(Image H/T: Liberal Logic 101)

A “fundamental transformation”, he said.  Determined Weakness, he “policied”.  Free rides, he decreed.  Now, more people are in the National Cart than there are pulling or pulling:

Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers

Daniel Greenfield over at Frontpage Mag has his take on what ails the GOP.  Like Steve, like me, he sees what’s wrong and the inertia that stands in the way to start winning again.  A few excerpts (emphasis mine):

If you don’t fight, you can’t win. That’s what the Party of Lincoln, a party that tested its mettle in a devastating national conflict, has forgotten. Instead it has become a party of good losers who would rather lose easy than fight hard.

The Republican Party.  Its genesis was in taking on the mantle of Abolition – the task of eliminating slavery.  A long fight.  A bloody fight.  A fight that tore the country apart.  But a fight it willingly took on for the end was a most precious thing – Freedom.  Now?  It seems that the conviction to do the hard things, to achieve that Freedom goal again, has gone limp.  Why?  Spirit – or the lack thereof.  That ‘fire in the belly” – has it been replaced by complacency or hubris?  Or both?

The GOP would like to win without fighting. It wants to wait for the voters to come around and recognize that it’s the better choice because it compromises.

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Several years ago, one of the daughters of a well known Seacoast Republican Power family was told, in a fit of pique, that she was not one of CongressCritter Carol Shea-Porter’s (D-NH CD-2) constituents – simply because she was a Republican.  I just don’t understand how wrong my teachers were growing up as I was always taught that EVERYONE in a district was a  constituent of the hack-du-jour.  Just another day in the life of a bitter Leftist, I guess.

Is this disease a communicable one amongst Democrats?

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius responded moments ago to questions about whether she will resign in the wake of the Affordable Care Act’s problematic rollout. Her response is raising some eyebrows.

“My goal is to actually get the website up and running,” she told reporters. “The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don’t work for and who do not want this program to work in the first place. I have had frequent conversations with the president and I have committed to him that my role is to get the program up and running and we will do just that.”

We ALL help pay her salary – she is supposed to work for us ALL.  Our Republic works this way – there will ALWAYS be people who hate your policies (and perhaps, you for them).  That doesn’t mean that merely for the reason of disagreeing with those policies that she doesn’t work for them as well.  What is it about Democrats in this regard?    Now, if she were to give a rebate from her salary and perks back to those of us that she doesn’t work for, it might be a tad more tolerable, but our Republic doesn’t work that way either.

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Free association in any group is based on the presumption that those who choose to join will promote the groups “charter.’  They will support its mission.  That those charged with leading that mission will develop and deploy strategies to advance those shared goals.

The current leadership of the GOP and the NHGOP has a platform that espouses principles.   But instead of using them to stand up for property rights, rule of law, self-responsibility, and local control, they use them like a siren calling ships that then crash upon their rocky shores.  They are hoping that once trapped there, they will simply play along.  Those that do not or who are upset over the deception are scolded, derided, even bullied for expecting the party to stand up for the principles in its own platform.

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In a less well know act of government vs. Journalists, a freelance reporter who had done investigative work on agencies under Homeland Security, had her home raided in early August.  The search warrant was to look for arms or ammunition that the reporters husband was not supposed to have, but they managed to seize without right or knowledge a number of files that included the names of confidential informants who had provided details on scandles within Homeland Security.

The informants are now at risk.  Anyone within the government who observes lies, corruption, or wrong doing, has been sent another message–we will find you.

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Let’s keep about the “why” – Here’s a great example of what undergirds the GOP civil war – by Andrew McCarthy at PJ Media (emphasis mine):

The statist side is enthusiastically championed by Democrats, and the conservative side by Republicans, albeit more reluctantly. Like the Democratic party, the GOP is run by Washington-oriented politicians and, thus, is more enamored of Washington-centered fiats than is the conservative base whose support Republicans need in order to be politically viable. In the vogue of establishment Republicans, Jeb Bush ostensibly directs his “Can’t we all just get along?” preachments at the Republican-Democrat divide. Clearly, though, as an all-but-formally-announced contender for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nod, he is more vexed by the widening disconnect between Republicans and conservatives.

Here is the problem for Jeb: There is no common ground between (a) “I should control my own medical decisions, with my doctor deciding what to charge for his services and my insurance company deciding what risks it will cover, at prices to be determined by a free market,” and (b) “The federal government should oversee my medical decisions, tell the doctors what to charge, and dictate what insurance companies must cover at what rates.” In this, as in other matters Gov. Bush calls the “bigger, more pressing issues” – the issues about what kind of country we are going to be – one side has to win and one side has to lose.

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