Rudy is the best..No wait!..Fred is the best.. No wait! Romney is the best

[SoCalDem]

Seriously folks, is the majority of the public really dumb enough to even THINK of having another republican administration?

Instead of all the nitpicking, our candidates just need to hammer away at the horrible mis-management of the whole republican philosophy..and yes, they need to bring up the dreaded "c" word.. Competence..

We may be headed for the most dangerous decades ahead, and we cannot just fiddle our way through the years.

Republicans have messed up every time they have been in office, save Eisenhower. Eisenhower gets a pass, because in the post-war glow, no one really cared all that much about government. They were too busy having babies, buying cars & stuff and basking in the good will glow from the rest of the world.

The list below shows the 17 times we have had republicans..(Lincoln would not recognize the current crop of republicans..would he even BE one now?)

18. George Bush the son 2001-2008
17. George Bush: 1989-1993
16. Ronald Reagan: 1981-1989
15. Gerald Ford: 1974-1977
14. Richard Nixon: 1969-1974
13. Dwight David Eisenhower: 1953-1961
12. Herbert Hoover: 1929-1933
11. Calvin Coolidge: 1923-1929
10. Warren Harding: 1921-1923
9. William Taft: 1909-1913
8. Theodore Roosevelt: 1901-1909
7. William McKinley: 1897-1901
6. Benjamin Harrison: 1889-1893
5. Chester Arthur: 1881-1885
4. James Garfield: 1881
3. Rutherford Hayes: 1877-1881
2. Ulysses Grant: 1869-1877
1. Abraham Lincoln: 1861-1865

The current mythology of Reagan is the glue that holds this whole party together.

When Reagan/Bush1 papers are finally released, I have a feeling that some of the "warm-fuzzies" will abate. The only problem I see, is that the Republicans spinmeisters have spent the intervening years, carefully re-molding the media and demonizing all but their own, as "biased". Hopefully, some sense of reality will re-emerge.

In the most recent republican administrations, just what HAVE their accomplishments been?

Reagan started to dismantle what was left of the New deal and the Great Society. That's what his administration was all about. That has been Bush1's plan from when he first challenged Reagan in 1980.

Republican administrations are all about taking things away. Since there is a finite amount of revenues, the take-aways always come form the people least able to withstand them.. Who gets them? The wealthy classes.

That's the other "C". Republicans love to bandy about the phrase "class warfare". They so this to rabble-rouse and stir up their base, and claim that the Democrats are doing it.

Look at the history of Republican administrations, folks.. When has a republican adminstration EVER improved the lives of lower-middle class or poor people?

I am not saying that democrats are saints, but when it comes to corruption, there is no one to challenge the undisputed winners in that other "C" issue..corruption

One only needs to pick up a newspaper to see what effect a republican adminsitration has.

Its effects are everywhere. It's in the food we eat, the skies we fly, the tires we ride on, the petfoods we buy, the toys our kids play with. It's in the air we breathe, the water we drink.

It's in the unnecessary wars we fight. It's in the jobs we lose, the companies that close down and move away.

The privileged people in the US will always do just fine. They have always had a free ride. The majority of the people here are NOT doing well..haven't done well in decades.

We have some serious issues to resolve, and we have very little time to get it done. we cannot AFFORD to waste more time and money on another republican administration.

We need to repair international relations.
We need a better health care system than the mish-mash we have now
We need to energize our saggy economy
We need to address the issues that lead to terrorism
We need to fix the infrastructure of the nation
We need to overhaul our depleted military.
We need to find a way to no destroy our ecosystem, or none of the others even matter

I just don't see ANY republican doing even a few of those things.

What I DO see a republican doing is:

Giving favors to corporate raiders
Cutting up what's left of the raggedy safety net
Taxcuts for people who don't need them

Whether it's the "Hunky GQ Romney", or 911-iani, the "Reaganesque Thompson, the spokesmodel for Cranky old men ,Mc Cain, the batshit-xenophobe Tancredo, Chuckleberry Huckabee, I just don't see any of these guys as being able to cure what ails us.

