you have to wonder if it made a POP, when they pulled their heads out:
CHARLOTTE, N.C.Republican National Committee members gathered here to re-elect Chairman Reince Priebus for a second term. But by week's end, that vote seemed secondary to the question of the party's long-term survival.
After three months of denial, anger, despair and depression over the results of a bruising national election that gave Democrats an edge in Congress and kept President Barack Obama in the White House, Republicans know they must adapt if they are to move forward.
Almost every conversation in the bar of the Charlotte Westin Hotel this week involved a discussion about what the party must do to win the next elections. Floating through the air is a desire to recapture glorious days of the past, a challenge made difficult by a country that refuses to stand still. Demographics are changing, minorities are growing in political influence and views on social issues like gay marriage are drifting rapidly leftward. Something's got to give.
Bring in the Bobs
Enter the RNC's five-person "Growth and Opportunity" committee, an ethnically diverse cadre of political veterans and RNC members analyzing what the party must to do avoid another 2012-like drubbing. (Think of them as The Bobs from "Office Space," but with American flag lapel pins.)
The group includes Henry Barbour, a Mississippi committeeman and Haley Barbour's nephew; former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Florida strategist Sally Bradshaw; South Carolina committeeman Glenn McCall and Puerto Rico committeewoman Zori Fonalledas. They will submit a detailed report in March that looks back on the 2012 election and forward to 2014 and 2016.
"You're going to see a very renewed aggressive effort by this party to put on a different face," Bradshaw said on Thursday. "We've got to find a way to take our message to more people and get more votes. It's not a particularly complicated formula. We got beat; we have to change what we're doing."
The report is a work in progress, and only part of it will be made public, but The Bobs delivered an update on their findings on Thursday to the RNC members.
First, they said Republicans must work on improving their tone when taking their ideas to the American people. For example, when discussing immigration, maybe presidential candidates should avoid phrases like "self-deportation" (Mitt Romney) and "anchor babies" (Michele Bachmann).
Henry Barbour said some in the party can appear "hostile" to certain constituencies with the rhetoric they use. The party must increase communication training for candidates, he said.
"There are certainly too many times when we've had candidates who have come across as hostile, and that's not really helpful when you're trying to win elections," Barbour said.
Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, was even more blunt.
"We need to understand that we can't come off as a bunch of angry white men," he said.
Minority 'engagement' a top priority
Making an honest effort to engage minorities was above anything else the main, yet unofficial, focus of party leaders this week.
On Thursday, committee members took part in a closed-door panel discussion on minority engagement. Edward Cousar, a black committeeman from South Carolina who sat on the panel, said white Republicans struggle in part because they spend too much time with other white Republicans. They have little idea how to speak or interact in a way that appears welcoming to outsiders who come from different ethnic and social backgrounds.
"People get set in their ways, and maybe they don't have a diverse set of friends and they say things," Cousar told Yahoo News in an interview before the panel. "It's not that they're being racist. They just don't know."
Cousar, who leads the Black Republican Political Action Committee, pointed to past Republican efforts to suppress early voting"shameful," he saidand Romney's writing off of 47 percent of the country as unwinnable.
"I always thought Romney had better policies," Cousar, who is the only Republican in his family, said, comparing Romney and Obama. "But he was a horrible messenger."
In November, Obama won more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote and more than 95 percent of black voters supported him. Single women also fled the Republican party on Election Day, with about two-thirds supporting the Democrat. It's a serious problem for Republicans, one they admit will take a lot of time to overcome.
"It's not going to happen overnight," said McCall, a black member of the study group. "But it can be done, and we're going to make that effort."
No more witches
Part of that effort relies heavily on recruiting quality candidates, many attendees said.
For the past four years, Republicans have faced a series of disappointing setbacks after mediocre candidatesoften tea party favoriteshave gone on to lose very winnable elections.
They include Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin, who lost a Missouri Senate race last year and forced Romney and other Republicans on the defensive over women's issues.
