Can't we leave that poor party alone?

Conventional wisdom holds that the GOP's babbling blitzkrieg against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is immeasurably stupid, since Harry Reid is running for no office. It is customary as well as transcendently practical (thus the custom) that during election years one's political attacks should actually attack one's actual political opponents. This still seems good advice. But then again the GOP has excelled in the pioneering of sideshows and irrelevancies as mainstream campaigning; and one should never, I suppose, argue with empirical success.

(My cardinal worry is that Reid's taxing assault and Republicans' retaliation might upset the Senate's bipartisan comity, smooth operation and awesome effectiveness.)

The GOP's blitzkrieging modus operandi is as dazzling as it is dependable. The trick? Simplicity and leanness. The party simply unburdens itself of all proprieties and perspective and unleashes an ungodly offensive of ratcheting malice, usually centered around one tested word; in this case, "liar," which RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, ever the pioneer, gussied up to "dirty liar" on ABC's "This Week."

Hence another few dwindling days of this presidential campaign are being consumed by the GOP's wrath and hellfire. Sen. Lindsey Graham boldly went with the "lying" tactic on CNN; George Will, also on "This Week," cited America's homegrown prince of lies, Joe McCarthy; and this morning Politico is featuring the fainting-couch indignation of several GOP partisans whose virginal nerves are on the tragic brink of unraveling over all this nasty lying. My favorite, Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi: "Obama's all negative, all the time campaign shows that he is not a nice or likable person, as some wrongly think. Obama is an ego maniac and a narcissist who will stoop at nothing to hold on to power. He is more like Richard Nixon than has been any president we have had since Watergate."

Tortured syntax aside, will these delicate flowers ever comprehend the rather elementary concept of "projection"?

I'm digressing. I opened with conventional wisdom's condemnation of the GOP's blitzkrieg, with which I, initially, concurred. Yet I'm beginning to wonder. Standard-issue criticism says that Mitt Romney & Party should be out there, bellowing on and on about economics and not Harry Reid; but in that criticism there is also a standard-issue flaw: Mitt Romney has no economic plan to bellow.

There are only so many times one can say "8.3" in a day, and though most persuadable voters would love to hear how Romney would lower that number, he hasn't a clue.

Neither, of course, does his party. Yet while the GOP is pitiably out of practice when it comes to offering positive prescriptions, it has become the Jackson Pollock of political irrelevancies and malicious sideshows. So I now tend to think, Come on, folks, just let them do what they do so well.

Comments

[Peter G]

I beg to differ. The Republicans know exactly how to lower that number. If they enacted and executed any of the economic policies proposed by the Obama administration since the 2010 midterm elections it would significantly lower that number. What I don't understand is why they won't just say that as part of their plan. It doesn't really matter that it would completely contradict everything they've previously said. (Hasn't been a problem yet has it?) They aren't really going to lose any of the votes they have now and they just might attract a few moderate independents. Seriously, why would Romney not argue that he could do within his own party what the "hyper-partisan" Obama could not as an adversary. I see no reason to try to maintain the illusion of logic or integrity when there appears to be little punishment for abandoning them.

[Peter G]

Oh and by the way, welcome back. There are a few other places to get my fix of politics (and acid humor) but you definitely peddle the "good stuff".

[Susan Zoon]

The GOP has nothing more than the usual
"I know you are, but what am I?" nincompoopery.

The wrecking ball GOP has no plan... I'm shocked.

And of, course- my fave: "Why won't the angry black, Chicago thug, foreign, Muslim, Kenyan, Commie be nice to us?"

Really?

[Robert Lipscomb]

Mitt Romney and his (as yet undisclosed) income tax filings are to trickle-down economics what Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" buying liquor with food stampas was to the New Society.

He is the absolute personification of Reaganism by way of W. Bush, the Koch brothers and the Tea Party. It is not so much that his tax filings might show cheating or even unfairly low. the reproabable real problem with the taxes is that they will put to lie the argument that the tax code is so oppressive to the capatins of industry that they no longer have sufficient motivation to become billionaire and trickle down on the rest of us.

Good-bye trickle-down economics.

[japa21]

Just to second Peter. They know exactly how to handle the problem. Watch a Republican government, President on down, send all those funds to the states to rehire the teahcers, firemen, policemen and other government employees that were gotten rid of.

The unemployment rate would drop to 7.2% almost immediately, and the extra spendable income would increase demand and the rate would continue to drop.

Plus, transportation bills would be coming out their rear ends faster than you could believe.

However, the reason they can't say anything is that it would run directly counter to all their arguments about the deficit and the debt. They have placed themselves in a bind and hope the American voting public is too dumb to figure this out themselves.

The sad thing is, they may be right.