Pathetic GOP Comes Crawling Back...

..to Ron Paul. Be sure to read the comments, where the total hypocrisy is laid out in full.

Now, I've put up a few posts over the past few months on why I think the "Libertarian" Party is headed in the wrong direction. I myself was a Republican before converting to libertarianism some years ago. (Just thinking of that makes me shudder.) Why is the Republican Party in such a dismal state?

First and foremost, the Republican Party's social agenda is absolutely freaking insane to anyone who isn't living in a retirement home. This is a party that rejects evolution, global warming, birth control, stem cell research, sex ed, and medical marijuana. When I say they "reject" these things, I don't merely mean that they oppose state action or funding for them (which we should all oppose), but that they don't believe in them in general. Most normal or educated people think these stances are insane, and so long as the GOP focuses on its hard-core rightwing social agenda, it is screwed for all practical purposes. The GOP's battle against gays and secularists has grown increasingly futile and tiresome. The more it focuses on the "culture war" issues of 20 years ago, the more irrelevant it will become.

Second, the GOP has completely thrown fiscal and economic conservatives under the bus, concentrating on their lunatic social agenda. These two wings of the GOP are antagonistic in many ways. Many of the social conservatives are at the bottom of the economic ladder, meaning they don't mind the big-government spending so much (they mistakenly believe that it helps them). These people live to interfere in other people's lives and legislate the Bible, and want a powerful central government to do so. They don't care about much else.

So if the GOP downplays its perverse, medieval social agenda and focuses on economic issues, it risks alienating a massive chunk of its piss-ignorant base. They would take the risk of sending a large number of social conservatives to the Democratic Party (an apt choice for deadbeats and "mommy state" proponents).

But Cork!, you ask, what about the police state and the American war machine? Well, those two things are certainly far more important than social issues and big spending. Unfortunately, I don't think most of the American public cares about them, so it's questionable how big of a role they play in the GOP's horrid state. Your average American simply doesn't care how many Ay-rab women and children are incinerated, raped, tortured, or decapitated (if they did, Obama wouldn't have been elected). It's a big yawner for them. To the extent that the American public cares about these issues at all, it is only for three reasons:

1) The amount of money it's costing (the gulags would be tolerable if they were cheap)

2) The number of "our troops" who have been killed. They could care less about the 1,000,000+ civilian deaths, but shed crocodile tears every time some US thug loses a fingernail (usually when exterminating a family).

3) It was "poorly prosecuted." The imperialism and mass murder would be handy-dandy if only they were "planned" better, or if WMDs had been found.

So where does all of this leave the GOP overall? In the gutter, where it belongs.