Something big happened when Nirvana released their first album, Nevermind, in 1991. They killed rock as it currently existed. What they did on that album, how they looked, and what they said, was inherently more vital and authentic than what was around when the album dropped. Bands like Poison and Motley Crue suddenly looked like a bunch of burnt out losers pretending to play rock. The age of hair metal was over, simply because Nirvana existed.
I felt like something similar was happening last night as I listened to President Obama talk to the American people like adults. It was so very different. And it makes what has passed for political discourse the past twelve years seem like people playing at politics. If I were a Rupublican I would wrassle the party the away from Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter and start making a grown-up argument for conservative principles. We need rational conservative voices for balance. The Republican response last night felt like Bret Michaels in sequined leather pants.
4 comments:
The party has already been wrassled away from Rush & Ann. That's why the country is in the shape that it is in. No true conservative supported Bush. It was not conservatives who ruined our banking institutions by relaxing the laws and forcing banks to make house loans to low income people with poor credit scores and little if any money down. That was a liberal agenda. Then to make matters worse both sides sold us out with NAFTA and then later CAFTA.
Maybe they didn't support Bush, but they elected him. Twice. Either that, or true conservatives are only a tiny sliver of the electorate.
My brother has told me my whole life that the older I get, the more conservative I will become. I think he's right. But I have no where to go. And this is a serious problem for conservatives. People like me need to see a coherent argument. The tenor of the conservative party these days is a little shrill, to say the least.
I would like to see conservatives reorganize themselves into a party that doesn't rely on xenophobia, homophobia, and jingoism, to make an argument. I am willing to listen. I would love to see the Republican Party recast as a party of pragmatic, solution-oriented and fiscally disciplined problem solvers. But with eight consecutive years of George W. Bush as the standard bearer, the party is going to have to work hard to regain credibility.
Here is the same sentiment voiced by a professional conservative, John Derbyshire of the National Review:
www.amconmag.com
Nice article Tom, the author failed to mention the numerous times every talk show host he mentioned have been railing about GWB's money policies for years. Every single one of them consider themselves to be "Reagen Conservatives" and not the mouth piece for GWB. Bush Sr. and W. are cast from the Blue Blood wing of the party and nither captured the support from the Reagenite crowd.
That's why McCain lost, low on conservative principles.
Ron Sparkman
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