This devastating indictment of the today’s Republican Party, by a recently retired 28 year Republican Congressional staffer, has been bouncing around the internet for a couple of days. For liberals, it will be both enjoyable and disturbingly thought provoking (he reveals some real dark secrets as to why Republicans keep kicking the %&^ out of us from a messaging point of view)
Please share widely!
Yeah, the bulk of the article is about the ruthless and reckless Republican party these days, but he doesn’t much like the Democrats either:
Yes, he does note the single payer is the answer. But Democrats do want that option, you need the votes in order to get something passed. How many Republican votes were there for single payer?
Dems controlled the house and senate and the presidency up until 2011. Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi? I think the author is correct that they prefered to preserve insurance companies and big pharma.
by not insisting on including abortion coverage in the single payer system. Instead the ideological extremism of a few radicals alienated the moderate democrats. It’s the flip side of the same story: dumb libertarians prefer to sabotage the country John Galt style, and don’t actually care about the welfare of the people.
They could have and should have started with universal government-sponsored single-payer health care. They could have and should have used every means available to push the bluedog DINOs on board. They could have and should have changed the filibuster rule so that they didn’t need 60 votes at every step (in the Senate).
It was (and is) the anti-abortionists who were are both extremists and very much a minority. Each of those anti-abortionists should have lost every earmark to his or her district. Each should have been been given offices is the darkest coldest dungeon. There were and are LOTS of ways to “throw a bit of stick” around, and the Democratic leadership used NONE of them.
I do, however, agree with about preserving insurance companies and big pharma. The abortion circus was a smokescreen and distraction, a vehicle that successfully distracted the discussion away from an approach that would actually work and instead put in place a massive subsidy for the insurance companies.
The Democratic Party has been bought, just like the GOP. This is why we need to take more radical steps now.
this guy was a Republican staffer for 28 years. You would not expect him to like the Democratic party. The surprise is how much he hates today’s Republicans.
Right, he presumably still believes in the Republican agenda and values circa 1980-2008. And there were religious Republicans who weren’t shy about evangelizing all through that time, and they never bothered him before. So what he”s complaining “totay’s Republicans” is the rise of Ayn Rand libertarians in the party who think John Galt is a hero for starving the beast and destroying “collectivism” with heartless careless contempt.
The author seems to agree with me that it is the Cult of Ayn Rand that is to blame for the craziness of the current Congress, but he ascribes it to the whole party, as if there was no internal division between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives:
I really don’t think that any “values voters” enthuse over Ayn Rand or libertarianism. Can anyone offer an example of this? They might share some beliefs about shrinking government or personal responsibility, but not in the same areas.