As the GOP struggles to re-litigate the 2012 Presidential election and undercut any significant Democratic policy advances, they increasingly are retreating into parallel universes that have no foothold, really, in evidence-based reality. 

change the “messaging”, not the policy As Red State so revealingly puts it,

We, as the low-tax & personal responsibility party cannot waltz into a low income housing area, look around, shake our heads and say “Hey, when are you guys going to stop being idiots and voting for people that think you’re stupid — also, you don’t pay enough taxes.”

 

 

Whether or not we view that as what happened, the people we’re talking to certainly did.

 

 

In the same vein, we cannot waltz into a border town and say “Hey, you know your high school football star? Yeah, his parents came here illegally 17 years ago when he was one. Sucks to be him but dammit, THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!! Deportin’ time!” There just might be a better way to engage that conversation.

 
Now before my twitter timeline fills up with people screaming “AMNESTY!!” take a breath and grab a glass of regulated water. No one, certainly not me, is asking for anyone to change their principles, beliefs, or policy positions. But maybe we should consider offering our principles, beliefs, and policy positions, in a way that doesn’t make people want to set us on fire.

 

 

As the headline says, “It’s the messaging, stupid. It’s the stupid messaging.”

 Arcane and perverse ObamaCare incentives are solely intended to “gather ever more health care spending under federal control”.

A new decade of war is beginning—America not only can’t lead from behind, but can’t even follow from behind (pace, Benghazi, Iran, Syria, North Korea). All as Obama “guts” defense.

Limits to growth mean limits to hope. Don’t tax work and investment. Mona Charen  envisages a coming Doomsday: “A shrinking private sector drowning in regulations, a voracious public sector always in search of new ways to waste money…and the inexorable ticking, louder every day, of the debt bomb.

The anti anti-terror Left. The Left is not only against wars and foreign entanglements, but acyually opposed to any defense against terrorism.

Increased minimum wages will make the country uncompetitive, just as new taxes will “corrode work and investment incentives”. Wage increases are also a boon to the Chinese manufacturing sector still dependent on cheap labor”.  Such “artificial wage increases” cost jobs and cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder. In other words, the Republicans oppose paying America’s poorest workers more per hour because doing so will hurt their economic prospects, but it’s OK to give the rich more money through tax cuts.

Obama has a “campaign” to “prevent entitlement reform”.

The federal  government forced investors to rely on Moody’s & S&P and Fitch, and the government should sue the SEC for rigged credit ratings, not S&P.

Enforced equality rather than personal liberty is the new national creed

Energy regulation is forced economic contraction, especially new emissions controls, which “make overseas industries relatively competitive”, and “threaten US-made cars and US-produced oil”.

Online education is the future of higher education,  behind the disingenuous calls for “increased access to higher education,” online education is tied to workforce readiness and a new business model for colleges and universities .

The sequester is the GOP’s main negotiating leverage. “The sequester will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment”. Huh?

States will lose budget autonomy to the “carrots and sticks of ever-larger government”

Barack Obama now only wants to tell us what Uncle Sam will do for us so that we need do nothing for ourselves. If he is successful we will each be too dependent on the federal government to set our own course in life.