Rampant "Romnesia" Infects the GOP

In the wake of Tuesday's election results it is amazing hearing various conservatives who seem to be suffering extreme cases of "Romnesia" when it comes to their sudden memory loss as to things they previously said or stood by silently on as the GOP clown car and the pitchfork carrying Christofascists drove the GOP and Mitt Romney to defeat.  Andrew Sullivan has a roster of some of the more preposterous claims to conservative pundits that looks at some of the most insane of the electoral results predictions that can be found here.   In her defense, Kathleen Parker did write some point on columns reactions to GOP insanity and an almost intentional effort to alienate all by lily white far right voters.  One Example can be found here.  But then, she soon lurched back into GOP fantasy land as evidenced by this column.  Now, she has swung back in the direction of rationality conveniently forgetting her past columns and seeking to put the blame for the GOP crash on election day to the Republican Party - .i.e., the party base - rather that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and their failed ideas.  What she says - at least for the moment - is in fact correct.  One can only ask why she failed to continue to say it when it really counted.  Here are highlights from her column in the Washington Post:

The headline was inevitable: “What went wrong?”  Seriously?

The bubble in which most politicians and their staffs live is not just a metaphor, apparently. The answer has been so obvious for so long and in so many ways, one has to wonder what these people read in their spare time. Old issues of Boys’ Life?

If nothing else, one had to look only at the two political conventions. One was colorful, vibrant, excited and happy. The other was pale, moribund, staid and restrained. If the latter sounds like something in the final stages of life, you’re not far off.


Truth is often painful, and the days since President Obama’s reelection have been a salted slugfest. Amid the writhing, I rest my case.  Some Republicans stubbornly insist, of course, that the problem was that Romney wasn’t conservative enough. Really? In his heart, this may be true.   But the real problem is the Republican Party, which would not be recognizable to its patron saint, Ronald Reagan. The party doesn’t need a poll or a focus group. It needs a mirror. 

The truth is, Romney was better than the GOP deserved. Party nitwits undermined him, and the self-righteous tried to bring him down. The nitwits are well-enough known at this point — those farthest-right social conservatives who couldn’t find it in their hearts to keep their traps shut. No abortion for rape or incest? Sit down. Legitimate rape? Put on your clown suit and go play in the street.

Equally damaging were the primary leeches who embarrassed the party and wouldn’t leave the stage. Nine-nine-nine, we’re talking about you, Herman Cain. And Gov. Oops? You, too. And then there were Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann  .  .  .  .  Did they have a right to persist in their own fantasies? Sure. But not if they were serious about getting a Republican in the White House.

More to the point, the GOP seems willfully clueless. There’s a reason there are so few minorities in the party. There’s a reason women scrambled to the other side. There’s a reason Hispanics, including even Cuban Americans this time, went for Obama. 

The way forward is about love, not war, baby. Women’s reproductive rights need to come off the table. As Haley Barbour suggested long ago, agree to disagree. Compassionate immigration reform, including a path to citizenship, should be the centerpiece of a conservative party’s agenda.

Marginalize or banish those who in any way make African Americans, gays, single women or any other human being feel unwelcome in a party that cherishes the values of limited government, low taxes and freedom. A large swath of conservative-minded Americans are Democrats and independents by default.

Mitt Romney would have been a fine president and might have won the day but for the party he had to please.

I disagree with Parker on Romney.  As I have made clear in numerous post the guy was a flawed candidate at best.  However, she is point on in terms of the sickness that plagues toe GOP.  It is too bad that she did not remain consistent in her criticisms -  especially early on in the campaign.  Or better yet, during the GOP primaries.  One thing is clear:  until rational conservatives get over their "romnesia" about their own behavior/statements, the GOP most certainly will not begin to reform itself.

Kathleen Parker Has Romnesia

Often columnist Kathleen Parker is a voice of reason in a Republican Party that has become a de facto sectarian party that seeks to force its religious beliefs on all Americans and gut the First Amendment promise of freedom of religion for all citizens.  Indeed, I have noted and commented when Parker has written columns decrying the GOP's "death wish" and describing with horror the ultra-reactionary GOP party platform adopted in Tampa earlier in August.  She has even described Mitt Romney as a cyborg.  She's even complained about the GOP's "god problem" and attacks against her by Christofascists who label her as a fascist (search her name on this blog for more examples). Despite all of this, Parker must have either (i) developed a severe case of "Romnesia," (ii) suffered serious head trauma, (iii) guzzled down gallons of Christianist Kool-Aid, or (iv) bene kidnapped and subjected to a Stepford Wives like transformation.  How else can one explain her column in today's Washington Post in which she accuses Barack Obama of relaunching the so-called culture wars and claims that no one in the GOP will take away the right to abortion.  Here are samples from her severe, debilitating Romnesia induced delusion column:

We shouldn’t be talking about this silliness — Big Bird, “bull­s----er” or a girl’s “first time.”  We should be talking about The Issues, we keep telling ourselves. But in the waning days of the presidential campaign, these are the issues — binders full of cultural issues that continue to divide us and by which Barack Obama hopes to win reelection.

It is no accident that the war of competing economic theories has devolved into the same old culture war, beginning with the debate about the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act. Ever since, the Obama campaign has strategically tried to push the Republican Party and Mitt Romney into a corner by advancing the war-on-women narrative.

That Obama has had ample help from certain outspoken players (Missouri and Indiana Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively, to name the most notorious) has only made Romney’s challenges greater. But the war against women has always been a red herring.

The contraception issue never would have come up but for Obama’s decision to force the hand of the Catholic Church. By placing religious institutions in the position of having to provide health insurance to pay for contraception as well as sterilization, which, agree or not, are against church teaching, Obama created the conversation.

The same ol’ culture wars. But, of course, women have had access to birth control for decades, and no one is trying to take it away. Anyone who suggests otherwise may have been spending too much time with Big Bird. 

One can only hope that Parker seeks immediate medical treatment for this shocking disconnect from reality and her many past columns that underscore the source of the culture wars within today's insane GOP and the party's own platform.

What Mitt Romney Really Said About Allowing Detroit to Go Bankrupt

During last night's debate, Mitt Romney again tried to rewrite history in terms of what he said about allowing General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt back in 2008.  Like almost everything the man says, last mights song and dance did not reflect reality.  Here are highlights from Romney's actual op-ed in the New York Times on November 18, 2008 which was captioned "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt":

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. 

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check. 

I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers. 

First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.

Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations. 

Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.  

I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others.  . . . .But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.

The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.  In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check. 

Of course, as Romney - a vulture capitalist himself - well knew at the time given the collapse of the financial markets, financing during a bankruptcy of either automaker such has he proposed was non-existent.  Giving "post bankruptcy financing" to companies that had collapsed and had ceased to operate would have been too little, too late and many millions of Americans would have found themselves unemployed.  In short, Romney's plan would have been a disaster and GM and Chrysler would be out of business had his approach been pursued.  So once again. last night we heard Romney suffering from "romnesia" and rewriting his own words.  Thankfully, Bush and Obama rejected Romney's plan.  The American people need to remember what Romney proposed for Detroit and reject Romney on November 6th.