Iowahawk has a wickedly fine satire on the national Republican party that keeps looking for ways to lose elections (as they did with this last one). Here's a taste--worth reading in full:
T. Coddington Van Voorhees VIIThe national Republican Party needs to face some hard truths:
Editor, the National TopsiderMembership Chairman, The Newport Club
Much has been written about the fate of the conservative movement in the months since last I corresponded with you. I won't belabor the barrels of ink expended in the printing of its obituary, nor will I bore you with further reading of its entrails. Suffice it to say the grand old ship is in the doldrums, adrift in the electoral currents, with nary a harbor on the horizon. But it is time we leave such map room mopery aside and navigate a bold new course for the conservative armada. One needn't have a 400-year old heirloom scrimshaw sextant for this task; but, fortunately, I do.
It's quite a handsome instrument, I might add, skillfully hewn from North Atlantic whalebone by some long forgotten crewman on De Gouden Hoer, the sleek Dutch galleon that once transported great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather Marinus Van Voorhees to the New World, safe beyond the reach of the angry Amsterdam mobs who mistakenly blamed him for some unpleasant business there involving tulip futures. According to family legend grandpapa Marinus won it in a high stakes high seas game of Kaiserspiel, trumping that unlucky crewman's queen-high flush with his trusty pearl handled rapier. Although it doomed the crewman to a tragic fate as shark chum in the Gulf Stream, his beautifully crafted sextant has since proven a treasured family keepsake -- passed down from generation to generation of Van Voorheeses as we migrated westward with the great American expansion; from Newport to Greenwich to Manhattan, and finally back east again to the summer compound in Montauk.
Today the Van Voorhees family sextant rests proudly atop my private shipboard desk. I'm admiring it now; there it sits, in its protective crystal bell jar, alongside Marinus' rapier, both still bearing the sanguinary patina of their provenance. They were, of course, the deathbed bequest of my visionary father, T.C. Van Voorhees VI, rakish founder of the National Topsider and the modern conservative movement. Last year, after our final emotional handshake, he looked at me with those anxious, fading eyes, and said:
"the helm awaits, my lad; I trust you will steer it well. And, it appears, I have soiled myself."
With that, old Dad slipped off this mortal coil. A sad moment, to be sure, but I took comfort in the stoic grace with which he finally relinquished control of both the conservative movement and his bowels. His beloved sextant is a constant reminder of my grave responsibility as conservatism's new helmsman, and a testament to the timeless truth that fate favors the bold - and the well-bred.
This was, as you know, the theme of the National Topsider's exclusive January conference at the private Breakers Club in Nassau where I hosted a veritable murderer's row of top tory thinkers to diagnose the troubles with conservatism. Dame Peggy Noonan was there, of course, along with Kathleen Parker, Douglas Kmiec, and those two mighty Davids of conservative intellect, Brooks and Frum. But enough of the namedropping. The order of the day, after mixed badminton doubles, was to formulate an Rx for our ailing patient. In this regard we were in surprising accord: in order to survive, conservativism simply must start appealing to a better class of people. The sad fact of the matter, as we noted, is that one no longer finds admitted conservatives in any of America's prestige zip codes nor the faculty redoubts of her selective academies. During our Bahamian summit many gambits were proposed to win back America's elite electoral precincts from the left; sponsoring various hip hop colloquia at the better Ivies, supporting integration of gays into Nascar, endorsing state ownership of the means of production. Rod Dreher, whose sensational exegesis "Crunchy Cons" sold well over 200 copies last year, recommended a full embrace of the environmental movement, which as I understand is quite the rage among youthful voters and the trendsetting thespians of Hollywood. Good and bold ideas all, and necessary steps to get the movement started again. But there remains a daunting obstacle - namely, the benighted rubes who constitute so much of our so-called "base," and whose existence make it nigh on impossible to recruit their social betters.
1. As the last election demonstrated, the obscenely wealthy are not our friends. There's no reason for them to be our friends. They want an activist government to alleviate their guilt about being obscenely rich, and to keep shoveling money from middle class taxpayers upward.
2. We need to make a serious effort about stopping the flood of illegal aliens, both by interdicting the border, and by vigorously prosecuting knowing employment of illegal aliens. This has positive benefits for national security, perhaps some reduction in illegal trafficking, and improving the economic status of the poorest working Americans.
3. There are two reasons why we need to be doing this--and to be seen as doing this. The obvious crass reason is to peel away people making $8/hour from voting Democrat. The more important reason is that taking illegal aliens out of the workforce drives up wages of citizens and legal residents.
To the extent that people at the bottom earn more money, the less need they have for the government to help them, and the less need there is for bureaucracies to process paperwork and redistribute wealth. I have no sympathy for people who are lazy, or who prefer getting high to working. (And I know such people.) But I have a lot of sympathy for people who show up for work every day, and make just enough money to pay their rent, their car payment, their car insurance, and their groceries--but not enough to buy health insurance. Someone like that is the traditional base of the Republican Party--people with enough self-discipline to work hard when there isn't a lot of reward that comes from it. We don't need to throw money at them--but we can certainly remove the obstacles that are making them worse off than they need to be.
4. The entertainment industry is not our friend. Back when Republicans controlled Congress, I was amazed at the bills that Republicans pushed to help Hollywood and the music industry. These industries are intent on putting hard left Democrats in power. Why should we help them do anything?
5. Stop trying to play nice with Democrats in Congress. George Bush tried to be friends with Democrats by backing Teddy Kennedy's disastrous No Child Left Behind bill. It failed, because it was built on a false premise: that the reason that black and Hispanic kids were being "left behind" was because the schools weren't trying hard enough. Hence, this elaborate testing scheme. The possibility that there are cultural problems in these subcultures that might explain the problem just didn't occur to Kennedy. But you know what, Bush became so identified with NCLB that I hear schoolteachers talk about it like it was Bush's idea. They blame Bush for something that the teachers union pet, Teddy Kennedy, created.
6. Yes, cutting taxes is a good thing. Yes, the higher income brackets pay a disproportionate share of the taxes, and any sort of even tax cut will probably benefit them more. But there's a reason that the Democrats keep banging the drum about taxing the rich: it motivates a lot of voters who are having trouble making ends meet on $8/hour. I wouldn't argue for "soak the rich" rhetoric--but the highest marginal tax rates are low enough. Let's take a "highest marginal tax rate cutting" holiday for a few years, and focus on tax cuts down where it matters. Besides, the $250,000 a year and up crowd is overwhelmingly voting Democrat and Green, anyway. Why give them more money to fund Obama and Nader?
If we want to have some fun, let's start reminding voters that the obscenely rich (the billionaire wing of the Democratic Party) doesn't even have to pay income taxes, because of the municipal bond interest exemption from state and federal income taxes. I don't know that there's much that can be done about this (since this is an artifact of the Constitution and that the federal government can't tax the states and vice versa), but it is good to remind the average voter that an income tax isn't a tax on the rich--but on those trying to get rich.
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