"At long last, the conservative juggernaut is cracking up."

WP: McCain's Problem Isn't His Tactics. It's GOP Ideas.
By Greg Anrig
Sunday, August 3, 2008; B01

At long last, the conservative juggernaut is cracking up. From the Reagan era until late 2005 or so, conservatives crushed progressives like me in debates as reliably as the Harlem Globetrotters owned the Washington Generals. The right would eloquently praise the virtues of free markets and the magic of the invisible hand. We would respond by stammering about the importance of regulation and a mixed economy, knowing even as the words came out that our audience was becoming bored.

Conservatives would get knowing laughs by mocking bureaucrats. We would drone on about how everyone can benefit from the experience and expertise of able civil servants. They promised to transform stodgy old Social Security into an exciting investment opportunity that would make everyone wealthy in retirement. We warned about the scheme's "transition costs" while swearing that the existing program would still be around for today's younger workers. They offered tax cuts. We talked amorphously about taxes as the price of a civilized society. After Sept. 11, 2001, they vowed to strike hard at terrorists anywhere and everywhere without worrying about the thumb-twiddlers at the United Nations. We stood up for the thumb-twiddlers.

But now, seemingly all of a sudden, conservatives are the ones who are tongue-tied, as demonstrated by Sen. John McCain's limping, message-free presidential campaign. McCain's ongoing difficulties in exciting voters aren't just a tactical problem; his woes stem largely from his long-standing adherence to a set of ideas that simply haven't worked in practice. The belief system and finely crafted policy pitches that enabled the right to dominate the war of ideas for the past 30 years have produced a relentless succession of governing failures, from Iraq to Katrina to the economy to the environment.

Largely as a consequence, the public's attitude toward government -- Ronald Reagan's bête noire -- has shifted. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that, by a 53-to-42 percent margin, Americans want government to "do more to solve problems"; a dozen years ago, respondents opposed government action by 2 to 1. Meanwhile, Republican constituency groups' long-standing determination to put aside their often significant differences and band together to support GOP candidates is fracturing: The libertarian darling Ron Paul and the evangelical Christian leader James C. Dobson are among the Republican bigwigs who haven't so far endorsed McCain. And the mountains of books and articles by conservative writers attacking liberals and liberalism have begun to be matched by new stacks of tomes exploring what went wrong with conservatism and what is to become of it.

As I listen to leading voices and thinkers on the right pondering the condition of their ideology, it is increasingly clear to me that they face a fundamental dilemma -- one that cannot be resolved anytime soon and that might well leave the conservative movement out to pasture for as long as we progressives have been powerlessly chewing grass....

(Greg Anrig, vice president of programs at the Century Foundation, is the author of "The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080103061_pf.html

on a 20-point poll margin. I think things are looking up for us, however, since the darkest days when we were completely eclipsed.

The pro-GOP MSM owns the polls.

You expect them to tell the truth?

Reagan led this country to the housing crisis: millions losing homes.

Bush led this country to the foreclosure crisis: millions losing homes.

Same old stuff. The MSM tells the lie that conservatives might be viewing government more favorably. Well yeah. They've been stealing from it for so long that they will accept anything, even regulation. That is, just as long as government continues to pay the way for "private" enterprise.

The problem is, it's being run by people who want to use the system for personal gain and the public be damned. That stems from electing Republican administrations who appoint these types into all agencies and, I think they deliberately try to put their agencies in the worst light possible so as to discourage people from resorting to public agencies and blindly believe that all can be provided through a profit-driven private sector.

This should:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amebelodon

that is not motivated by evil. So, rather than innocently asking, is this writer correct?, we should be asking, what is the evil that WaPo is seeking to accomplish by publishing it?

Possibly to push the word "conservative" as a respectable political position, when what we've suffered is a coup d'etat by global corporate predators. "Conservative," har-har. They permit this acceptable liberal (what is the "Century Foundation," by the way?) to say that "conservative" policies are out of fashion--rather than calling them what they are: mass murdering, massively thieving, massively illegal, corrupt and vile--to disguise what's really happening, which is a global corporate predator consolidation of rapacious power, finessed to prevent outright revolution here (which could get pretty messy in this big, diverse country with its democratic and revolutionary traditions).

The M.O. of this fascist coup is maintaining the ILLUSION of democracy, when in truth our democracy is an empty shell. You only need one fact to understand this well enough: The fast-tracking of electronic voting machines, all over the country ('02 to '04) run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

I mean, come on.

So WaPo's intended evil may be to further than illusion--make it feel kind of like change is happening.

Anyway, that's how we should analyze WaPo publications. What is the evil motive in publishing it at all? What is the hidden fascist/corporation agenda, both apart from content and within content (where we should be alert to finding the disinformation that may be obvious or may be stuck like anthrax-laced raisins inside an innocent-looking muffin.)