In 2010, Nevada's Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle and Delaware's Christine "I'm Not A Witch" O'Donnell lost Senate races Republicans had been expected to win.
The party hopes to take steps to avoid such catastrophes.
Republicans say if that means supporting a moderate candidate who can actually win over a hardline conservative who doesn't stand a chance, so be it. (You may have noticed that among the names that make up The Bobs, there isn't anyone who might be considered a "tea party leader.")
"If we're not nominating candidates that can win in the general election, what business are we in?" Barbour said. "We are in the business of winning elections."
There is one thing, however, that no onenot the committee members, elected officials or even The Bobsseem interested in addressing, and that's whether core Republican ideas need to change.
Most here said they don't.
"The conservative message sells," said Saul Anuzis, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. "We're on the right side of history, on the right side of the issues. We just haven't done a very good job on articulating the issues."
Anuzis' analysis is pretty universal in Republican circles. They see the true cause of their problems as merely poor presentations of otherwise good ideas.
That means a tricky rhetorical sleight of hand.
Don't believe women should have access to an abortion if they are raped or victims of incest? Try not to talk about it. Think the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes are "takers"? Please don't quote Ayn Rand in your stump speech. Support laws banning gay couples from legal rights guaranteed to straight couples? Keep it in the closet. And remember, when in doubt, pivot and talk about economic growth.
Barbour admitted his committee wasn't brought in to debate or change those policy ideas. Their task, he said, is to put Republicans on a path to win electionnot a squishy exercise in lazy pontificating or a dorm room bull session about the proper role of government.
It's data driven.
It's going to hurt some feelings.
And most of all, it's damn serious.
"We did get whipped in the presidential election," Barbour said. "That's not something we take lightly."
It should come as no surprise that the Communist Party USA is on board with President Obamas plan to attack Americans right to keep and bear arms as a means to end gun violence. A cardinal feature of communist regimes, like all dictatorships, is the prohibition of private ownership of arms, creating a monopoly of force in the hands of the State.
In a January 18 article, Peoples World, an official publication of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), declared that the ability to live free from the fear or threat of gun violence is a fundamental democratic right one that far supercedes any so-called personal gun rights allegedly contained in the Second Amendment.
The article, entitled, Fight to end gun violence is key to defending democracy, written by Peoples World labor and politics reporter Rick Nagin, claims that the right-wing extremists opposing all efforts to curb gun violence are the same forces that rallied behind Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, hoping to undermine every other democratic right as well as the living standards of workers and ordinary Americans.
It is for that reason, declares Nagin, as well as the need to protect public safety, that the same coalition of labor and its allies that worked so hard and effectively to re-elect President Barack Obama must now go all-out to back his common sense proposals for gun law reform.
The Communist Partys journalist continued:
As Obama has charged, the extremists recklessly gin up fear that the government is coming to take away hunting rifles and personal weapons owned for legitimate self-defense. Led by the hate-mongering leadership of the National Rifle Association, they use a totally fraudulent and only very recent interpretation of the Second Amendment which they falsely claim as necessary for protecting every other freedom contained in the Bill of Rights.
However, gun rights advocates dont need to gin up fear that President Obamas common sense proposals will lead to even more onerous infringements than the current calls to ban or restrict so-called assault weapons; the gun control zealots have been quite emphatic about intending to severely restrict (and many have called for a total ban on) all privately owned firearms. A December 21 article for the Daily Kos is one of the candid admissions against interest by the Left that the real end goal is a total monopoly of gun ownership by the government. Entitled, How to Ban Guns: A step by step, long term process, the regular Daily Kos writer Sporks says:
The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.
The writer then outlines the piecemeal plan by which the federal government can begin with registration and end up with confiscation. The Daily Kos article also cites the need to delegitimize hunting as well. We should also segway [sic] into an anti-hunting campaign, like those in the UK, it says. By making hunting expensive and unpopular, we can make the transition to a gun free society much less of a headache for us.
