Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Tiger Balm

I'm feeling a bit flu-ish today, so here are some wise words from someone else.

"It happened slowly, didn’t it? The change in the Republican Party? I don’t know. Maybe it’s nostalgia. There have always been the wild, vicious voices of the right. The devil on the shoulder of the conservative movement that whispers in its ear, “burn it down, burn it down.” But those voices were to be ignored, humored, tolerated, placated, or just deceived. That was the way of things, and we were protected by the obvious: people who believe foolish things tend to be easy to fool.


Then it all changed. The Republican elite caught a ride on the tiger. But the tiger got sick of waiting for the gazelles it was promised, the gazelles that were always one election away. The tiger was hungry and angry and tired of being used and the longer it waited the more appetizing the elite on its back became. So the tiger got a radio station and a news channel. The tiger got organized and mobilized. And finally the tiger realized it didn’t need someone kicking its sides telling it which way to run and who to eat and when to eat and why it wasn’t time to eat and the time to eat would come, don’t worry, you’ll eat soon enough.

So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.


America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can’t fix everything and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow. And there are smart, honest conservatives at the ready to be that voice, to help govern practically and sincerely with that voice, but they are drowned out by the guttural scream of craven utopians raging against reality.


This moment in American political life is insane. That a group of narrow-minded zealots could push us to the brink of economic ruin, that they maintain a base of support in their frenzied, quixotic, incompetent gambit, that there is an apparatus that exists to defend this kind of nonsense—it came on us slowly but it is no less an emergency. This is broken. This cannot go on."   -- Jon Lovett.

I.... agree.  Is all i can say.

4 comments:

Kagekatsu said...

If the current crop of Republicans are a tiger that ate its master, then the current crop of Dems are the scorpion that stung the tortoise while crossing the river.

All the more reasons why we need a third party.

Unknown said...

It's who they are, it's what they do? Why do conservatives love that metaphor so much, i hear it everywhere.

The issue is, the radical right are about 20% of the population demanding that the other 80% of the population fall in line behind them, which is not going to happen. Just tonight, on the Mark Levin show, Ted Cruz was defending his idiocy by saying that his plan would have totally worked if only the American People rose up in a great wave to support them...

...which reminds me of the hippies. Look, guys, if we just all be groovy, it will be a groovy world!

Ya gotta work within the constraints of reality, Ted. Sucks, i know.

Kagekatsu said...

Might have to do with how progressives and their policies always seem to have a catch to their ballyhooed promises. Just look at the clusterfuck that are the Obamacare enrollments, and that's before we get struck with sticker shock due to our current debts.

Basically, if you are suggesting the GOP purge the extremists on the ranks, I would suggest the Dems do the same to their old guard establishmentarians intent on maintaining the status quo they so love to claim they're against.

Unknown said...

That's one possibility, sure. Or, they could let the extremists take over and destroy the party from within.

I'd love to see Ted Cruz win the nomination and suffer an absolute LANDSLIDE loss to Hillary.