“Conservatives” Today - Can’t Represent America If They Don’t Like It

By TRB - The Republicans seem hell bent on extinction, revealing an irony I once thought impossible - The Democrat's efforts to save them from their own fate. I must admit it is difficult to understand. But any political party needs a boogy man against which to run, especially a weak one. The Dems have always had one - the Republican Party and its various degrees of conservatism. But this time it is different. The Dems can't save them and the Republicans can't save themselves. In fact it seems a bit like "dead man walking" as we watch the conservatives on their way to the firing squad.

Mitt Romney is partly to blame for their problems, as during the campaign he revealed some "contemporary" conservative social theories that angered large numbers of the population. The "47 percent" remarks, the "givers" and "takers," which arose from it and the "entitlement" of Social Security. With that quip he unknowingly shamed a lot of older white men and women (his own base) who are collecting Social Security. Consequently, many of them did not vote at all.

They were the only base he had left. His opinions on women's health issues and contraception, and just his high and mighty attitude torwards women in general, assured he would lose that voting block. His belief that government should not help college students with loans cost him an extremely large portion of the youth vote. People of color (all colors, including a large block of whites) just could not vote for him.

He went after teachers. He went after all municipal workers, the cops, firefighters, the automobile industry, heathcare workers, and more - until there not enough people to vote for him. His party did its best in many places to keep pro-Obama voters from the polls, but this only enraged those voters, and many had decided they would vote for Obama if it was the last thing they did in their lives. So Jim Crow didn't get all the way out of the box. Although Romney offered racist solutions to some perceived problems. For example he said "illegal aliens" should deport themselves. Seriously. Had we ever seen a presidential candidate so displeased with America?

Behind all of this was his budget - which in truth was the Paul Ryan budget. Talk about givers and takers. It is a budget that essentially takes from the poor and gives to the rich, while further shrinking the middle class. It is a budget that - when its details began to leak - scared the hell out of a lot of Americans.

It is also a budget that - even though Obama won the election - is back. Rep. John Boehner is doing his best to sell Paul Ryan's economic war on the poor and middle class to Obama as I write. Sure Obama knows it. And he is not buying it. The so-called "fiscal cliff" doesn't scare the President, whose attitude is to let the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of December. Most polls show that U.S. citizens will blame the Republicans for this.

Sit back, go over the cliff, then ask the House to lower the tax rate for 98 percent of Americans - the unrich. What are the Republicans going to do then? They would virtually guarantee their extinction if they failed to pass the bill.

But that will probably not happen. The budget will be taken care of some way or other before the Dec. 31 date. The U.S. can't afford to have its bond rating lowered. So it will be a temporary fix, something to get us through the holidays and the beginning months of the new year. Then Paul Ryan's budget will be snuffed out, consigned to the circular file in Congress.

One thing all Conservatives should know about this "new" America is that it not as open to conservative ideas as they had once thought. Forget the Reagan years, wars on drugs and "Leave It To Beaver." This is a new country of all colors, creeds, and sexual preferences. It is an America where women leave the house, work and compete with men for promotions and where woman demand to have legal control of their own bodies. The nation has moved forward while the conservatives have anchored themselves to the 1930s Era of corrupt banking, Jim Crow, and zero social welfare programs.

It seems that many conservatives don't like this "new" America. To them I say, if you don't like it, you can't represent it.