They understand that if Barack Obama were to cure world hunger tomorrow, they would blame him for overpopulation.

They understand that if Barack Obama were to somehow bring about world peace, they would blame him for destroying the defense industry.

In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

Grayson also makes a pretty good point as to why Democrats are so fixated with getting all these extra voted in the Senate.  Also, when Democrats were in the minority, it sure didn’t work the other way. In fact, the few times Democrats threatened to filibus

Democrats are always worying about how they appear, and as a result, they usually appear weak, and fail to communicate an effective message, or to effectively define their oponents, outside of to their own choir. Republicans don’t really care, they articulate why they beleve the way they do, and provide constant support for, and sell, that belief. Democrats will — and often do — claim that Republicans are “wrong,” “misinformed,” or “misleading.” But they don’t show it. They don’t then take that very fact — that, if true, their opponents either a) don’t understand the issue, or b) are misleading (both themselves, and Americans), and turn that in to the bigger story. Instead they utter a complaint here or there; and sometimes the blogosphere, “gets mad,” but does not often reach outside of its choir to show to everybody else its own reasons why.”

His campaign for President in 2008 was based in large part upon this “straight talk” theme. Given the radical and contradictory shifts of McCain, up through and including that time, and the many representations his campaign made, we don’t think it continued to apply in 2008.  To Say the Least.

The national media naturally thought differently, and continued to annoint McCain as the real “‘Straight Talk’ Express.”  (The media also annointed McCain, and would hardly contemplate evidence to the contrary, as a preminent foreign policy and national security expert. this is something which we also think was hype — something which was promulgated and then parroted so many times, it simply became conventional “wisdom” without really being deeply explored, and which went effectively unchallenged by the Democrats.  Here is just one example of McCain’s statements on Afghanistan. His statements on Iraq are even more telling.  Those will have to be dug up, and provided in a later post.)

Recently, an extremely popular, overtly partisan (again, we wonder why), political website noted the following, which we share here, from Bush I Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Bruce Bartlett:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat.

This should have come as no suprise.  Bartlett, a lifelong conservative, had been affiliated with the Dallas, TX based conservative National Center for Policy Analysis for almost 12 years, when in 2005, he was ostensibly fired for being critical of President Bush.

Other leading conservatives have also criticized the Bush Administration. Mickey Edwards and Bruce Fein both called the Bush Administration Tyranical. Fein was also outspoken in his support of President Obama (although more as a statement against John McCain and the continuation of  Bush Administration policies, than in favor of Obama).

Bartlett may not have supported McCain either, and wrote a piece stating that it would not necessarily be a bad thing if McCain lost.

Other prominent conservatives who supported Obama, or were simply against McCain, included quite possibly former Senator Chuck Hagel, who while still friends with McCain would not proclaim his support for him; Reagan Economic Advisor Larry Hunter; Reagan and Bush I Head of the Office of Legal Counsel Doug Kmiec;  Reagan Assistant Secretary of the Army Delbert Spurlock; Dwight D. Eisenhower granddaughter Susan Eisenhower (who eight months later decided to leave the Republican Party because of the party’s direction, and issued a fairly stinging rebuke of the McCain campaign), former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach, former Senator Lowell Wiecker (although has has become an independent), former Reagan Assistant Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb (who has become a Democrat), former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee (although Chafee is a very moderate Republican, clearly opposed to the Bush Administration, and almost assuredly did not vote for it in 2004), and others. Even former Bush II campaign strategist Matthew Dowd had stated that the only candidate that he “likes,” was Obama.

Democrats almost never talked about this, because they did not seem to think it was relevant to connecting with voters who may well not have supported McCain if they had known the true facts, or had more credibility been built up with respect to the Democrats’ claims against McCain, and in favor of Obama.

But they say, “well, we won, so what does it matter?”

What matters it that the Democrats were handed that election on a silver, platinum encrusted platter, and don’t even know it. Had they not won THAT election, we would effectively no longer have had a two party system in national politics.

Yet immediately afterwards, all we heard as a nation was how the Republican Party “was dead.”

We here (before there was a “here”), disagreed strongly with this, and in vain tried to get Democrats to realize that if this was THAT hurtful to the Republican Party, Republicans would not be playing into it so easily, and that it was a natural reflection of what was a long predictable (and predicted) backlash to all the rightward lurching over the past several years, as well as a very unpopular incumbent Administration. True, and very relevantly, this general agreement was in part driven by Republicans aghast by the party’s takeover by far right elements. But it was also driven by Republicans, who naturally realize that the best way to succeed in politics, is to downplay expectations of success, and play up the need to fight and strive for it every step of the way (and took advantage of the reality that public sentiment was squarely against “Republicanism,” and that many Republicans were in fact questioning their own party). 

The Donkey Party, of course, does precisely the opposite, and often confuses success, with how well it is able to convince itself that it has in fact been successful, rather than in fact playing down those very same expectations and underselling its own influence therein while working harder to sell and expand it.

Of course, as predicted, we see less than one year later, that the Republican Party, still largely dominated by its own Right Wing, is very much not dead. So much for Democrat Presumptuousness, once again.

How is it that almost all of the experts, including many on this list of the “50 most influential commentators” in America, and others, got it wrong on the state of the Republican Party — prematurely predicting its demise — and we humble predecessors of Donkasaurus Post admin’ got it right?

Hmm. We wonder.

Steve Kroft: You ran for this job, saying that you were not a big spending liberal, and that you were definitely, under no circumstances, a Socialist. And I know you inherited a unique set of circumstances. But in nine months you have effect nationalized two automobile companies, sections of the banking industry.

President Obama: Oh, wait, hold on, time out a second Steve, come on now.  Let’s think about it. On the banking issue, when I walked in, the banking system, the financial system was on the verge of collapse. And what have I done?  I’ve essentially taken the program that was voted on by the previous Congress, supported by the previous Republican President, and we’ve made it work.    So, that didn’t originate under my watch. 

With the auto companies, before I took office,  Uncle Sam was writing them billions of dollars worth of checks, without holding them accountable.   And what we said was, if you are going to get taxpayer money, then you’ve got to be accountable to taxpayers, by restructuring.

But what I think is a legitimate concern, because this did happen under my watch, is that we initiated a big recovery act:  800 billion dollars. And the reason we did so, is that every credible Democratic  and Republican economist, at the time that we came in, said that if we don’t have a stimulus of some sort, this is potentially going to get a lot worse.

Obama also claims that health care reform in the long run should not cost a dime more.  He asserts — somewhat correctly — that the most out of control spending in our budget, is on Medicaid and Medicare.  In 2005 for example, Medicare and Medicaid spending was projected at 481 billion dollars, more than on national defense and homeland security combined.    (And that’s not counting state Medicaid, over another 100 billion. ) These costs have been rising rapidly every year before and after, and are projected to continue to rise rapidly.

We also spend almost two times more per person on health care than any other industrialized nation in the world, but yet our overall rate of health care success is little better (and in some cases worse.)

The question is this: Do these current proposals cut waste, or simply expand the current system.

We think health insurance — at least health insurance that racks up enormous overhead, profits, paperwork, and other ”middleman” costs while covering most routine things that insurees could afford themselves (at least, could afford if they were not paying an arm and a let, so to speak, on health insurance), rather than just for true “security protection” catastrophic losses — is a big part of the problem. Not the solution.