Let Me Pat Myself on the Back

Ok, I don't normally do this, but I happened to run into an old blog post of mine, and just had to revel in it for a moment — well, sort of, I would have preferred being wrong, for the most part.

“For those, like me, of the Right, we have a serious problem. As the
saying goes, if these are our friends, we hardly need enemies. I
predict a Democratic landslide in 2006, unless we get our collective
acts together.”

-October 18, 2005

As I wrote on a mailing list today, as a free market kind of guy, I'm not excited about the Republicans at the moment — they are now the “big government party,” and though I don't trust the Dems talk of smaller government (since it doesn't fit with their overall agenda), I think the fact that people like me, as members of the base, are unexcited was damaging. Moreover, the wishy-washiness of the Republicans on issues like cloning, etc., hasn't given social conservatives like myself much reason to be terribly excited about the GOP either. So, I think the Republicans ended up going for some illusory “moderates” that do not actually exist, or at least do not exist in large enough quantities to win an election, while leaving behind the bases that propelled them into power in '94, and helped for the big wins ten years later in '04. This was worsened by the close association of the GOP with the USA PATRIOT Act, despite the fact that people from both parties stupidly supported this bill. Why the GOP pushed to reup it is beyond me in as much as they actually wanted to win in the election a few weeks ago. Really, the election was all about the stupidity of forgetting what people elected you to do and not even doing a good job lying about it.