Rush Limbaugh: "The [GOP] Establishment is Authoring Its Demise."

(Above: Rush Limbaugh, the most popular conservative political radio talk show host in America. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Introduction: The Truth Hurts for the GOP as It is At a Crossroads in the History of Its Existence

In previous articles on this blog, I have stated clearly my assertion that the lawmakers who are members of the Democratic Party are far superior politicians than those in the GOP.  This has been made abundantly evident as Republican lawmakers for years have caved into the Left's demands that we adhere to the principles of political correctness, that they take great pains to endeavor not to offend people in minority groups or to respect the sanctity of a woman's rights to her body, up to and including her right to have an abortion upon demand. Finally, there have been instances when the Left has pressured the conservatives within the GOP to such an extreme that it recanted on their philosophical pledge to cut the fat from government and increased funding on social welfare problems. The last article I published, "The Uphill Battle of Social Conservatives Against the Leftist Mass Media," states the reasoning behind this in clear, unequivocal terms for all to read.  I also authored an article addressing the lack of direction that is so obviously plaguing the GOP over the past 20 years in "A Discourse on the Division Within the Republican Party That is Playing Into the Hands of the Democrats Despite Their Being Embroiled in Multiple Scandals", which remains to this day out of all of my 54 previous articles published to this blog the most unpopular based upon the lack of positive feedback compared to the rather-widespread show of support for every other article.

(Above: Former presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who both combined to serve from 1921-29.  They were among the first conservative GOP presidents to serve in the White House. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

My parents used to tell me upon explaining a concept that would prove to be unpopular with me at the time but would no doubt prove to be prophetic and true with regard to my posterity that "the truth hurts." In this case, that cliche is, indeed, just as prophetic as those our parents taught us so many years ago.  At my present age of 32, I have come to accept that the truth does, indeed, hurt, far more often than it actually feels pleasurable.  And so it is with the current state of the GOP, who not only cannot seem to develop an identity now since George H.W. Bush destroyed the greatest era of national unity and social harmony in American history after the Reagan Revolution brought a 12 year retraction of the values of social unrest and upheaval that had its roots planted 25 years before Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 by raising taxes and paving the path toward the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 to the Oval Office.  As I have stated many times, including within the introductory sentence of this article, the greatest collection of politicians this country, and the world, has ever known are those in the Democratic Party. This has been true since 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to the presidency upon the perception that conservatism was to blame for the stock market crash on Black Tuesday in 1929.  Yet, never do the liberal Democrats mention how Herbert Hoover, the predecessor of FDR's, was a big government Republican, and therefore no conservative like Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge, who had together presided over what was then the longest and most prosperous period of economic growth in U.S. history.  Hoover broke with the conservative principles of his two predecessors who had worked diligently during their presidencies to reverse the course toward which the nation had been steered by the Woodrow Wilson administration, which began with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment that created the federal income tax in 1913 that would ultimately manifested the conditions which would spring to life upon FDR's rise to power when he transformed America from a nation of economic and social liberty into a welfare state endowed with socialist economic and fiscal policies.  As the rate of taxation for the wealthiest Americans reached a high of about 75% in 1916, by the end of the Coolidge administration, that total had dropped down to 25%.  The federal deficit, which had soared during the Wilson administration (1913-1921) both as a result of World War I and increased public expenditures that cost more to fund than the massive amounts of tax revenue that was created through the enormous amounts of income collected, was reduced between 1921 and 1929. Hoover reversed the good works of the Harding and Coolidge administrations when he raised taxes as well as public expenditure initiatives, leading to an increase in the federal deficit, and setting the chain reaction of events that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Republican Party, which had dominated the political landscape since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. As Calvin Coolidge was no doubt the champion of the private sector when he made the simple, yet famous quote, "The business of America is business," Hoover was the exact opposite; he did not trust the free market to propagate economic growth, but rather the government, and as the last Progressive president from the Republican Party, he enacted policies that were not only pernicious to the perpetuation of the economic growth begun by Harding and Coolidge, it ultimately led to the collapse of the entire economy on the monumental level in U.S. history.

(Above: Former presidents Herbert Hoover, R, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, D, who were opponents in the 1932 Presidential Election. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

In an irony when one who reads history reflects upon the domestic policies of his administration, FDR stated the following during his campaign for the presidency in 1932 against the incumbent Hoover:

I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all American history - one which piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs or reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer. We are spending altogether too much money for government services which are neither practical nor necessary. In addition to this, we are attempting too many functions and we need a simplification of what the Federal government is giving the people."

Through cunning political tactics of promising to take care of the people through government activism and yet throwing in a traditional conservative barb into his attacks on Hoover, FDR won the presidency by a landslide over the embattled incumbent. The GOP would not see another president from its party against until Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1953, and it was all caused by the division within the party even back then rather than the importance of philosophical unity and strict adherence to it in implementing public policy. And as a grisly reminder of the gross irony of FDR's quote mentioned above, the unprecedented growth in federal spending and the federal government in terms of bureaus and bureaucracy, not to mention enormous public deficits, left a smarting feeling to those within the Republican Party who managed to survive the Democrat's rise as the dominant political party in America in 1932, just as it remains so today.

(Above: Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, and the first Republican Party member to hold the office. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Republican Party was founded upon the principles that the Reagan Revolution resurrected upon the election of Reagan to the White House in 1980 of "free land, free labor, free men."  As the Democratic Party is fond of claiming that they is the party of Thomas Jefferson, the principles which it espouses could not be further removed from those of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party philosophies than night is to day. The GOP conviction that America is a Judeo-Christian society holds true to the core beliefs of the Founding Fathers. It also believes, at least in its official platform and therefore in theory, that less government leads to greater liberty and opportunity for prosperity, just as our Founders did.  And until the beginning of the Cold War, whereupon the victories of the U.S. over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Empire of Japan in a war fought in two different hemispheres resulted in our opposition against the spread of Communism due to the other major victor of World War II, the Soviet Union, to the nations it "liberated" or more descriptively conquered, the Republican platform was one based upon isolationism, with the lone exception being the Spanish-American War of 1898 conducted by the administration of William McKinley and later propagated by his successor Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive in the same cloak worn by his Democratic presidential successors. Even during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first GOP member to hold the title as the nation's head of state and government since Hoover in 1933, "Ike" cooled the rhetoric toward the Soviet Union that had been intensified in each successive year of the Harry S. Truman White House that ultimately culminated in the Korean War that resulted in approximately 35,000 deaths of brave American soldiers in a war that was unnecessary.  And while Nixon initially accelerated the military presence and war efforts in Vietnam, he succeeded in implementing his exit strategy by 1973, even though this ultimately resulted in the South Vietnamese government falling to the Viet Cong in 1975 when the Communist guerrillas sacked Saigon (now known as "Ho Chi Minh City").  On domestic matters, both Eisenhower and Nixon adhered to the majority of the New Deal legislation signed into law by FDR, and were not fiscally conservative. And unfortunately for Nixon, his involvement in the Watergate scandal led to the public's development of mistrust and skepticism toward government.  While his successor, Gerald R. Ford, attempted to do damage control, the GOP's image had been greatly tarnished yet again, and led to the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. 

