At Christmas, the GOP is the Old Man Potter Party

One of The Next Right's bloggers, pivoting off a Nation profile of Howard Dean, says there's a lot the Old Confederacy & Buffalo Commons Party can learn from the The Screamer , among them this:

3) Apostates are OK; Grandstanding RINO's are not - While the article doesn't touch on this, another major factor in the Democrat rise was that they nominated much moreconservative candidates.  Democrats were willing to tolerate a few ideological apostates in order to win; they just won't tolerate those members grandstanding against their own party.  We should take the same approach.

It's an interesting point in the context of SC Republican politics. Candidates and office holders whose parents registered them with The John Birch Society at birth are dissed by the Big Swinging Bloggers as RINOS. Politicos and their consultant pilot fish parse each other's ideological bona fides with a fineness that would make Linnaeus wince. They credit themselves with infinite gradations of Reaganosity. Because they have defined the world in terms of negatives- government, taxation, international paranoia and the social norms of Father Knows Bes- they are stuck with being really negative. 


They are against things. And they have been against things for so long no amount of dressing it up in terms of code words like individual liberty and personal freedom and getting government out of people's lives can conceal that they are mostly about looking out for those most like themselves: white, anglo (WASP is a decayed species but they love them all the more when they find an outlier), well-off, insured, and straight.


All of which is completely at odds with the world of creativity SC leaders dimly apprehend they need to get in touch with, but fail to understand its most fundamental rule: a ruthless insistence on merit next to which gender, race, sexual orientation, age and ancestry don't mean squat.