I'm sure many of you have seen the video of English MEP Daniel Hannan verbally pantsing British PM Gordon Brown on Tuesday, but I thought I'd post it here if you haven't. In three minutes, he managed to make one of the most articulate, sharp, and coherent arguments I've seen against the current Brown/Obama trend of spending like a drunken fool to allegedly improve the economy. Also, Brown's fuddy-duddy look near the end of the clip is priceless.
I believe my favorite quote is "It’s not that you’re not apologizing; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things." This is the problem with Congress, and President Obama, and before him, President Bush. Nobody accepts responsibility for anything anymore. And it's why I more or less hate every politician, Republican or Democrat.
The GOP needs to find one of these, and fast.
I believe my favorite quote is "It’s not that you’re not apologizing; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things." This is the problem with Congress, and President Obama, and before him, President Bush. Nobody accepts responsibility for anything anymore. And it's why I more or less hate every politician, Republican or Democrat.
The GOP needs to find one of these, and fast.
9 comments:
It's too bad that political Third Parties tend to be to the right or left of the Republicans and Dems. I see the need for a centrist political party in this country but it's not going to happen.
As a little friendly rebuke to your post...
You say "In three minutes, he managed to make one of the most articulate, sharp, and coherent arguments I've seen against the current Brown/Obama trend of spending like a drunken fool to allegedly improve the economy."
The problem is he still fits the "Party of No" mantra that the Dems are throwing around... albeit an incredibly articulate "no" that comes complete with a British accent.
It's a great clip, but I wonder if he could be so "articulate, sharp, and coherent" if he was forced to answer the question "what do you think we should do?"
At the end of the day you can boil his comments down to "you suck and what you're doing sucks." That's fine. You don't like recession spending or deficit borrowing. Wonderful. Now Mr. Hannan... what do you think we should do? Find me his three-minute clip on that one.
Until the GOP can proactively come up with an idea that isn't a broken record from the past eight years, Obama could probably have verbal diarrhea and people would still support it simply because it's something of an idea and it could work, which is a lot more than anyone can say about the GOP right now.
It's not that the GOP doesn't have an idea as to how to fix the economy....it's just finding a way to say:
"Let bad businesses fail; let them go bankrupt to get out from under bad debts / contracts, or get bought up by other companies who can afford to buy 'toxic' assets at a discount, and potentially profit off their sales once conditions improve"
in a way that doesn't sound mean. It's cold, calculating, and about the only thing that's going to work without devaluing our currency by another trillion or two. Doing nothing is the best plan anyone could come up with at this point.
I don't disagree that an affirmative agenda is helpful from an election standpoint. I would raise two points in response.
1. Sometimes doing nothing (or close to nothing) can be the very best course of action.
2. Having no agenda at all didn't exactly hurt the Democrats in 2006 or 2008 (let's leave Obama out of this and focus on Congress). Congressional Democrats were officially the party of "we're not *them*" and it served them just fine. Now, "invest and borrow" is just a synonym for "tax and spend." If things aren't significantly better in a year, the Democrats could be in for a rude awakening at the polls without the Republicans offering a single proposal in response.
Just as a historical aside, the Democratic congressional candidates didn't need a strategy in 2006 and 2008 other than "We're not them." The problem is that they didn't follow up on their repeated promises to roll back the GWB malfeasances, instead continuing to issue him carte blanche to do whatever loopy, ill-informed thing he wanted to do.
That's why congressional Democrats continued to have such dismal ratings after gaining the majority in 2006. It's not because of anything they did, it's because of what they didn't do, namely reign in the excesses of the Bush administration. At least that's my take on it.
I must have missed the note that Playground Politics is now written by Dick Armey at the start of he year. Wow have you jumped to the right in the last few weeks.
Can we hire him to travel to the US and give a similar speech to Obama?
It sure would be nice if we had a Republican leadership that would say things like that to Obama, with him right there in the room to receive it.
Apparently you've not heard of a certain US Senator for Vermont named Sanders.
This nitwit from the UK that you so admire wouldn't win a single district here in America
Get a grip!
"It’s not that you’re not apologizing; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things."
To which George, The Unprepared, replied, "It's not time to play the blame game."
There were dozens who stood up and asked for just the tiniest cognizance of the enormity of the previous administration's incompetence and yet the conservatives marched in lockstep. Now they try to distance themselves from their own policies while berating the administration which has been for two months trying to clean up the mess.
What the GOP needs to find is a coherent message. There is no short supply of talkers.
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