(Above: Former presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the three GOP presidents who served in the position between FDR and Ronald Reagan. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

The agenda of the increased role of the military in U.S. foreign policy under a Republican president did not occur until the Reagan presidency. At the point when he discovered how President Jimmy Carter had destroyed the U.S.'s military superiority over the Soviet Union by severely cutting funding for the armed forces, Reagan was horrified, and he quickly acted to not only bridge the gap, but to leapfrog the Soviet military once and for all.  At this, Reagan decided that rather than engaging in a foreign policy strategy with the Soviet Union predicated upon the principles of appeasement and amelioration in what had previous been the governments' Containment and Detente policies, his was simple and had an means to an end rather than a desire to maintain a status quo: He decided he was going to end the Cold War once and for all.  To do this, an enormous military buildup, the largest in U.S. history, was necessary. Though Reagan, among the most well-known of world leaders who have been tagged with the "conviction politician" label, was horrified at the realization that to achieve this goal would require more federal spending rather than less -- as he had run on the platform in 1980 that he would dramatically reduce the size of government by cutting taxes and divesting government bureaucracies, agencies, and cabinet departments of their previously-exorbitant levels of funding in order to resurrect the economy and to engender greater sources of tax revenue despite lower tax rates due to the increase in taxpayers as a result of the massive creation of jobs -- he nevertheless felt it was for the greater good of our national security to undertake in this endeavor.  In achieving this end, he delivered a message over national television to the American people on March 28, 1983 outlining his plans to not only dramatically increase the number of nuclear missiles and improve the quality and functionality of our tanks and aircraft, but to devise and build a measure for defense against a potential Soviet nuclear missile attack against the U.S. that become known to history as the Strategic Defense Initiative, (aka. "Star Wars"). Though this never actually came to fruition, the announcement struck fear into the Politburo in Moscow, and ultimately led to the other world superpower of the Communist world's dissolution beginning in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and finally culminating with the fall of the Soviet Union itself on December 31, 1991, thus bringing final closure to the 45 year Cold War.

You can watch the YouTube clip of President Reagan speaking to the nation about his plans for a massive military buildup and SDI below:

In Reagan achieving this goal, it came at a high cost.  Because the Democratic-controlled Congress failed to act to pass all of his proposed domestic budget cuts that would have counter-balanced the great cost of the military buildup throughout his administration, the federal deficit that had grown at record amounts during the Carter administration to $900 billion when he left office in January 1981 tripled to a sum of $2.7 trillion by the end of the Reagan presidency.  Unfortunately, Reagan has been blamed for this, despite that in his 1986 State of the Union address, he called for an amendment to the Constitution that would require an annual balanced budget that would legally eradicate the practice of deficit spending. Reagan, a proponent for state's rights, wanted to dissolve dozens of federal bureaus and departments and delegate the authority to operate and maintain those to the states.  As the story goes, though, several states balked at the idea, leaving him no choice but to continue funding their existence.  But through the initiatives with the tax cuts, an estimated 18 to 20 million new jobs were created between 1983 and 1989, and through closely working with Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the rate of inflation, once at 13.5% when Reagan took office, was reduced to below 4%.  Unemployment, which at the conclusion of the Carter administration was 7.6%, at first spiked to a post-Depression era high of 10.2% in 1982, would be reduced to 5.3%.  And while the Left has for years claimed that the jobs created by "Reaganomics" were low-paying "hamburger jobs," the truth was quite to the contrary, as most jobs were geared toward those who were college graduates entering management positions in businesses and corporations. In essence, the Reagan Revolution, which in my opinion lasted from 1981 until George H.W. Bush transferred the power of the presidency to the Democrat Bill Clinton in 1993, destroyed the social institution long propagated by the Democrats in the federal government of popular dependency upon the government for funds and survival in favor of putting record numbers of people to work earning higher wages than every before at all levels of income.  Furthermore, the myth by the Left that Reaganomics made the "rich richer and the poor poorer" was also fallacious, as fewer people were classified as living below the poverty threshold by the end of the Reagan presidency than there had been when he entered office. In the words of Reagan's greatest foreign ally and fellow right-wing ideologue Margaret Thatcher, the Democrats would have been happier "if the poor were poorer so long as the [income] gap were smaller." The Reagan years, indeed, were characterized by the three-word cliche in his campaign commercials in 1984: "Morning in America."  It was a great era when Americans gained the greatest sense of self-confidence and independence in the nation's history, and all President Reagan did was create the right conditions to make this phenomena never seen before and not having occurred since possible for the people to achieve their dreams, not the government.

November 3, 1992: The Day the Sun Set on America

(Above: Former presidents George H.W. Bush, R, and Bill Clinton, D, who campaigned in the 1992 Presidential Election. Photographs courtesy of Wikipedia)

November 3, 1992 was a watershed day in the history of the Republican Party.  The fate of the Reagan Revolution, inherited by former Reagan vice president George H.W. Bush, rested upon the votes of millions of Americans. The incumbent president's campaign was geared toward defeating his Democratic Party rival Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, and the Independent candidate, Texas billionaire business tycoon Ross Perot.  Bush would lose the election to Clinton in ignominious fashion, not because he prosecuted the Persian Gulf War in 1991, but because he raised taxes in 1990 as he was applied with great pressure by the Democratic-controlled Congress to do. The tax increase under Bush, much like the implementation of the surcharge by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, led to a recession, with unemployment rising well-above 6%.  This, of course, might not have been so bad had he not promised during his first presidential campaign in 1988 in rather bold, brazen, and declarative rhetoric, "Read my lips: No new taxes," but as he did say that, he was portrayed as a liar by the Clinton campaign, and it worked to perfection.  As Ross Perot was perceived to be a bizarre-type of conservative, many officials of the Republican National Committee have since blamed the Texas billionaire for costing Bush the election, as no one came close to winning a majority of the popular vote, as it was widely-perceived that the votes garnered nationwide by Perot would almost all have been votes for the president.  Still, the point is that President Bush lost and Bill Clinton won, marking the end of the 12-year long phenomena of the Reagan Revolution.   

As I have said both in this article as well as in various forms in others, the Republican Party lost its identity upon losing the White House in 1992.  Even though the Republicans would sweep the 1994 midterm congressional elections behind Newt Gingrich of Georgia's "Contract with America" as a result of President Clinton's signing into law a massive tax hike and the Brady Crime Bill banning assault rifles in 1993, the die was already cast for the foreseeable future.  Even though Clinton was forced by the Republican Congress to retract toward the center from what was a very liberal agenda that included designs on implementing a national health care service much like exists in most European nations and Canada, the GOP's strong-arming him into signing into law the Welfare to Work Act and ultimately his balancing the budget and creating a surplus in 1998 that began payments on the federal deficit, the damage was already done.  This could not have been more evident than in 1999, whereupon the Republican-controlled Senate was charged with the task of voting to either remove the president from office or to acquit him after the House had passed a resolution of Articles of Impeachment late in 1998.  The Senate GOP had the chance of a lifetime to end the presidency of the strongest Democrat to inhabit the White House since Kennedy, and failed to seize it by voting against his removal.  There is, of course, created widespread speculation that because Clinton had a high approval rating in the 60% +/- range, it would have been political suicide to act in that way.  In support of this theory, an article I once read in the liberal publication The Huffington Post mentioned that because the Republicans in the House voted to impeach him, the Democrats gained seats in both houses of Congress in the following election.  Thus, it can be stated with some degree of accuracy that rather than the public growing disdained by Clinton's lack of morals and professional ethics, it reveled in what essentially became a political soap opera laden with sex and power struggles.  As I mentioned in my last article published on this blog earlier today, the culture had changed from that which been created by the Reagan Revolution during the 1980's.  Sex, indeed, was selling at that point in time as pop culture blended in with politics just as it sells today... only now it sells at a much greater, more graphic extreme now than even during the Clinton years. We are seeing this now with the New York City mayoral race with the front runner, former congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, running just a couple of years after resigning his seat in the House after a scandal involving his forwarding sexually-suggestive photographs of himself to women on Twitter.

