Unmasking the Pure Crooks

A line from my last post got me thinking on a related note: How much better would it be for Dems to stop emphasizing the ideological purity of Republican politicians, regarding issues like abortion, religion, etc; and to instead emphasize that those issues are all shams that the GOP uses to help further its crooked agenda?  They don’t want to overturn abortion, or institute religious-rule, or banish all the gays.  Many of their supporters do, but the Republican leadership would have to be completely nutzo to do these things.  They just like the issues, not the victories; and the longer they can milk these issues without providing results, the better.  This is something that conservatives have long attacked Dem politicians for, but the shoe fits much better on the other foot.

If the Democrats cured poverty, ensured us good healthcare, ended war, and all the other issues that we fight for, and we didn’t need to worry that Republicans would undo our success, there would be no reason to be a Democrat or vote at all.  Those are our goals.  Once they were achieved, we’d be done.  Sure, there are likely to be many Dem politicians who are only in it for the money and power, but the hardcore longtime Democrat would be satisfied.  In fact, that’s one disadvantage that the Dems have.  We won the policy battle years ago, life is relatively good, and there really isn’t too much to fight for.  Until the Repubs finally undo several decades of liberal policies regarding labor, health, etc., there really isn’t much for us to be angry about.  Overall, life is good.  We’re not fighting for many new rights and protections; we’re just fighting off the Republican’s encroachment onto our existing rights and protections.  And the Republicans are fairly good at convincing people that none of this is at risk.

But if the Republican leadership enacted the entire Social Conservative agenda, they’d be totally screwed.  Because that’s not what they want.  They want money and power, and the ability to undo the liberal items.  But if they did everything the Soc-Cons wanted, they couldn’t possibly obtain public office, because there just aren’t nearly enough people out there who benefit from the Republican’s real agenda.  Overall, the Soc-Cons are a relatively recent edition to the party, and their overall interests are often in direct conflict with the laissez-faire “anything goes” policy of the hardcore Republicans.  While the base is often tossed a bone or two to satisfy their hunger, the main policy pushes almost always benefit the old school Republicans.  And the last thing the Republican leadership wants to do is to completely satisfy the rabid newbies, as that’s the only thing that keeps them in office.

And so don’t you think it’d help if we emphasized that, rather than emphasizing their ideological and religious purity?  Bush most certainly is not a hardcore conservative or Christian, not in any traditional understanding of those terms.  Nor are most of the other Republican politicians.  Their policies are what they need them to be at the moment, and are far from the purists that they’re made out to be.  And the current scandals are proof enough of that.  No longer the small government gurus, they’ve figured out how to milk Big Government (and thus taxpayers) for all it’s worth; subsidizing both their own fortunes and their political campaigns.  And when Dems take over Congress and/or the Whitehouse, they’ll once again be against government spending, as they can’t milk a system they don’t own.  So why do we go along with their purity showboating, instead of pointing out the pure sham of it all?  That they’re making suckers out of their most loyal supporters.

As the point I made in the last post, even if the media doesn’t like the Soc-Con agenda, they at least think it’s honest and pure.  This isn’t to suggest that we can’t talk about the danger of allowing Republicans to throw meat to their base on these issues, but that shouldn’t be the main point.  The main point should be that these people are shameless hucksters who are running a crooked game against both their supporters and the American people as a whole.  And as that ties-into and feeds the current corruption scandals erupting across the right, it could only help.