RNC commercials: Do they resonate with anyone?

RNC commercials are dumb because Republicans are awful.  That’s the basic thesis of Salon’s Alex Pareene.  He doesn’t think the standard-issue millennial mouthing GOP platitudes (see videos below) is all that bad, but he’s certain that the actual, no-kidding Republicans out there are snaggle-toothed gay-bashers and other Dead White European Males who hate Diversity, think Cuddly Puppies are something to shoot at, and wouldn’t know Millennial Chic if they found it dead in their ditty bag (except, of course, that Pareene himself would have no idea what a ditty bag is, and is darn proud of it).

So RNC commercials must be silly and/or deceptive or something.

Battleground Texas: Defending the vote

 

Image via Fort Bend Democrats (who, bless their hearts, love this display because it involved “recycling”).

The new video from James O’Keefe (see below) has gone viral in the last 72 hours.  It was the first big “get” for Breitbart Texas, and for good reason: it shows an operative from the Obama-affiliated Battleground Texas PAC apparently violating Texas law on voter registration.

Crisis of politics: The opportunity in the storm

Each day brings new bad news about Obamacare.  Each day also brings another volley from one or both sides in the War Between the Republicans.  (See here, here, here, and here, if you must.)

This is silly.

A recap, to begin.  The Tea Party and limited-government folks are right that we are at a great crisis point in the life of the republic.  The “moderate” or “establishment” conservatives are right that there is a limit to what can be done at the moment within the constraints of law.

But two things really need doing.

A house divided: The GOP dialogue continues

I wrote a few days ago about the current division in the Republican Party, which is as profound as I can remember seeing it in my lifetime.  The dialogue on this isn’t going to end any time soon.  There’s a sense in which we would be shortsighted to want it to.  Some observations.

1.  Rush Limbaugh is right about the Tea Party and other limited-government conservatives.  They have been galvanized by the recent fight, not abashed.  The sense about Ted Cruz among limited-government conservatives may be best expressed by Lincoln’s famous exclamation

GOP: Polls and hinge points of history

What does it mean that recent polls show 7 in 10 respondents think Republicans are putting their agenda ahead of what’s good for the country, as opposed to the 5 in 10 respondents who think President Obama is doing the same?

The answer probably lies in an analysis of the ancillary question posed in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: do respondents agree or not with the statement that the GOP or the president is “demonstrating strong leadership and standing up for what they [he] believe[s] in”?

For Republicans, only 27% of respondents agreed with that statement.  For Obama, 46% of them agreed.

On the face of it, that’s actually a contradictory assessment