(Above: Former president George W. Bush of the GOP. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

As the 2000 presidential election that pitted Vice President Al Gore against Texas Governor George W. Bush of the Republican Party arrived, there was a golden opportunity to be seized by the GOP to regain some of its former glory it had attained during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's.  Unfortunately, while Bush won the election, he did so illegitimately, as he did not win the popular vote, and the decision that led to his become president came by way of a conservative-heavy U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore was ironically an act of judicial activism, the judicial practice most reviled by conservatives. Though Bush did what he could to ameliorate his critics by appointing a Democrat to his Department of Transportation Cabinet position (Norman Mineta), he never was considered by a large portion of the population to be the real president of the United States, especially at first.  But upon the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths of civilians, Bush capitalized on the moment, leading a new wave of national pride in a new initiative of national defense and foreign policy we now know as the War on Terrorism. Unfortunately, he did not stop there. President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security, a wasted initiative that further increased the size of government and has acted to persecute the American people rather than serving as a mitigating force of law enforcement along with the FBI and NSA in deterring the threat of terrorism. He then signed into law the Patriot Act of 2001, which led to the NSA's surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners worldwide under both his and the current Obama administrations.  America was less free under Bush than it had ever been before, and even though the economy he inherited was mired in a recession as a result of what essentially was a policy of austerity implemented by President Clinton when his tax hike from 1993 led to a surplus of tax revenue and government expenditure programs saw a decrease in funding which resulted in the deficit being paid on would result in the younger Bush cutting taxes on three different occasions and led to a sustained period of economic growth until the financial crisis of 2008, Bush not only failed to cut federal spending on domestic programs, he increased expenditures, citing the necessity to assist people in the wake of the terrorist attacks fundamentally damaging the very infrastructure of the economy that had experienced the longest period of relatively-consistent growth in the nation's history between 1983 and then.  As a result, the deficit that was being paid down well into the first year of the second Bush presidency had been undone, instead beginning the longest period of deficit spending spanning from his administration into the Obama presidency in U.S. history, leading to the current total of approximately $16.7 trillion, up from the $5.5 trillion in 2001 when Bush took office.  

This failure in reining in government spending was not what led to the ultimate downfall of the Republican Party. Remember that I have established that the downfall actually was initiated upon the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. What led the Republican Party into its current state of malaise was Bush ordering the invasion of Iraq under the pretense that he was going to seize what had long been believed to be a cache of weapons of mass destruction.  Bush was not the first to state the belief of their presence in Iraq; it was President Clinton, who cited that intelligence surveillance had concluded they were, indeed, present in the Middle Eastern nation.  In 2003, the U.S. and British military forces invaded Iraq in what became known as a show of force called "shock and awe."  Other than deposing Saddam Hussein and later arresting him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, nothing was accomplished other than eight years of fighting that resulted in more than 4,000 deaths of America's troops.  After winning reelection in 2004 as the first president since his father in 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote, his approval rating began its abysmal decent to the lowest percentage in the history of the Gallup Poll upon his exit from the White House.  The financial disaster of 2008 was only the icing on the cake of what proved to be a disastrous presidency. Nothing Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) could have done in his campaign against Barack Obama would have won him the presidency in 2008, though it did not help that both he and Obama's GOP challenger Mitt Romney were a moderates. George W. Bush set the party back in ways it had not experienced since Nixon with Watergate.

Conclusion: Rush Limbaugh Echoes What Other Members of the GOP Such as Myself Have Already Said

As we rapidly approach the 2014 midterm congressional elections, the GOP currently finds itself in yet another position to regain some of its influence in national politics.  With the slew of scandals in which the Obama administration is currently embroiled -- scandals which are far more insidious and threats to the democratic process of this nation than that of the Clinton/Lewinsky sex scandal of the late 1990's since they are matters of constitutional violations of the American people's rights -- the approval rating of the president has dropped precipitously over the past month and a half. While at first the CNN poll showed that his approval rating improved from 50% to 53% between May and June, it has now dropped eight percentage points to 45%. Unfortunately, the GOP members in the Senate have managed to jeopardize this great advantage they currently still find themselves in by not only supporting the NSA's surveillance of the Internet, cell phone and credit card records, it also had nearly a third of its Senate representation vote in favor of the immigration bill that will create 30 million new Democratic voters and cause massive amounts of unemployment by employers laying off nationalized American citizens in favor of hiring those who were granted unconditional, universal amnesty who will be willing to work for far less pay.  While GOP House Speaker John Boehner has sworn that the bill will not pass in the House, the damage may already be done to the party's credibility yet again.

There have been several notable figures of the GOP who have voiced their displeasure on the state of the party, echoing the same sentiments I have posited before my readers for more than two months.  The following article from March 18, 2013's Bloomberg, though it be a mouthpiece for the Left, provides comments from several key public figures within the party suggesting that the GOP is currently lost and without a sense of direction:

A Republican National Committee report says the party should change the way it recruits candidates, talks to voters, uses technology, raises money and reaches out to minorities in an effort to appeal to a broader base of voters and win elections.

Republicans have become too insular, frequently sound like bookkeepers and need to be more inclusive in dealing with those who disagree with the party platform on abortion rights and same-sex marriage, the report, released today, says. Party leaders commissioned it after 2012 election losses spotlighted demographic and technological shortfalls with Democrats.

“There’s no one reason we lost,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, 41, said this morning at the National Press Club inWashington. “Our message was weak, our ground game was insufficient, we weren’t inclusive, we were behind in both data and digital, and our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

 Priebus said the RNC would spend $10 million this year, an unprecedented amount in a non-election year, to hire hundreds of workers to network with, court and register minority voters.

“We’ve never put this many paid boots on the ground this early in an off year,” he said. “We’ve also never been this dedicated to working at the community level, to win minority votes, household to household.”

Philosophical Divisions

Some of the report’s proposed mechanical changes could be accomplished with adequate funding; those that call for a philosophical pivot -- becoming more accepting of those who disagree with the party’s positions -- will be harder to enforce. Candidates straying from Republican doctrine in recent years have been penalized by the party’s base in elections.

“Our standard should not be universal purity,” Sally Bradshaw, one of the report’s authors and a longtime consultant to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, said at a briefing today.

The report, which includes more than 200 recommendations and runs almost 100 pages, is often blunt.

“The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” it says. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”

More Inclusive

The report calls for the party to be more inclusive, or risk becoming further marginalized.

“When it comes to social issues, the party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming,” the report says. “If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.”

Priebus said party leaders need to “constantly remind everybody” to treat all, including gays and minorities, with dignity and respect. The party would continue to support Senator Rob Portmanof Ohio, who last week said he would back same-sex marriage after revealing that his son is gay, he said.

“It’s his decision,” Priebus said. “I support him having that opinion.”

Priebus also made clear he doesn’t expect any of the party’s policy positions to change.

