Let’s spell it out: in their desperate effort to achieve relevance through stridency, the Republicans have turned their backs on half the electorate. Brilliant move, guys.
It’s nice to already know the Republicans’ strategy as they lurch toward the long and bumpy road to someone else’s presidency. Removes the mystery.
Their new mantra, in GOP-speak: So long, ladies.
I’ll give them this: They’re no longer pretending to care about us. Yay for them for ending that charade. They don’t want us, and apparently they’ve decided they don’t need us. Or, as Jeb Bush put it on Tuesday: “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”
Did I say half? Add 10-20% to that, since making Trump the frontrunner also alienates the Hispanic vote. It’s tempting to make Trump bear the brunt of the blame (Jeez, a guy who uses menstruation as an insult?) but let’s not forget that he’s a stalking horse, and whoever gets the Republican nomination is going to hold views just as odious.
1. It’s less than that. John Ellis Bush, which is JEB’s real name, got the numbers wrong as well.
2. So far, John E. has proposed starting a war in the ME somewhere for some reason, abolish Medicare, not realizing that his base of old white people love Medicare because it keeps them alive, and has no idea what women are, what they do, or what they need.
(He’s walked most of that back after his Thinking Brain Service Dog woke up.)
3. John Ellis Bush is actually far dumber than his idiot brother, George. And he is just as vicious.
This is someone of low IQ born into vast wealth. It’s obvious JE has never had to actually do much of anything by himself. It’s not impossible that he doesn’t even know how to tie his shoes. People at that level have assistants who do everything, including dressing them.
It is ridiculous that the Republican talking heads are claiming that Trump is really a Democrat, and he is trying to mess up the Republican ticket in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton is elected.
OK, that is a thesis. So how do they reconcile that with the fact that amongst Republican voters, he has twice the polling numbers of the next closest candidate?
jaybee, it’s obvious – the stealth Democrats masquerading as Republicans (Dempublicans?) are conspiring to drive up (aka Pharyngulate! There’s another evil plot! Athiestseses are coming, run away, save your Bibles and your babies!) Trump’s polling numbers and destroy the GOP. It’s conspiracies all the way down, didn’t you know?
[adjusts tinfoil hat, returns to bunker]
Not quite half. I’m sure the Republicans have the Stepford Wife vote all sewn up. (And the Quiverfull vote, if they voted.)
Unfortunately there are a lot of women who have internalized patriarchal ideology. I think it is a an extreme exaggeration to say that the Republicans have turned their backs on half the electorate. Plenty of women will vote for Jeb! or whoever it may be. Yes, Dems have an advantage with women, but it isn’t that large.
Are you suggesting that women who voted for the GOP before hadn’t worked out that the party is waging a war on women? It’s not exactly a new thing that they’ve suddenly switched to.
I expect it makes perfect sense to alienate women, if you don’t believe they should be allowed to vote in the first place.
They have the zillionarie’s vote (you’re either one of us or one of our slaves). Problem is, zillionaries don’t bother with that ridiculous idea of “voting”. They simply buy the politicians, with the assistance of their lackeys, the
politicianslawyers,policegoons, andjudgesrobots.53.4% of all eligble voters. http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/25/politics/btn-women-voters/
I have some female relatives who are deeply conservative, and they’ve done an excellent job until now of failing to notice the blatant contempt that Republican politicians have for women. Trump’s too blatant about it, but everyone else will be able to quietly continue their war on women without issue.
Raven, there’s a funny episode from when Daddy Bush was running for Prez. He visited a supermarket, to show how he was in touch with the little people, and he was amazed by the laser scanners they use at the cash registers. He’d never seen such a thing before!
They’d been standard in every market in the country for about 20 years at that point. That’s at least how long it had been since Bush had done any of his own shopping. I don’t expect it’s any different for his spawn.
Trump is paying a small price for his misogynistic comments.
