillion dollar debt (and growing), will he pay for a nationalised health service no one wants AND welfare? If he can’t raise taxes, inflation. He will not allow the Keystone pipeline to go through. He will further alienate Canada and Israel. Israel will go off on Iran and the burden (for lack of a better word) of alliance will fall to us. He has strengthened, either deliberately or by accident, China and emboldened Iran. How long will it be before the unemployed and undeservedly entitled respectively go off on a man who can’t deliver? Who will take advantage of America’s weakness?
    Things aren’t looking too good. My only solace is that the left will be broke and broken-spirited, as well.

  5. cgh, all good points. PM Harper gets it. Brad Wall gets it. Danielle Smith finally gets it and eventually the others will too.

  6. cgh – I’ll agree with you on the need for immigration reform and also, on the ‘radicals’ in the GOP. But stupidity and entrenched opinions also exist among the Democrats, whether it’s Obama’s many gaffes, Biden, Pelosi, Harry Reid, etc.
    But Obama hasn’t dealt with immigration reform; he has actually totally ignored it. He certainly hasn’t secured the borders; he hasn’t done a thing about reform – and his most recent ‘bill’, to enable young hispanics to get work permits, was a blatant vote-buying tactic and not genuine reform.
    I agree with you about the GOP refusal to deal with immigration reform as well. It’s not really about immigration reform but about what to do with the illegals who are here in the US now, as well as dealing with the borders.
    Perry was tarred and feathered by the GOP for his enabling hispanics who had been in Texas for a while, to pay the same tuition rate as Texas citizens to go to college. He was right about this decision but the GOP rejected him.
    By the way, I think Perry would have been the best choice for the GOP nomination ..but not this year because his recent back surgery rendered him incapable of dealing with the primary debates and would have made it too hard for him to campaign.
    I agree with you that the GOP has to take some serious and strong steps to deal with the illegal immigration – and rejecting what Perry tried to do, shows that they weren’t ready.
    And, I also think that they have to refuse to deal with social issues such as abortion, marriage. These are issues that belong in the decisions of the people but at the state not federal level.
    And yes, Harper and Kenney are doing great things with Canadian immigration.

  7. DanBC, don’t be hard on Quebeckie. He made you a cookie but he eated it.
    Cgh, who made the election about a fictional war on women and immigrants being pulled over and discriminated against?

  8. ET, yes, there’s plenty of stupidity on the left as well, aside from the fact that they have no understanding of how to run an economy. But they are far better at showing a united front in public than the Republicans are. It’s inevitable, given that the Republicans are supposedly a party of individualists.
    This is about politics, not real achievements. Obama PROMISED immigration reform; I never said he actually did anything about it. But that’s miles ahead of where the Republicans are. Hispanics aren’t stupid. Even a thin promise is better than nothing. And the Republicans have given hispanics no reason to disbelieve Obama’s claim that he can’t do anything because of Republican intransigence.
    As for Perry I agree with you strongly. Every Republican who turned on him over that should have been horse-whipped. Perry was thinking ahead, like Harper, Kenney, et.al.
    It’s about both borders and immigration reform. The Canadian government is betting that if we reform immigration and greatly speed up the process, it will reduce illegals or in our case bogus refugee claimants.
    And Perry is one of the very few in the US to try to deal with the problem creatively rather than repressively.
    Osumashi, I’ve forgotten the specific details. It was about three weeks ago or so when some Republican senatorial candidate was asked a trick question by some reporter about abortion. He popped up with an answer that said essentially that it was never justified.
    Trap questions happen all the time in politics. Either the guy was badly briefed by his staff, in which case fire the lot of them. Or he was an idiot speaking his mind, in which case the party deserves to lose for choosing a candidate who can’t keep his trap shut on a fairly obvious trick play.
    And the feeding frenzy was on. Republicans should know by now that the left wing press is always on the hunt for some SoCon candidate to say something bound to generate a controversy.
    The Democrats always want to go to these issues. They clean up on all kinds of votes. But they can’t breach the issue unless some idiot Republican bends over and says, “Kick me”.
    How does Harper win elections? Discipline, discipline, discipline. How do Republicans lose elections? Lack of the above. It’s like herding cats. Obama lost 10 million votes between 2008 and 2012. This was the Republicans to lose.
    As the great Abe Lincoln commented, it was “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

  9. Cgh, there were two candidates so “trapped” but that is immaterial. Perhaps you’ll remember how Rick Santorum was called “creepy” for how he chose to grieve the loss of his child? The knives are ALWAYS out for social conservatives. Paul Ryan was the “math guy” yet he was portrayed as some sort of misogynist monster. How did that happen, I wonder?