“Our policies are sound,” he said. “But I think that, in many ways, the way that we communicate can be a real problem.”

The report calls for a shorter primary campaign season and no more than a dozen debates during that period, with the first no earlier than Sept. 1, 2015. It also says the party should consider penalizing candidates through the loss of convention delegates if they don’t abide by the party’s debate structure.

Female Voters

On wooing more female voters, the report calls for the creation of a list of surrogates based on their policy and political expertise and calls on the RNC’s media team to focus on “booking more women on TV on behalf of the party and be given metrics to ensure that we aren’t just using the same old talking heads.”

The party also needs to “educate Republicans on the importance of developing and tailoring a message that is non- inflammatory and inclusive to all,” the report says.

On immigration, the report calls on the party to “embrace and champion comprehensive” changes.

“If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” it says. “Comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.”

Younger Voters

To court younger voters, the report says Republican leaders need to more actively participate in interviews on the programs that they watch. It also calls for all party digital and data efforts to have the young voter as a major focus.

To match the Democrats’ advantage in technology, the RNC should hire a chief technology and digital officer by May 1, the report says.

It also calls for the creation of a data platform for the party that would be accessible to all qualified Republican organizations and campaigns so they can share information. Priebus said the RNC plans to open a field office in Silicon Valley to boost its ties to the technology development community.

The report also recommends a more populist tone.

“We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare,” it says. “We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”

Electoral Success

Formally known as the Growth and Opportunity Project, the effort was initiated by Priebus on Dec. 10 as a way to study how Republicans can find more electoral success -- from the local level to Congress and the presidency.

The study group’s other members included Henry Barbour, nephew of former Mississippi governor and RNC chairman Haley Barbour; Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under President George W. Bush; and RNC members Zori Fonalledas of Puerto Rico and Glenn McCall of South Carolina.

Priebus also said he wants the party’s national convention, typically held in late August or early September in presidential election years, moved to June or July. He argued that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was hampered by his inability to tap funds slated for the general election to defend himself against Democratic attacks ahead of a late August convention.

Core Message

Before any of the proposed fixes can take full effect, Republican leaders may face their internal fissures that have led to the nomination of candidates viewed by independent voters as too extreme.

Some Republicans unhappy with losses in 2012 are pushing for a new core message and moderation on social issues and views on how to deal with undocumented immigrants, while others are arguing the party needs to stick to principles.

That tension was on display this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, where most of the speakers called on the party to stick to its core beliefs and there was no indication that the party base is willing to change the type of candidates it backs.

Exit Polls

Exit polls of voters in the Nov. 6 election showed President Barack Obama dominating Romney among single women, Hispanics, blacks and younger voters en route to carrying eight of the nine states both camps viewed as the most competitive. Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, the exit polls showed. That translated to a 44-percentage-point advantage over Romney, who won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote -- down from 31 percent for the party’s presidential ticket in 2008, 44 percent in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.

Blunting those Democratic advantages is critical for Republicans: Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority bloc of voters, and the party risks losing much of an entire generation if they can’t appeal to younger voters.

One area not directly addressed by the study group is how the party goes about selecting its candidates for statewide races in the era of the anti-tax Tea Party movement.

Losses by Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana who drew controversy with comments about rape and pregnancy cost Republicans seats that they were poised to win a year before the election. When combined with similar defeats in 2010, some Republicans have complained that the primary fights that led to Democratic victories prevented them from gaining control of the Senate.

“We don’t pick winners and losers in primaries,” Priebus said. “It’s a business that we’re not in.”

 ____

Former GOP Senator from Kansas and presidential candidate Bob Dole also expressed his disapproval with the direction the party has taken in recent years (Courtesy of CNN.com):

(Above: Former GOP Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

(CNN) – National Republicans have shifted so drastically in the past decade that the party’s most vaunted figure - former President Ronald Reagan - would no longer find a home in the GOP, former Sen. Bob Dole claimed Sunday.

“Reagan couldn’t have made it,” Dole said, adding he too would also have faced challenges in today’s Republican Party.

Instead of operating day-to-day in a nonelection year, the national party should focus on broader plans to rehabilitate itself after the losses of 2012, the former Kansas lawmaker said.

“I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘Closed for repairs’ until New Year’s Day next year. Spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,” Dole, who was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

MORE: Republicans want to end perception as 'stuffy old men'

He also assigned blame for Washington’s current state of gridlock to President Barack Obama, who he argued was failing to bridge divides between the capital’s ideological camps.

“I think that the president, he lacks communication skills with his own party, let alone the Republican Party. And he’s on the road too much,” Dole said, quipping Obama was a “good golfer.”

“I think one mistake he’s made was not getting together more with Congress early on in his first administration. There's nothing like knowing the person you are talking to on the telephone, if you had an opportunity to sit down with that person and visit - not about anything, but just visit."

____

But perhaps the most damning condemnation and admonition of all emanates from the preeminent conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whose reply to a caller reflected the above people's thoughts, but from the perspective of a voter and private citizen, not that of a GOP political insider (Courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.com): 

GOP Establishment Authors Its Own Demise

July 01, 2013

RUSH: John in Westchester, New York. Great to have you on the program, sir, as we head back to the phones.  Welcome.BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  I want to speak to you today about the immigration bill that's going through the House.

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER:  You've had Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, and Obama all telling Republicans that it's such a bad idea for us not to pass it and that we gotta push this through, otherwise we have no shot of getting the White House in 2016.  And if that doesn't set up a red flag, that these four knuckleheads are telling you that you have to pass this, I don't know what does.  Reid has been sticking stuff in a drawer for the last five years.  Why don't we just take this bill, stick in the drawer, and tell 'em, "When we have the Senate, we'll come up with something good"?

RUSH:  Well, here's the thing.  By the way, there's more on this.  There are Republican establishment figures who are in the news today. They're out making personal appearances, and they're bragging about how Republicans voted on the amnesty bill in the Senate, and they're bragging about the Gang of Eight Republicans are out there saying, "We love you," to Hispanic groups, and that this ought to show you that we love you.

The establishment of this party is authoring its demise. You talk about Pelosi and Reid and Schumer and all these other Democrats -- Bob Menendez, the Democrat senator from New Jersey -- all warning us that if we don't do this on immigration, we're never gonna win the White House. As though they are interested in us winning the White House?  I mean, the idea that the Democrats are advising us to do things to help us, which means that they would lose? I just don't buy it. I'm sorry.  I don't think the Democrats ever want us to win the White House ever again.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Steven in Westchester County, New York.  It's great to have you on the program, sir.  Hello.

CALLER:  Thanks, Maha Rushie, and bless you for all you do, too.

RUSH:  You are welcome, sir.  Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER:  I have a question with this whole immigration thing and, to me, these fraudulent numbers that the government's come out with in regards to legalizing these people and then actually having the government have more money in its coffers.  It seems to me that if we have about seven million illegals in this country, let's say about 25% of them had children, and therefore when they become legalized, they are instantly available to take avail of the federal earned income tax credit.  I don't see how --

RUSH:  Which is something that might not impact recently married gay couples, which means that the illegals are gonna have an advantage over the gay couples who ostensibly get married for federal benefits.

CALLER:  There you go.  There you go, sir.

RUSH:  I mean, there's just no justice.

CALLER:  Yes.  I know.  You're right. The earned income tax credit to illegals that have children, plus they're auto citizens --

RUSH:  Mmm-hmm.

