By John R. Thomson
Clash Daily Guest Contributor
It’s been painful to watch the party, the last decade. It started with “compassionate” conservative Bush the younger thinking his self-definition meant, as one example, throwing hundreds of billions at the public education sector, mostly for salaries, while doing nothing to upgrade the quality of teachers and teaching.
Next, we gave the ’08 nomination to John McCain, aka the people’s chameleon, who managed to confuse everyone about where he stood on just about everything. How about his copycat crusade, an Op Ed in Pravda to offset Czar Putin’s sleazy shot in the N.Y. Times? How’s that for big time mouse-that-roared foreign policy?
Then, we have Senate Minority “Leader” Mitch McConnell looking and acting like a nervous teenager at a burlesque performance … which of course is what goes on, on Capitol Hill. Poor Mitch is overshadowed by House Speaker John Boehner, who had to be dragged kicking and whining into a serious effort to defund Obamacare, despite millions more Americans opposing rather than favoring the president’s signature train wreck.
Wild, isn’t it? We have the worst president in our lifetime (strongly challenging Jimmy Carter), coupled with Nevada’s most corrupt thug, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives stumbles around like a drunk looking for a morning eye opener.
The Republican old boys in the House don’t work smoothly with the young Turks making waves in both chambers. So, old guy Senator David Vitter has the simple idea that the congressional gang, elected and staff alike, should be subject to Obamacare, like the rest of the country, and what happens? Virtually everyone on Capitol Hill, Dems and GOPers alike, dumps on him.
Sorry, but there’s much more. Earlier this month, yes 9/11, we passed the first anniversary of the Benghazi terrorist attack, in which four Americans were killed and about which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lied for 10 days. Despite knowing full well it was a well-planned Al Qaeda attack, the administration claimed it was a spontaneous uprising in reaction to a video nobody had seen by someone in Los Angeles nobody knew. Until now, the GOP has done nothing to investigate (and capitalize on) one of the worst attacks, ever, on our country.
Remember the 2012 presidential election debates, with the third one on foreign policy just days before the vote? Mitt Romney didn’t say a word about Benghazi, much less that our leaders watched from the White House, did nothing to retaliate and lied about how the attack was mounted. That’s when the GOP lost the ’12 election.
Get the point? The Republicans are disunited, have no policy beyond greed and boast ethics not much above those found among Chicago pols.
So, let’s demand true leadership and cooperation from the bright stars: governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Indiana’s Mike Pence, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, New Mexico’s Susanna Martinez, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, plus senators like Texas’ John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, Utah’s Mike Lee, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Florida’s Marco Rubio and South Carolina’s newcomer Tim Scott.
Come on, guys and gals: come together on principle, policy and politics. You can do it and millions of Americans want it, with all their hearts.
If not, the not so Grand Old Party should rename itself. How about Grungy Out-of-it Punks?
John R Thomson, former diplomat and international business developer, spies on U.S. politics from his base in Colombia.
