"The five stages of Republican grief" by Ezra Klein at WP

[applegrove]

The five stages of Republican grief

by Ezra Klein at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/08/the-five-stages-of-republican-grief/

"SNIP............................................


Dick Morris and Sarah Palin are out at Fox News. Rep. Paul Ryan is helping House Speaker John Boehner talk his caucus down from the debt-ceiling ledge. Sen. Marco Rubio is going from one conservative talk-radio host to another to sell them on bipartisan immigration reform. Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal is telling Republicans to cease being “the stupid party.” Tea Party icon Jim DeMint left the Senate, while FreedomWorks, a Tea Party catalyst, went through a nasty, costly divorce with its figurehead, Dick Armey. Karl Rove’s super-PAC is turning its formidable financial artillery toward helping Republicans win primary elections against Tea Party insurgents.

The Republican establishment is reasserting control. It’s purging some of the hucksters who’d taken the party’s reins — or at least the airtime — in recent years. It’s resisting much of the brinkmanship that marked the last Congress and trying to present a more fearsome, united front against counterproductive strategies favored by the right. All of the major 2016 presidential contenders have made the same political calculation: It’s better to build a reputation as one of the party’s adults than as one of its firebrands.

“We’ve had a period of this movement at the grass-roots level, call it Tea Party or something else, and it seems to me we’re seeing the normal progression of a grass-roots populist movement,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. “It ran out of control for a few years — that’s why we call it a movement rather than an organization. But it’s receding a bit now. That’s allowing natural leaders to reassert themselves, and institutional forces to reassert themselves.”

Just don’t call this process moderation. The Republican Party isn’t reinventing itself so much as reverting to its previous form. There’s little evidence of a rethinking of core Republican policy ideas. There’s no obvious analogue to the Democratic Leadership Council of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was a moderating influence on the Democrats, or even to the “compassionate conservatism” that George W. Bush promoted to the nation in 2000.

..........................................SNIP"

[shenmue]

1. The stages

1. Staring at the teevee

2. Yelling

3. Posting something on FR

4. Putting bad stickers on their cars

5. Yelling more

[calimary]

2. And they STILL don't get it. All the message discipline and improvement and not talking about rape

in the WORLD is not going to get them more votes if they cling to the same old stale irrelevant, intolerant, closed-minded, antiquated policies and ideas and agenda. The yowling and scolding they're doing to each other for self-improvement is STILL - all cosmetic. Surface-only. They can NOT talk about rape all they want, but they still believe it's a woman's fault and if she gets knocked up by it it's STILL her fault and totally on her and she's stuck there with no recourse. She's lucky if she doesn't get some long plastic phallus jammed up into her privates as they tried to mandate by law in Virginia and are looking at, seriously, elsewhere.

They STILL DON'T get it. It's not HOW you message. It's WHAT you message.

The only hope they have of longterm reinvigoration is to change some of their ideas, open their minds more, look around and observe REAL reality, not the fake "reality" that Pox Noise tells you about all the time. They need to face and accept the changing and evolving views of a majority of the American public. And stop trying to defy the changing reality around them. Adapt or die. Be flexible so you can bend, or be rigid and get snapped in half.

[jerseyjack]

3. -but, but, but if they did all that, they wouldn't be Republicans.

[Thinkingabout]

7. You are right, it might cause them to br sane and they dont wannabe

[Zoeisright]

4. I still hate Vin Weber, that little weasel.

"Natural leaders" my ass. All it takes to be a repuke leader is to be a greedy, cruel, ignorant misogynistic liar.

[MNBrewer]

8. +1

[Viking12]

5. 1) anger 2) denial 3) anger 4) persecution complex 5) anger

jeebus probable fits in there somewhere, too.

[AlinPA]

6. That's a bullshit article. The rightwing crazies are the "establishment" that now runs the GOP.

McConnell, Boehner, Rubio, Ryan are all extreme rightwingers who are being dragged by the nose by the teabaggers.

[Thinkingabout]

9. Maybe we should not wish for them to change and be decent, they would try to overtake our

Democrat Party and try to sneak the damn Tea Party in also and we sure don't want them in our party.