CALLER: I'd love to know more the details of the financials of this thing 'cause it's driving me nuts, and... I don't know.  Maybe we'll get some more of that as time passes, but we're on a short string here.

RUSH:  Well, I gotta tell you something. I've been tracking this and following this, and the Republicans are celebrating this vote in the Senate. The Gang of Eight.  I don't meant this to sound threatening or intimidating in any way.  I honestly think that the Republican establishment doesn't know what awaits it regarding this issue.  I don't think... Maybe they do and they just don't care.  That's just as likely, actually, 'cause they were the same people in 2007 when your phone calls shut this down then. 

I think they know, actually. 

But let me put it this way.  I don't think... They know that there's opposition, and they know it's their base.  I don't believe they realize how deep it goes.  I don't think they have the slightest idea how deep the anger at the current thinking, as expressed by supposedly smart Republican establishment people, exists. The anger.  I don't think they have any idea how deep it is in towns large and small all across this country. 

People are livid every time an establishment leader opens his mouth and says, "We gotta do this to make amends with the Hispanic community! We've gotta do this so they will love us!" Now, certain members of our establishment, certain establishment members are running around talking about how they are loved now, that the Hispanics get us now.  It's a fantasy like I've not seen in a long time, and I just don't think they know.  This issue, even if it were the only thing happening, the anger would be deep and solid.

But in connection with back home, it comes after the wrecking of the US economy, it comes after wrecking the job market, it comes after the exploding debt and interest rates in the student loan program.  It comes after all of this other Obama stuff was not stopped or even pushed back against.  I think the degree to which people like you are fit to be tied out there over this is something that has escaped them or they're either aware of it and are ignoring it. But they're certainly not factoring it, and they're going to regret that if they continue to push this thing through the House or if they start playing games in a conference committee. 

You have people more and more talk about third party now. 

If that happens, you can kiss the Republican Party good-bye. 

END TRANSCRIPT

____

Is the GOP "dead on arrival" once again come November 2014? Much will depend upon how the House votes on the immigration bill.  Unfortunately, the bulk of the Republicans in the Senate, the house of Congress charged with giving advise and consent to the president on matter of national defense under the Constitution, have already sided with President Obama in defending the surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners around the world under the guise that they are "taking care of us."  Furthermore, in doing so, many Republican lawmakers and pundits are crucifying NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and labeling him a "traitor." Donald Trump, a well-known conservative, has even gone so far as to call on the federal government to have Snowden assassinated.  Virtually all of my family members and friends with whom I have discussed this issue at great length have proudly declared Snowden a "patriot," a crusader against a government whose ever-growing stranglehold on American society is, in his words, "abusive," and leading to "tyranny."  At this, the party that traditionally prides itself on greater liberty through a small government is once again swimming against the current like a school of salmon. 

And just like the vast majority of salmon swimming upstream, the GOP is experiencing a slow, self-inflicted death. 

The Uphill Battle for Social Conservatives Against the Leftist Mass Media

(Above: President Ronald Reagan, along with one his most famous quotes.)

Introduction: The 1980's Represented "Morning in America"

(Above: 1984 Reagan/Bush campaign ad, "It's morning in America.")

Ronald Reagan is considered by the vast majority of history and political scholars as the last great president. As such, this leads one to recognize the sheer dearth of well-qualified leadership from the subsequent candidates to have run and been elected to the most powerful leadership position on Earth since "Dutch" left office in 1989. During the Reagan years, America experienced a phenomena of social simplification in comparison to the previous 20, which were filled with civil unrest and growing immorality with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's, the counterculture movement promoting free love and peace under the pretense of civil disobedience that ultimately produced the bulk of today's liberal politicians and media pundits, the feminist movement that engendered the culture of sex without repercussions for women as a result of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortions, and finally the birth of environmental conservationism which greatly contributed to the great economic malaise between 1968 and 1982 popularly referred to today as stagflation.  Though two Republicans served as president between 1961 and 1981 (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), neither one can be classified as having been a conservative in accordance to the standard set by both Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who challenged the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Presidential Election yet lost in a landslide, and Ronald Reagan, an actor who achieved fame from humble beginnings and who delivered his first landmark political speech in stumping for his friend Goldwater during his campaign, known to history as "A Time for Choosing." Below is a video of that speech:

It perhaps took a former Democrat disenchanted with the party's platform to call "a spade a spade." But that was what the world had in Ronald Reagan. There is an old cliche of which I am quite fond of reciting when I talk to someone I find to be truly unique and endowed by God with a great gift, and as such, I will adjust the phrasing to describe what I believe to be true about Ronald Reagan: "If Reagan didn't exist, we'd have to invent him." Truly, Reagan was more than a simple politician. He was an American icon whose legacy was born from the roots of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who was the first to allude to the qualities of what would become "the American Dream."  As  Reagan was born in the small rural town of Dixon, Illinois, this was a far cry from the laps of luxury many of his presidential predecessors enjoyed. He was truly a self-made man, a strict adherent to the mantra that hard work pays off.  It was this principle, therefore, that served as the foundation of his core principles and beliefs, and assisted him in stating such comments that by 2013's standards, are truly profound in the level of their wisdom and the ignorance from those who have lost sight of it:

"My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose -- somehow we win out."

With his election to the presidency in 1980 after his experience as governor of California, the culture of America retracted to that more associated with the 1950's. Society became simpler; it was, in reference to the immortal lyrics directly echoing the words of the song's title by Huey Lewis and the News, "hip to be square" again for the first time in nearly a quarter century.  Stifled were the blood-curdling screams of feminists, environmentalists, and bitter civil rights activists who had lived for the day when the black community in America would be the governing elite in much the same fashion as the white minorities of South Africa had since 1948 when the policy of Apartheid was implemented. The emphasis on class warfare, the concept of the "majority-minority us" against the evil white men of the world, no longer loomed large over the airwaves of television or cinema, or so much from the editors-in-chief or the journalists who had for so long perpetuated the cause of liberalism. For the first, and sadly, the only time in American history dating as far back as the founding permanent colonial establishments at Jamestown and Plymouth, America was finally "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Virtually everyone prospered, people of all walks of life -- the poor, the black community, Hispanics, and women -- and for a period of 12 years, the culture of dependency and the bitter divisions drawn first in 1955 when the Civil Rights Movement officially began were being forgotten.

And the hippies who instilled the culture we see today within the Left?  What became of them? Well, they transformed their image as they had done twice before when they first were the beatnik vagabond poets of the vanguard culture during the mid-to-late 1950's, later to morph into the classified taxonomy of the 1960's associated with the counterculture movement promulgating sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll; and finally in the 1980's into something far different and yet more insidious than either of those movements: that of the "yuppies," where they became members of the upper-middle business class during a time where the economy was on the upswing and the culture of responsibility and not dependency was the posh thing to do for the first time since the 1920's. Of course, this method of gaining wealth would serve these people, still largely of the liberal mindset, toward the end of obtaining power over the next 30 years, as most of America's powerful lawmakers in both the GOP and Democratic Parties benefited greatly from President Reagan's supply-side economic principles, or more commonly referred to in the leftist pop culture lexicon as "Reaganomics." The liberals are quick to criticize conservatives and libertarians for that which they achieve that is successful, while surreptitiously being mindful amid their shallow denials that they, themselves, greatly benefited as the vast majority did so during the Reagan Revolution.

