The Real Reason Republicans Have Been Sabotaging America

[quaker bill]

53. It is also face saving.

Once Bush* failed, it could only be blamed on his being "not conservative enough". The conservative ideas had to the held as "good" and the person "flawed". McCain also lost because he was "not conservative enough". It could not be that the ideas are flawed, only that the humans were not perfect enough in carrying them forward.

To keep the meme intact, since President Obama is "not conservative enough", he must also fail.

The larger party has bought into a "system of notions" related to how our system and the world works. One might call it a "system of thought", but I think that would give it far too much credit, because systems of thought are internally consistent and based somehow on observations of reality. In such systems, new observations result in new thinking, there is no evidence for new thinking on the right in the face of a reality that has provided sufficient clues that new thinking is needed.

The RW system of notions is cobbled together from convenient bits and pieces of historic writings extracted and robbed of context. Adam Smith did favor free markets and we hear this, but he also strongly favored progressive taxation and inheritance taxes as a counterbalance, we don't hear that. They substitute other snippets of writings out-of-context for that, Ayn Rand for example. While they like Ayn Rand, they don't adopt the atheism that she held as an essential component.

This cobbled together system of notions must fail because it is not whole in the sense that the component ideas are balanced as a complete "system of thought". However, they have determined to to cover the logic flaws through denial rather than correct them. Therefore the ideas must be good, and the messengers flawed. Obama, not buying any of it, must be the most flawed.