Nagin surely must know that it is not merely groundless paranoia exploited by extremists inspiring fear that President Obamas multi-part gun control plan is but the opening wedge in a new drive for ever-expanding federal restrictions and infringements of the Second Amendment. And Nagin surely is aware that his comrades ruling China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, and other communist countries have never stopped at partial restrictions on private ownership of weapons.
As The New American reported recently, Communist Chinas ruling mandarins, sounding very much like our own media commentators, have blasted the United States for our rampant gun ownership. A Chinese government report last year detailing alleged human rights violations in the United States declares:
The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens lives and personal security and exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership.
More recently, on December 14, 2012, the Beijing regimes Xinhua news agency editorialized:
Twenty-eight innocent people, including 20 primary students, have been slaughtered in a mass shooting at an elementary school in the U.S. state of Connecticut. Their blood and tears demand no delay for the U.S. gun control.
Action speaks louder than words, concluded the Xinhua editorial. If Obama wants to take practical measures to control guns, he has to make preparation for a protracted war and considerable political cost.
Communist China, of course, is no paragon of virtue when it comes to liberty, safety, and human rights. Its total ban on private ownership of guns under Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) guaranteed that the Communist Party would have unchallenged power. And, as Professor R. J. Rummel has pointed out in his several published studies on democide (mass murder by governments): Power kills and absolute power kills absolutely. In the case of Communist China, the mass murder by the communist government under Mao was somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 million souls!
And China remains a rigidly controlled police state to this day, notwithstanding the limited market reforms that the Party has allowed for pragmatic purposes to obtain the capital and technology it needs to modernize. Only Party officials and the police and military (who must be members of, and be vetted by, the Communist Party) are allowed to possess weapons.
Maos comrades in Russia, Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, likewise disarmed the civilian population before initiating mass murder. As did Adolf Hitler and every other successful mass-murdering tyrant throughout history. Vladimir Gladkov, a radio propagandist on Vladimir Putins Voice of Russia program, expressed disappointment on December 20 that the Sandy Hook mass shooting probably would not generate the support President Obama needs to implement his desired gun controls. Unfortunately, there are grounds for very serious doubt that even after this terrible massacre, a ban on selling weapons will be introduced in the US, said Gladkov.
Again, considering that rigid, absolute, centralized power is the essence of all totalitarian regimes, those regimes must, therefore, automatically strike down all checks and balances that would limit their central authority. It is not surprising that spokesmen for these totalitarian governments would endorse policies that give the government a monopoly on deadly force.
The American Founding Fathers, on the other hand, recognized that the armed private citizen is the ultimate check and balance against the centralized monopoly of force which invariably turns tyrannical and deadly. Nagin and Peoples World, not surprisingly, side with communist tyrants and deride American commitment to our natural rights enshrined in our Constitution.
The Second Amendment is obsolete and now has been twisted to threaten the basic safety and security of all Americans, says Nagin. Nagin, according to the profile provided on Keywiki by Trevor Loudon, has been a member of the CPUSA for several decades and a writer for the Peoples World and other communist publications since 1970. He is a member of the Newspaper Guild and the Communications Workers of America as well as a political coordinator for the AFL-CIO in Ohio. In 2012 he was the Democratic Leader in Cleveland Ward 14 and served on the County Democratic Party Executive Committee.
We recognize the totalitarian ideology and objectives of Nagin and other communist propagandists when they advocate disarming of civilians and a total monopoly of force in government. Many of the other people advocating the same gun control policies may not have those totalitarian objectives in mind but by their support of these policies they would lead us down the same deadly path nonetheless.
This article was posted: Friday, January 25, 2013 at 5:48 am
I'm guessing that the media that supports gun control does not understand that after the Government gets our guns and has all the power that they want then other freedoms like freedom of the press will go next. They will have to say only what the Gov. tells them to.