The fear that had festered in the American stream of consciousness since 1949 upon the Soviet Union detonating its first atomic bomb came to an end as a result of Reagan's aggressive anti-Communist foreign policy that was in stark contrast to the previous methods of appeasement known as Containment and Detente.  The Left has aggressively endeavored to discredit the Reagan record on the matter, but as I am all too fond of saying and you have now grown to expect out of the buttons of my very keyboard, "You and I know better." Upon being briefed of the extreme state of malaise of not just the economy but also the military, Reagan quickly acted to create his national defense policy he stated that was based upon the Goldwater philosophy of "peace through strength" by embarking upon the most massive military buildup in U.S. history, not just during wartime, but anytime, peacetime or not.  In doing so, he decided to engage in an experiment to see how the Soviet Union, still under the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who crushed the rebellion in Czechoslovakia during what became known as "The Prague Spring" and had ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, would react by announcing to the nation March 23, 1983 an initiative that would "render the awesome Soviet military threat impotent and obsolete."  This initiative, famous to Republicans and reviled by Democrats, was the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known to history as "Star Wars."  Below is President Reagan announcing his intentions to the world on national television from the Oval Office to fund the plan to the fullest extent of the government's capacity:

President Reagan took a dramatically different approach in dealing with the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Whereas previous administrations dating back to Harry S. Truman enacted policies that were largely based upon the stenches reeking of appeasement and amelioration, Reagan played a form of diplomatic and militaristic "chicken" by aggressively tackling the enemy nation head-on. By introducing the SDI program, he increased the stakes of expenditures for the Soviet Union beyond its capacity to pay. Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the economy began its final crash; the citizens in the Soviet Union found to their horror empty grocery shelves in the cities, massive inflation, and the inability to manufacture tax revenue and gross domestic product fast enough to maintain the military supremacy it had achieved over the U.S. and its NATO allies beginning in 1969 when the malaise of America's military initiated.  It was at this time that the death knell began to be hammered into the coffin of the Soviet Union, which first saw the domino effect of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc of Communist nations previously dominated by Soviet supremacy for more than 40 years denouncing Communism and ushering in a new era of liberty, which two years later resulted in the confederation of republics comprising the Communist nation breaking apart and thus dissolving the nation Reagan had referred to as "the evil empire" less than a decade before on December 31, 1991.

The greatest legacy of the Reagan Revolution, however, is the 12 year moratorium on the perpetuation of liberal values characterized most affirmatively by the following cliche businesses borrowed from Ogden Nash, "Sex sells." No longer were the concepts of licentiousness and the promulgation of promiscuity being broadcast in such great frequency than that which had grown more intense from the 1960's on through the next 20 years.  Hollywood returned to providing more wholesome family entertainment, albeit a more realistic take on life from a Middle American perspective. It was at its most wholesome since the early 1960's before the gas of political activism was splashed over the flames of national revolution and social discord. The media no longer had the ability to counter the efforts of President Reagan to engender an alteration in the nation's culture from one of godless subliminal messages in pop culture to that which would be endowed with more of the Judeo-Christian principles upon which this nation was founded over two centuries prior.  As stated, no longer was the concept of rendering the nation's "great unwashed" to the soup ladle of government dependency in style, but rather a new standard of culture was instilled as a result of the Reagan Revolution promoting responsibility as a byproduct of increased liberty that would result in greater prosperity for all Americans regardless of income.  Through a series of massive tax cuts in both 1981 and 1986, along with President Reagan working closely with Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to reduce the 13.5% rate of inflation he inherited from the Carter administration as well as tackling big labor unions and implementing a policy of economic deregulation, America experienced its longest and most prolific period of economic growth and prosperity in a history characterized by the greatest slew of achievements in just over 200 years the world has ever known. It was these measures that gave birth to a culture predicated upon the exquisite qualities of not just political, but social conservatism as well, that can best be summarized in Ronald Reagan's promise to the American people upon his reelection in 1984 when he proclaimed that it was "Morning in America." This dream was realized, and lasted until 1993, when Reagan's former vice president and successor to the Oval Office, George H.W. Bush, transferred the power of the presidency over to Bill Clinton under the auspices of ignominious defeat as a result of his betrayal of the American people's trust that were still predicated upon the standard of conservative values manifested by the Reagan Revolution.  It was at this time that America not only lost its way in terms of economic and political freedom, but in its ability to turn on the television set or read a newspaper or magazine without viewing the previous forms of godless behavior based upon the principles of that terrible phrase of Nash's that now reigns more supremely than ever in the pantheons of American media and pop culture.

The Uphill Battle Facing Social Conservatives Today Against the Leftist Mass Media

The Reagan Revolution redefined the image of the American people from that of the collective that is characteristic of Communist and socialist democratic governments in Europe and elsewhere into one of the individual.  In doing so, the Left was stunned, leaving its only recourse in its vain attempts to discredit the rising tide of economic, political, and social conservatism by declaring the Reagan Revolution catered to the people's innate tendencies to be greedy; hence, the Left, through their mouthpiece of the mass media, declared during the 1980's and well into future that the decade was embodied by greed, that the rich grew richer while the poor grew poorer. The Left has always been of the mindset that mankind is inherently evil, that it must be reined in by the power of a cabal of masters. Hence, in its distrust, they have played upon these motives by instilling fear into the hearts and minds of the American people since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). This is in diametric opposition to the philosophy of Reagan, who unlike the Democrats in Congress, always credited the American people for any and all progress manifested economically, socially, and through acts of private altruism and generosity.  Again, I will use what has become my favorite phrase to use as a retort to these false pontificates of lies and evil virtue when I say, "You and I know better."  Not only are the references by the Left of the 1980's being the decade of greed and those cliches popular with that lunatic fringe regarding the rich growing richer while the poor growing poorer false and erroneous, they are actually quite to the contrary.  While it is true that the gap between the rich and the poor grew during the period from 1981 to 1993, it is also right to state that all levels of income increased in both economic viability and purchasing power, and the number of people living below the poverty line dropped while those who remained in its grip still earned an average of 8% more in wages than during the Carter administration. Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the 1980's as a result of "Reaganomics," and the nation's level of wealth increased by more than one-third while the price of most commodities such as oil and gas decreased substantially with regards to inflation ratio as a result of the efforts by President Reagan and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker implementing sound monetary policies to deflate the price of goods and services below that of the 1970's stagflated prices.  As such, the changing economic atmosphere created a new culture in the world of the media and entertainment as people began to share in the wealth amid their having more influence on what they wanted to experience. As stated before, the trends of cultural and moral decay ceased to be for twelve years as the nation's morals became more in line with that of godliness and self-determination leading to prosperity.  

Upon Bill Clinton taking office, the advances America had made during the years of the Reagan Revolution took a U-turn for the worst and have not looked back. Not only has the economic, political, and moral decay not looked back, it is far more egregious and extreme than ever before. The phenomena was propagated the most by MTV when the networks began broadcasting a series of reality shows where the acts of promiscuous sex under a careless demeanor and mentality became the accepted norm to spectate, and therefore, to practice; the show I think of the most upon my reflecting on this phenomena are the Real World and Jersey Shore series'.  Over the course of the past 20 years, this trend has not just been exacerbated, but also has increased ten-fold in its intensity and graphic nature upon the principles of sex, drugs, and violence.

