Thomas Friedman to Republicans: This time around you should just take a pass, try in 4 years. [View all]

[grantcart]

Last edited Sun Feb 12, 2012, 02:13 AM - Edit history (1)

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/02/11/should_republicans_just_give_up.html

Friedman likens the Republicans to somebody playing scrabble where all the letters you have left are unplayable duds. Sometimes its better passing than trying to make out some convoluted word out of a bunch of wacky letters. Pretty funny and accurate analogy. Right now the key Republicans are searching through their dictionaries trying to figure out some possible word that you can make up out of a bunch of unplayable letters.

WATCHING the Republican Party struggling to agree on a presidential candidate, one wonders whether the G.O.P. shouldn’t just sit this election out — just give 2012 a pass.





Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman


You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing.

There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.

Without that, the best of the Democrats — who have been willing to compromise — have no partners and the worst have a free pass for their own magical thinking. Since such a transformed Republican Party is highly unlikely, maybe the best thing would be for it to get crushed in this election and forced into a fundamental rethink — something the Democrats had to go through when they lost three in a row between 1980 and 1988. We need a “Different Kind of Republican” the way Bill Clinton gave us a “Different Kind of Democrat

more at the link

As a fairly 'moderate' Democrat I am all for trying the 'crushing' them into sawdust option and see what comes out of it. Would be a lot better than the obstructionist idiots we have now.

Worth a try.