Marble Composition

"The Plan Was Solid"

"There was nothing wrong with the plan."

Conservative leaders meet to plan a comeback; Return to power is based upon policies that lead to resounding defeat.

That may as well have been the title of the article in the L.A. Times if you go through the guts of it.

There's some good stuff in here, like this:

"There was no ideological rejection in this election," said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union..."This was about the Republican Party not behaving like Republicans," Lessner said. "And the voters gave the party a timeout and said, 'Go stand in the corner.' "

Not behaving like Republicans? If that means acting like Democrats, well, they have a word for that: Treason. These were the people they wanted elected. Here's the soon-to-be-former head of the RNC, Ken Mehlman:

"We have a long history as a movement, if you think about it — of using our difficult election outcomes to make ourselves better," Mehlman said. "The fact is, we do need to do better, and I think we need to look at it as a big opportunity as a party and a cause to return to our reformist approach and our reformist principles."

His "reformist" calptrap is nothing more than a code word. He means to reform nothing. This talk is about continuing to shift the overall tax burden from corporations and the wealthy onto the middle class and the poor.

Here's more talk about how, "I didn't do it!":

"There's no doubt in my mind it was not a repudiation of conservatives but it was a repudiation of the Republican Party," said the group's president, former congressman Pat Toomey.

I wonder which other vehicle Pat sees as his horse to ride to victory? I guess Pat needs more "reformist Republicans" in his camp. If Pat went Libertarian, and ran on his choice of ticket anywhere in PA., we could rightly write him off for good. But Pat doesn't like to work on the fringes, he likes to shake things up! Indulge me for a minute. Pat, an anti-tax zealout, served in the House, and then ran to defeat in the 04' PA. Senate race against Arlen Spector. Now he's the head of the Club for Growth, a phony astroturf outfit that has been nailed dead to rights:

Elsewhere, Christina Larson documents the pain of the Club for Growth's Pat Toomey. It seems the Club took a poll before the election and they didn't like the results:

Two-thirds agreed with the notion that the GOP used to be the party of fiscal responsibility and limited government but was not today. By an 11-point margin, likely voters expressed greater confidence in Democrats to handle select fiscal matters responsibly. “We have lost our brand,” Toomey bemoaned.

Get real, guys. The Club for Growth and its ilk have never cared a tenth as much about lower spending as they have about lower taxes. They know perfectly well that if a Republican administration actually cut spending to match its tax cuts it would get voted out of office for the next century.

And they've never cared. They just want low taxes (the easy part of fiscal responsibility) without the spending cuts (the part that gets you voted out of office). It's similar to the GOP's Iraq strategy: they want the glory of winning a war, but without the pain of making the hard choices it would take to actually do so.

Toomey's Phony Shithouse came close to casting Rhode Island's popular Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee out of office in a primary, even when they knew the candidate they had backed would lose the seat to Democratic candidate Sheldon Whitehouse by overwhelming margins. Turns out, Chaffee won the primary against the Club for Growth cretin, and still lost the seat to a Democrat. And now Toomey "bemoans" the "brand"? He'll bemoan anything but his way of thinking. If I were a Rhodie Republican, I'd tell Toomey to go sell his dogma elsewhere, because what he put the GOP incumbent through in a useless primary certainly didn't help Chaffee in the general. What a sham.

Now, I bring you Grover Norquist:

Despite short-term setbacks, Norquist said, the conservative movement is "perfectly healthy. No one is losing because they favor tax cuts, are pro-life, pro-gun or pro-growth.

"In two years, there is no George W. Bush and almost no Iraq war as presently constructed," Norquist said.

Now, that's moral clarity. Grover's pining for the time when the Iraq War is not as it is "presently constructed". If it weren't for Richard Perle, I couldn't think of a more colossal asshole on the planet than Grover Norquist. When his "Ass To Mouth" movement has failed, he knows where the blame goes:

"'And Democrats will be standing there, naked to the winds, having been forced by Nancy Pelosi to vote for tax increases, gun control and impeaching the president,"' he added, referring to the future speaker of the House."

Yeah Grover, whatever. Conservatives should took a long look at their ideology and quit blaming the vehicle they chose to implement it.

Update: Right on cue, here's Newt Gingrich:

"We have to recognize that this was a defeat for Republicans, not for conservatives," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Times yesterday.
There is hope to advance a conservative agenda, Mr. Gingrich said, if House Republicans can find allies among conservative Democrats.
"The balance of power in the House is now 50-plus blue-dog [conservative] Democrats," he said.

We can't debunk this enough.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 11/09/2006 10:50:00 PM