While reading yesterday's E-mail subscription I receive daily in my inbox titled The Objective Conservative, the proprietor of the blog discusses the above decline in the power of social conservatives in combating the growing tide of influences emanating from the leftist mass media. Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was quoted to have said, "Print is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party." Interestingly, he was a member of the political Left, albeit in its most extreme form, Communism.

(Above: Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who ruled the U.S.S.R. with an iron fist from 1924 until his death in 1953.)

In agreeing with the principle behind Stalin's statement, it is eerily representative of what we as a people face today.  In the rearview mirror is the Reagan Revolution, gone forever from its blaze of glory, and in its place is leftist political thought first espoused by the radicals in the French Revolution and later by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The Objective Conservative provided the transcript of the article from The Rotheberg Political Report  on the manner, which will be posted right below:

It’s Uphill All the Way for Social Conservatives

STUART ROTHENBERGJULY 3, 2013 · 10:17 AM EDT

Although the seemingly unstoppable march of cultural liberalism took pause during the years of Ronald Reagan and even into the 1990's, it is back on track.  Liberals will applaud it and conservatives will dread it, but it is silly to deny its strength.

Television and movies reflect our current values and concerns, but they also help mold public opinion. For decades, that message has been one encouraging more equality, diversity and multiculturalism — and less tradition and religion. This isn’t all that surprising considering the ideological bent of most entertainers, producers, directors and writers.

Starting with TV shows like “All in the Family,” “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Maude,” progressing to the very funny “Will & Grace” and going right up to today’s most obvious example, “Glee,” television has pushed socially progressive themes. Socially progressive characters are enlightened and admirable, while traditionalists are unappealing, to say the least.

Of course, popular culture has not limited its “teaching” to cultural themes. The business community usually gets more than its share of contempt. One of my favorite recent TV series, “Damages,” which starred Glenn Close, based every season’s story on vile, corrupt, deceitful, money-grubbing, power-seeking businessmen who had little or no respect for human life.

But business has gotten off easy, compared with cultural conservatives who don’t have financial networks and savvy corporate CEOs to present an alternate perspective.

The public and TV networks’ reactions to two recent Supreme Court decisions, one invalidating Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the other invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act, were noteworthy.

Both decisions were 5-4, but only about the Voting Rights Act decision did I hear the high court widely described as “bitterly divided.”

In the days after the Voting Rights Act decision, you might have thought that the high court had taken away the right to vote from African-Americans. Journalists gave plenty of attention to voices opposing the decision and arguing that the ruling would overturn all the progress of civil rights since the 1960s.

The media’s coverage of the DOMA decision, on the other hand, was almost euphoric, geared overwhelmingly toward those celebrating the decision.

Admittedly, opponents of the decision were noticeably quiet after the court’s ruling. Of course, opposing gay marriage has increasingly been equated with intolerance, meanness, bigotry, religious fundamentalism and lack of intelligence, so many displeased by the ruling may have figured that silence was the safest course.

The type of coverage of the two decisions undoubtedly also reflects the fundamental values of most journalists, who are generally more liberal than the country as a whole. There appeared to be plenty of cheerleading after the two rulings on same-sex marriage, and not merely from the obvious voices on MSNBC.

But it wasn’t only surrounding the Supreme Court’s opinions on marriage that some of the recent media coverage seemed tilted.

On his final show hosting CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, media critic Howard Kurtz commented on the media’s very sympathetic treatment of Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, whose 11-hour filibuster at the end of a special session prevented the enactment of a bill limiting abortions and requiring facilities performing abortions to meet certain standards.

“If Wendy Davis had been conducting a lonely filibuster against abortion rights,” Kurtz asked, “would the media have celebrated her in quite the same way?” Kurtz didn’t offer an answer — because he didn’t have to. The answer certainly would have been “no.”

For social conservatives, the greatest problem may be the undermining of traditional religious authority and belief.

While Gallup showed only a slight annual increase last year in the percentage of people saying that they had no religious identification (up to 17.8 percent in 2012), the trend is clear.

“The rise in the religious ‘nones’ over time is one of the most significant trends in religious measurement in the United States. … The percentage who did not report [a religious] identity began to rise in the 1970s and has continued to increase in the years since,” wrote Gallup in a January 2013 report.

In the 2012 exit poll, President Barack Obama won 62 percent of voters who never attend religious services but only 39 percent of those who attended weekly. He carried 70 percent of those voters who said they had no religion, compared with only 42 percent of Protestants and 50 percent of Catholics.

(Next month, I have tickets to see the Broadway hit “The Book of Mormon,” which lampoons not only Mormonism but all organized religion and literal belief. Is there a Broadway blockbuster that mocks an iconic liberal value?)

Social conservatives probably see Obama, liberals on the Supreme Court and Democrats in Congress as their main adversaries. But they are wrong. The most important leaders of cultural liberalism may well be the members of the media and entertainment communities, and social conservatives simply have no strategy to deal with that.

***

Conclusion: The Leftist Mass Media Influences the Direction of the Electoral Process

Upon reading the article by Mr. Rothenberg and further reflecting upon my adult life as a registered voter, I fully understand that more than even the most charismatic politicians today, the leftist mass media plays a significant role in influencing the flight and direction of the electoral process.  By the same token, though, we must also remember that there are exceptions to every rule, and this one is no different.  In 1980, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican challenger to the incumbent President Jimmy Carter, had enough charisma and sway over those in the media that he was able to win the election in an electoral landslide.  While Reagan only garnered 50.9% of the popular vote, a statistic the Left loves to flaunt when they suggest that Jimmy Carter was only swamped in the election in the name of the legal method in which all presidential elections' have been measured since 1796, they will rarely tell you that there was a third presidential candidate running on as an Independent and therefore Reagan's extremely-small majority of the voter resulted in the "low" percentage total; in fact, Jimmy Carter received only approximately 45% of the popular vote.  As we once believed as a society that we were shaped in the form of clean, wholesome, Middle American values, President Obama has served as an impediment to the issues, to which I cry "foul."

There is yet another interesting circumstance to consider in understanding why Reagan had such a broad appeal among America's electorate.  Political analysts have discussed this ad nauseum for more than 30 years, and I am beginning to believe this to be true: that Reagan still had a significant base of support within the Democratic Party itself, a phenomenon no other politician either Republican or Democrat has ever been so blessed to experience. As he stated in his "A Time for Choosing" stump speech for Sen. Goldwater in 1964, he was once a Democrat, but had grown disenchanted with the party platform of increasing the size, influence, and role government serves in the lives of the American people.  His adopted son, Michael Reagan, stated in an interview on a program about "The Gipper" I once watched on History that his father told him upon leaving the Democratic Party that among his main reasons were because "they tax people nine cents to every dime." While the Kennedy and Johnson administrations actually endeavored in cutting taxes in response to an economic recession in 1963 and 1964, the wealthiest Americans still were paying a far higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than we see people in the same income bracket do today. But in 1968, however, Johnson showed his true colors when he increased taxes, particularly with the implementation of the now-infamous 10% surcharge that ironically coincided with the birth of that economic phenomena that wrought havoc upon America known as stagflation. Ergo, the reason behind the initiatives President Reagan implemented in 1981 with the first of his massive tax cuts where the wealthiest Americans were only being taxed 50% of their incomes -- the lowest totals in nearly 50 years -- was because he truly believed, just as Thomas Jefferson did, that true prosperity was not bequeathed to the American people by any falsely-perceived concept of altruism by government, but rather by one being free to retain the fruits to his or her own labor. Government cannot possibly be altruistic, in Reagan's opinion, because the source of its purse is not of its own devices, but by that of robbing entrepreneurs of their hard-earned wages and redistributing that money to those who sit by idly and not work. As a result, the culture changed with the Reagan tax cuts. By the time Reagan left office in 1989, the highest incomes were paying only 28.5% -- among the lowest percentages for the wealthiest Americans to be taxed since the Coolidge administration.  

