"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Albert Camus
October 23, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
"If only they would…” "Why don’t they…” "What they should do is…” "I can’t understand why they didn’t…”
But the Republicans won’t. They didn’t. They never will.
Because they don’t want to.
We’ve been through two presidential elections.
We’ve half-heartedly supported John McCain and Mitt Romney, plastic, non-charismatic moderates, chosen not by us, but by the GOP Establishment.
We weren’t given a chance to choose.
And even as we supported them, we thought they’d probably lose. Maybe they knew they’d lose. It sure looked like it with both of them. They barely tried.
And it will never change. We can keep on belonging to a club that is sort of okay only because it isn’t the Democratic Party, but it will never get any better than it is.
To vote for the lesser of two evils is never a great strategy.
In the 2008 election, the best part of John McCain was Sarah Palin.
People voted for her when they pulled the "Republican” lever, not him. No, he was the man who during and after the election was consistent about throwing his running mate under the bus. Not the behavior you’d want in a leader.
Conservatives and the Tea Party have been treated like the step children of the Republican Party. They’re ignored completely or when noticed, made fun of.
Republicans are more afraid of conservatives today than they are of the Democrats and more critical of them than the Democrats are. Maybe that’s why we are finding it so hard to distinguish any differences between the two parties.
Most of us aren’t even Republicans and don’t want to be. We’re Constitutional conservatives, Independents, Libertarians, but we vote "Republican” because if we don’t, if we create a third party, we’re afraid it would give the Democrats too much of an advantage.
Take a look around. The Republicans have already done that.
We cling to something that is a bad fit. We wrack our brains and ask "Why? Why?”
We figure out possible scenarios why the party we support doesn’t support us. And, like a doomed marriage, we know it’s never going to get any better.
The fact is the Republican Establishment is in charge and the party isn’t what it used to be. This is not the party of Lincoln or Reagan.
The Republicans who voted with the Democrats didn’t "lose” this week. They threw the fight.
You wouldn’t have found them among those fighting in Valley Forge or at the Virginia Convention in 1776, drafting the Declaration of Independence when hanging by the neck for treason was on the table for standing your ground.
But you could find them in Congress last week, caving in because they wanted to be liked. They threw in the towel and gave up just when they were about to win.
They voted with Democrats to "save the country” from an unpopular shutdown. They cut short a process we used to call "negotiating,” and guess what? They ended up with nobody liking them.
They ended up being blamed for higher unemployment, a faltering economy, a multitude of other woes, and yes, the failure of Obama’s Obamacare website to boot!
Surrendering. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
If they had only stood their ground.
But they didn’t. They wanted to be liked more than they wanted to win.
They were indignant. They were surprised. At their colleagues, but not at Obama.
Somehow Republicans continue to be surprised at this president’s zany antics. Not a good sign for people who spend their year in Washington supposedly addressing firsthand the stuff of which government is made.
They didn’t hang in when they should have, they didn’t make a difference when they could have and they never will because they are not in it to win it.
They will silence those in their party who are bold, those who make it their job to protect the Constitution of the United States, who do what they should be doing, but aren’t.
For us to tell them how to do it better or to try to guess their end game is counterproductive.
It’s not even their fault. We live in a world today where everyone gets a trophy for losing and exceptionalism is a nasty word.
You could point out that if you happened to be a lawyer, the only question you would be asked when you came back from court is "Did you win?” You could point out that no one remembers the names of the "runners up” in anything. You could.
Like it or not, it’s about winning, not the next election, but winning for the people. If you’re in Washington, elected by the people, it’s your job.
You could say Republicans have done a dastardly job in tackling Obamacare and Obama’s scandals and you’d be right. They talk, they hold hearings, they complain that they don’t "have” the Senate, but that’s all they do and then they take it on the chin as we watch our country circle the drain.
Where were Republicans this week when the president was selling Obamacare as a great "product?” Why didn’t they seize that "teachable moment?” They could have said something, but all we heard was silence.
So, it’s clear. It’s time for us to stop our "apology tour” for the Republican Party.
Instead we have to ask ourselves a difficult question. Do we want to be members of a club that includes people like Jeb Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, men who are held out by the Establishment as their best and brightest?
Jeb Bush, the reluctant candidate from a dynasty family who told an audience of conservatives that the U.S. will be in decline unless more immigrants here illegally get a path to legal status; that we should give credit for the "more fertile” immigrants who have "created far more businesses than native-born Americans;”
Or John McCain who has never managed to secure his state’s beleaguered borders despite all his years in Congress and was so disinterested in the hearings on Syria that he played poker on his iPhone and then joked about it;
And finally, Mitt Romney who changed the rules of the National Republican Party to basically greatly reduce the influence of grassroots conservatives and libertarians with the party in 2016 and beyond.
Republicans didn’t "lose” last week in Congress. They gave up. And if they gave up on something as assailable as Obamacare, you have to ask yourself one more question: What are they willing to fight for and can you afford to wait around and find out?
Hold the line, America.