Friday, January 13, 2012

Catron: The Thelma And Louise Party

In his latest American Spectator piece, David Catron discusses the seeming suidicdal tendencies of the Republican party.

From "The Thelma & Louise Party":
Barack Obama should be facing, as he himself phrased it, "a one-term proposition." His incompetence has reached depths that render the feckless Jimmy Carter positively Washingtonian by comparison, the sheer lawlessness of his administration evokes nostalgia for the merely corrupt Clinton years, and the state of the nation is worse by any objective measure than it was in on the day he took office.

The GOP should be well positioned to send the President into retirement. Instead, the party's nomination process has become a bloody battle in which the candidates are viciously attacking one another rather than Obama, denouncing core conservative principles rather than the failures of big-government, and seems to be on the verge of producing a "winner" who has no prayer of defeating the incumbent.
Catron then runs down the many serious problems revealed by candidates such as Perry, Gingrich, and Romney. I especially liked this discussion:
[Romney] obviously can't go after the President on Obamacare. Even if Romney hadn't provided the prototype for Obamacare while governor of Massachusetts, his company's acquisition of a for-profit hospital chain whose largest revenue stream comes from the pocket of the American taxpayer makes it impossible for him to attack the President's big-government approach to health care.

Romney can't even point out that Obamacare's insurance mandate is unconstitutional without being reminded that it is based on a virtually identical requirement that he signed into law in the Bay State. That the Massachusetts mandate was enacted at the state level, and is therefore constitutional, will be lost on all but a few voters. Thus, Romney can't criticize ObamaCare's most offensive feature without looking like a cheap flip-flopper.
2012 should be a GOP landslide. But Obama may have a legitimate shot at relection due to the weakness of the GOP field.

(Read the full text of "The Thelma & Louise Party".)