The Guardian Link
However, Erickson spreads his own brand of misogyny:
News Hounds link
Artor @ 11:
Snopes disagrees that Bush’s grocery scanner event happened the way it has been recorded in history:
http://archive.is/REsO
Naturally, Trump’s campaign lackeys issued a statement that puts the blame on Erick Erickson: “Also, not only is Erick a total loser, he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event. Mr. Trump is an outsider and does not fit his agenda.”
BTW, Trump must be a micro-manager, and/or he has his lackeys brainwashed to think like he does. That bit where he calls Erick a “total loser” is so trumpish.
On Twitter, Trump also blamed, well, all of us for “weakness,” that weakness being political correctness.
Talking Points Memo link
1. An important battle in the GOP War on Women is their War on Birth Control. We’ve all seen how lately they are defunding Planned Parenthood.
2. Which is absurd. Birth control acceptance is 90%. It’s part of modern life. The War on Birth Control is like a War on Your Liver or the War on Indoor Plumbing.
3. Studies show, every dollar spent by the state on BC saves the state $3 on welfare costs. Young single mothers and their kids make up most of food stamps etc..
4. The other GOP war is the War on Poor People. They’ve been cutting the social safety net right and left and hacking away at the bones and muscle like public education.
5. So, they want to produce more unwanted children by people who can’t afford them while simultaneously refusing to feed and shelter them.
This is simply a recipe to produce an underclass of desperately poor people. It’s a pathway to the Third World. Who will end up costing them in the end anyway in increased police and prison costs. It’s all very….xian.
Do remember that the Anti-Suffrage movement in the early 20th century was mosly run by women! Seems that to a good degree they were movitated by fear that women voters would vote socialist/progressive, quite similar to conservatives today.
Of course, back then the rhetoric was that women were too virtuous to meddle in politics, and ramblings about how women’s noble duty to family should come first. A bit different from Trump’s outright disgust with breasfeeding and menstruation!
More details supporting the history of Ericsson’s own misogyny:
Think Progress link
Think Progress secondary link
Maybe Erickson, like The Donald, simply thinks references to menstruation are icky and therefore a step too far.
And Jeb Bush is a dunderhead if he thinks Erickson is on the side of women.
I’d like to recommend The Republican Brain, by Chris Mooney – The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality. It is quite revealing and helps to explain why the R’s so often vote against their own best interests, and why they despise Democrats and esp. President Obama.
Interesting that Eric Erickson has a problem with the indecency Trump aimed at Megyn Kelly, but not with the indecency Trump aimed at Rosie O’Donnell. I wonder why that could be…
@microraptor – And that’s why the Republican establishment hates Trump. He says what they are all thinking.
The reality is that Trump’s positions are probably the least odious amongst the Republican candidates (don’t get me wrong…his positions are extremely odious, but the competing Republican candidates also all hold the same, if not worse, positions). He just doesn’t know how to use the dog whistles the rest of them do.
They’ve turned their backs on half the electorate? Maybe, but voters can be weird, and identity politics even weirder, and certainly not all that logical or rational.
Trump is a crude, sexist, racist jackass, but will that matter as long as he or whoever eventually wins the GOP nomination is simply not-Hillary Clinton, or, a long shot, not-Bernie Sanders (a socialist–run children!). If simply beating the Democrats is the end goal, does it matter if The Donald turned an early television debate into another opportunity to harass and insult someone? (The fact that he makes me feel sorry for Megyn Kelly has now left me pining for him to lose, and spectacularly so.)
I’ve seen this before; John McCain, war hero extraordinaire, hasn’t actually been that great for veterans, though somehow his personal military service is supposed to make up for it, along with that magical “R” after his name that we’re all supposed to believe implies strength in the face of the countless evildoers who wish to do us harm.
So, despite this, I still saw some veterans and plenty of hawks voice support for him in 2008 (though not necessarily as enthusiastic about his surreal choice of Palin). I’ve known more than enough women who support the GOP for as long as I can remember, no matter how angry a candidate may get about Planned Parenthood or a definition of “life” so narrow that it’s entirely prenatal. And in the case of Trump, the etiquette may be lacking, but most of the socially regressive, small government authoritarianism is still there. Who knows, maybe even Kelly would be willing to hold her nose to vote for him.
Jumped up, arrogant, obnoxious.
raven@15 — birth control only saves on welfare payments if there is still a functioning welfare system.
All the better. Whichever socially regressive buffoon gets chosen, this will only make it easier – and more valid – for the Democrats to run the “War on Women”-stuff again during the general election lead-up. Not that they’re that great on those issues, either, but it’s, as usual, just about making the case that the other side is worse. And they are. So, so much worse. I hope the Democrats are carefully archiving every bit of misogynistic garbage they’re spouting to quote it back at them later. Which will surely be perceived as a “smear campaign” again, but that’s how this is played: Repeating what these guys actually said is smearing them and just sooo unfair.
Unfortunately, the older white women will continue to vote for these assholes, so they are only alienating a small portion of that half of the population.
I do feel bad for Megyn Kelly. I think she thought she was special, not like all those other women, and she was safe. Now she’s discovering she isn’t and it sucks.
I don’t respect her for selling out in the worst ways possible, but I do fell sympathy for the betrayal.
I don’t believe conservatives have “turned their back on half the electorate”. Conservatives never really wanted most of the electorate to vote in the first place, as Paul Weyrich succinctly explains HERE. It’s not so much a case of turning their back as it is wanting certain portions of the population to stay away from the voting booth. Splitting hairs maybe, but conservative strategy makes more sense in that distinction. Conservatives are after all mostly regressives that pine for the days when women and minorities couldn’t vote. They’ve always done everything conceivable to keep low turnout the status quo. So rather than “turning their back” I believe that conservatives never fully “faced” the fact that more than half the population they’ve historically sought to repress are now in fact the majority of the electorate.
Also being largely reactionary in thinking, the strategic answer politically for conservatives has been to alienate and disenfranchise those they think might predominately vote against them, conservatives work to “whittle down” and reduce that voting bloc. Draconian voting laws and that sort of thing. The key strategy is to disenfranchise, but at the same time don’t create a common cause against Republican candidates. That’s a thin line to walk.
You don’t think for a second that conservative political strategists dislike Trump’s misogynistic remarks because they disagree ideologically? No, they dislike those remarks because being so blatant removes plausible deniability. Although their first concern is to keep voting participation as low as possible, they still need to sway as many voters as they can in those demographics that might predominately vote against Republican candidates like women and minorities. They can only accomplish that by keeping up a facade, while communicating to the rest of their constituency through dog whistle politics.
Now we have Trump who is basically running around screaming “I’m not ashamed of my conservative views!”. The conservative voting bloc loves him for that. The conservative leadership hates him for it, they know they’ve needed to play their cards close to their chest for decades now, since all that “women’s suffrage and civil rights crap”. Therefore the conservative leadership is trying to “stake” trump and his campaign, there is a larger political strategy at risk. So, it’s Trump vs the Republican party. Or Trump vs FOX rather, the mouthpiece of the Republican party, more specifically vs Megyn Kelly at the moment.
So you may think to yourself “alienating a good portion of the electorate makes no rational sense”. From our perspective it makes no sense. From the perspective of the conservative voting bloc to whom whole swaths of the electorate shouldn’t be voting in the first place, they’re saying “Trump is a breath of fresh air”, hence he’s a front runner among conservatives. But if you’re a conservative political strategist you’re pulling your hair out because you know that alienating and disenfranchising only works to a certain extent, if you can keep it on the down low. There is a point of diminishing return on that strategy in that blatant bigotry, misogyny, racism, homophobia etc, like Trump’s, has the opposite effect.
antigone10@26:
OTOH, what happened to Megyn Kelly has to have rocked the other women at FOX etc a bit. It’ll be harder for the right wing to play “we’re not sexist asshats” to the head-in-sand women if there aren’t women on their team to pretty up the place. (That last phrase is meant both metaphorically and ironically.)
If the women on the “team” turn and repudiate the Repubs, I suspect some right-wing female voters might defect to Hillary/Bernie.
@frog
That might be theoretically possible, but never underestimate the Right’s ability to successfully demonize those who fail to remain in lockstep.