[MadMaddie]

1. The number one thing a new Democratic Administration should do

when they get in.... open all of the Reagan/Bush1 papers......oh it's going to be good....

[Virginia Dare]

2. LOL!!! Vote for the Coots!....n/t

[frogcycle]

3. It is not so much competance

as intent. The so-called "conservative principles" of "lower taxes and less government" that they base everything on are counterproductive. They don't believe in government, except as a warmaking entity to further the interests of business. They don't believe in a middle class. They believe in rule by a few, for their own material gain, at the expense of the many.

The republican party has been ruled to varying degrees by these interests at least since TR, with Ike being a partial exception.

The true republicans are relatively few in number. Most who call themselves republicans are just deluded fools. Those few, to retain power, since they could not possibly win in a democratic election, have cynically sought out voting blocs and recruited them using hate and fear. They wooed the south away from the democrats over civil rights by not-so-veiled racist policies and innuendo. They wooed the religious fundamentalist in the same way. How many recall that Jerry Falwell first came to power by railing against integration?

They rail against "socialism", "socialized medicine", "handouts", "welfare queens" and such using the lines that "democrats want to spend your hard earned money on lazy shiftless bums." The fools don't get it that many of them would be bigger beneficiaries than contributors to the various progressive/populist programs. And they fool some of the suburban middle class into thinking that they will one day be rich and should support tax cuts for the rich because someday they will gain from them. Of course, in the meantime, they take it in the shorts and don't realize it.

The tactics bushcheney have been using to manipulate public opinion are just extensions of what they have used to manipulate their stooges for a century.

The simple fact is that they do not give a damn about anything or anyone but their own personal gain. They don't give a damn about whether the US survives as a country. They thought back at the time the Constitution was written (look up Hamilton vs. Jefferson disagreements) that giving the rabble a say in government was a bad idea. They have survived as a subspecies since the middle ages, and are on the verge of re-establishing a social structure they like. Rove's talk of a 100-year republican rule was code for a coup.

HRC was right when she referred to a "vast right wing conspiracy." That IS what was working against Clinton from the moment he won the election.

There was a campaign poster in 2006 that said "Republicans think you're stupid!"

THAT is the message that needs to be delivered. Like Kuo when he realized the whole "faith-based initiatives" thing was a scam to sucker the fundamentalist into slavish allegiance, when it dawns on the masses that they have been made fools of, they will jump ship. This needs to be exposed, and instead of taking turns tearing each other down, the Dems need to hammer that message home. They need to have Thom Hartman as a speechwriter.

Before everyone screams "its the primaries, they have to tear each other down" think about this: If one candidate put it all together like this and said, "I don't care which of us you choose; just be acutely aware that the future of our republic and your own self-interest depends on running these people off" don't you think people would rally around that person? To hell with which healthcare plan is better - cripes, NONE of them will actually be implemented exactly as described. The person who demonstrates that they have seen the real enemy and sounds the alarm is the one who will win. And if some of the dem candidatesa don't want to come out and confront, if they are not-quite dems, then they should be shown up for that, not by sniping at them, but by setting an example they dare not follow.

They say that in wartime people rally around the leader, they are all Americans first. Well, this is wartime - war against the middle class! Everyone who makes less than 300K a year should be in fear of being in a breadline, or riding a boxcar to California to pick grapes. We need the middle class and the poor all to recognize that the elite will never, ever give up power, will never, ever do anything for them out of altruism. "Let then eat cake" is their mantra. They will bail out their buddies who own financial institutions while throwing the rabble into the streets.

[SoCalDem]

4. You are right.. It's deliberate.. That's why it's even MORE important

to END republican rule..for a very long time..

I have no illusions, though.. the dems are not always all that much better in practice, but the basic philosophy IS.