  10. Osumashi, life isn’t fair. And there’s nothing fair in politics. It’s about power, not fairness. The right either deals with it or condemns itself to futility. Complaining about it has no more useful effect than that of a childish squabble in a sandbox complaining that the others “won’t play fair”.
    Complaints are for weaklings. Remember Neitszche. “What does not kill us makes us strong.”

  11. Romney lost the 3 million extra votes McCain had because he’s a Mormon.
    So-cons….damned if they participate, damned if they don’t!

  12. Who said anything about fairness, aside from you?
    Do you want to know how the game is played? There it is. It would not matter if ANY socially conservative candidate made a damning remark or not. It would be foolish to assume that lost the election for the Republicans. Hardly. Paul Ryan focussed on the economy and look where it got him. I argue it doesn’t matter, especially given how the Democrats behave and characterise everyone and everything. How could Obama run on his record? He couldn’t but, in the end, it didn’t matter. The American electorate proved gullible.

  13. cgh – speaking of discipline, Harper has been vilified for his own discipline over the CPC.
    Never mind the hostile Toronto Star and CBC; just take a look at the comments in the Globe and Mail. The hatred of Harper is beyond belief, with vicious rants against him as a ‘fascist, as a dictator, as destroying the country’. No data and no reasons are ever provided for these names but the hatred is unbelievable.

  14. ET, of course they hate him. He is the first Prime Minister to figure out a way of getting his message across without granting anything to the Ottawa Press Mafia. When has he ever held an editorial board meeting with the Globe or any of the other leading press? Never. He doesn’t need them.
    And he like any Canadian party leader can impose discipline on all its candidates because he has to approve their nomination by the local riding association. And he can simply override them and appoint his own if they do something truly foolish. Fact is, no US President or party leader has anything like the politcal power over his party that a Canadian leader does.
    Heh. They hate him because it works. I’m unmoved by the Harper Derangement Syndrome. If the radical opposition hates you that much, you must really be doing something right. There’s something truly satisfying in imagining Lefties’ spittle hitting their computer screens as tney pound their keyboards in fury.
    Osumashi, there’s a tendency on the right to whine about a lack of fairness, particularly about things like press bias. Of course the press is biased. It’s always been biased since printing was first invented. Like I said, deal with it.
    Jeff, Romney didn’t lose two million votes because he’s a Mormon. Romney lost in part because millions of so-called conservatives stayed home. Particularly Ron Paullist idiots who wanted Romney to fail because he’s not “their” kind of conservative. Or wasted their votes on Larry Johnson.
    What the SoCons do is drag up issues like abortion which simply play into the hands of the Democrats. And pi$$ off a lot of independent voters.

  15. CGH, don’t patronise me.
    Tell me what the Republicans can do that will NOT get them marginalised or eliminated from political office?
    Let’s suppose Romney made the election all about immigration reform, as you have suggested. Would that have been enough to win? As it happened, Romney made the election about the economy. The Democrats made the election about the “war on women”. Who would a gullible electorate believe- the guy with a plan or the guy who warned that free stuff would disappear if his opponent won?
    The mistake was thinking that the economy would have been sufficient in moving the vote. No one suspected how completely saturated in stupidity the American electorate was.

  18. Osumashi, sorry, it was not intended to be patronizing to you.
    As to what the Republicans can do, it seems to me there’s a few things. They have to have some positions acceptable to a majority of voters on the hot button issues.
    1. They seriously need to tackle immigration reform. In some fashion this means an expanded and much more rapid process for legitimate immigrants and some better way of dealing with illegals. Probably this lies in a much broader and more effective work permit system.
    2. They need to tackle abortion. Thus far, the Republican position has been that of prohibition. They need to move away from that or, like it or not they’re going to continue to marginalize the views of large numbers of women voters. It’s not about attracting militant feminists to vote Republicans. It’s about taking some serious steps to minimize the level of public outrage they can create.
    3. I have no idea how do do this, but they need to reduce the level of internal dissent within the party on public view. How much did Ron Paul et.al split the vote? I don’t know, but there was certainly some. And it’s purely destructive and plays into the hands of the Democrats.
    If the Republicans can do these things they will have gone a long way to reducing the level of liberal criticism directed at them. Reducing these as lightning rods will allow the Republican stronger position on the economy to come through.

  20. Cgh, fine. Sorry for snapping.
    I have no argument about immigration reform and I think Romney’s strategy for abortion was to let the states handle it. However, the entire strategy from the Democrats was to paint the Republicans as people who would “rob” women of their rights, ect., even Paul Ryan, the math guy.
    It’s bizarre.

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