The leftist mass media is the Democratic Party's version of the TASS news agency of the former Soviet Union. It to this day remains the vocal mouthpiece mechanism of the Left in influencing both political and pop culture in America as well as Western Europe.   While I can no longer recall many of the events of the 1980's prior to around 1988 other than my watching President Reagan delivering speeches, which resulted in my reportedly screaming very loudly, "REAGAN! REAGAN!" or tuning into my favorite cartoons and family programs such as Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, Fraggle Rock, The Smurfs, The Super Friends, and ALF due to being so young, I am always listening to stories of Dad's very fond memories of that decade.  As Dad was born in 1951 and began to grow more aware of his surroundings by the late 1950's and early 1960's, he lived his life in every decade prior to the 1980's, as well, obviously, as the subsequent ones, and has maintained to this day that he never felt more comfortable or secure in his quality of life than he did when Reagan was president between 1981 and 1989. He feels less safe and secure today than ever before in his life.

As Mr. Rothenberg correctly asserted, the Reagan Revolution delivered to America a 12-year respite from the liberal malaise our society had experienced in the decades prior. Back then, there were more Evangelicals, pro-life and pro-gun activists in the 1980's than during any prior generation in modern history, both past and that initial time's definition being one and the same. As many of those Evangelicals, such as Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker, were revealed to have been guilty of corruption, as well as were many other business moguls and tycoons, this mitigated the Left's cause in declaring the 1980's as the decade greed dominated American pop culture. Yet, there was also much good accomplished during the decade, as majority of the programming on television, while more socially progressive than those in the 1950's and 1960's, were far more wholesome and reflective of the realism that was then, and is today, most prominent in America as opposed to the gross materialism and sexual overtones the overwhelming leftist Hollywood industry and mass media have not only been re-injected into the American stream of consciousness, but have succeeded in increasing the intensity of the content to which we as a people are exposed. We see violent crime having risen sharply since the Reagan years, education decreasing in terms of test scores and graduation rates even as government is now standardizing scholastic standards socially with the failing Common Core policies, and an extreme spike in immorality through the licentiousness of teenagers and adults alike resulting in unwanted pregnancies that have led to an increase of the evil practice of abortions and the presence of single parent families for those women who decide graciously to continue with the pregnancy. We are a nation of broken homes, with both spouses who are parents working full-time jobs that result in the stunting of the development of their offspring, all because the Left wishes to transform the roles of women in society from the ones of the dedicated wife and nurturing mother to the ambitious businesswoman and power broker more inclined to be sexually-liberated, free and unfettered to do with their bodies as they so choose, up to and including killing the innocent unborn children they conceive through through their libertine behavior.  This all began with the beat movement in the 1950's and lasted throughout its first wave until the Reagan Revolution began in 1980.  From that time until the end of the George H.W. Bush presidency in 1993, there was a retraction of much of the damage to American society the Left had wrought for more than 20 years.  But upon the election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992, the liberalization of politics and pop culture were reborn, and have now reached alarming new heights in its graphic intensity.

In closing, then, I caution my fellow American contemporaries to seek greater education about the history of the world, Western philosophy, and by all means, endeavor to read about the issues in which your local and state officials champion.  The decline in America's exceptionalism has never been so extreme or threatening as it is today during the presidency of Barack Obama, and that has just been within the past four and a half years. The culture of dependency that even President Clinton, albeit through coercion by the Republican-controlled Congress under the "Contract with America" led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, worked to curtail as a result of the once-thought to be lasting imprint of the Reagan Revolution on society is now back and more ubiquitous in its presence than ever before in the history of the United States since the FDR administration. According to NBC News, with a total of more than 46 million Americans receiving food stamps in 2012 in comparison to the 24 million who did in 1994, the Obama administration's policies have relegated a significant portion of the American people to the soup ladle of dependency upon the government for their very survival.  In that same article, a poll survey was conducted that found that the largest percentage of those questioned, 24%, believe that "government welfare" is the biggest reason behind the persistent poverty plaguing America today.  The results of the poll, which will be shown in the form of a bar graph, are below:

  

This is obviously not what the Left wants to hear, nor its mouthpiece in the mass media.  Couple this sign of the public's growing discontent with what it believes is the gross misallocation of tax dollars along with the slew of scandals plaguing the Obama administration, and we may have the secret to the recipe necessary to bring about a resurgence of the Republican Party in the 2014 and 2016 elections.  Of course, there is also the side to the story that I have always believed to be true: that being the GOP serving as its own worst enemy and not that of their political opposition.  In an article I will later author, Rush Limbaugh believes that several grievous errors by Republican lawmakers recently will lead to the GOP losing the House of Representatives despite the slew of scandals which have been revealed to the public.  As anything can happen according to Murphy's Law, so, too, could that, but I do not find it likely unless the GOP in the House fails to defeat the immigration bill that was passed by nearly two-thirds of the Senate, which included some 13 Republicans including my home state senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker.  At that, we may see more upheaval within the GOP that will further propagate the cause of liberalism in America much as the divisions within the Democratic Party that began during the presidency of Jimmy Carter lasted for more than 16 years and led to the Reagan Revolution, which overlapped into the George H.W. Bush presidency that lasted from 1989-1993.

Unlike Mr. Rothenberg, however, I do see hope on the horizon, a characteristic trademark of the Reagan Revolution.  While the twelve years of "Morning in America" faded into the sunset upon the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, there are still remnants of his legacy remaining.  In the young, rising leaders of the party such as Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, I see a new generation of some of the brightest, most charismatic minds and personalities the party has seen since Ronald Reagan.

The Left, though, will continue to promote the practice of spreading public dependency even if it comes under the guise of Sloth. Thomas Aquinas once discussed the concept of Sloth in his famous theological work Summa Theologiae with this phrase (Courtesy of Deadly Sins.com):

(Above: St. Thomas Aquinas, historically-renowned philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

"Sloth is the desire for ease, even at the expense of doing the known will of God. Whatever we do in life requires effort. Everything we do is to be a means of salvation. The slothful person is unwilling to do what God wants because of the effort it takes to do it. Sloth becomes a sin when it slows down and even brings to a halt the energy we must expend in using the means to salvation."

As Sloth is one of the "Seven Deadly Sins" taught by the Roman Catholic Church for its followers to avoid, our nation, on the other hand, has aimed to promote rather than deter this threat. People know next to nothing about the issues affecting the nation today, nor do they care about the mistakes of the past that are easily avoided.  As such, the Left preys upon this weakness and gains power, which begets tyranny. We conservative-libertarians can therefore not afford to waste the next three years by allowing the Left through the Democratic Party to further cement their power when they are now at their most vulnerable for the first time in decades.  Let us act now to bring about another "Morning in America" and an "era of good feelings."

What would Reagan do? Well, listen to how he responded to Sam Donaldson's obnoxious question and see his reply: