I laughed to myself the other day when I saw longtime Republican pollster/spinmeister Frank Luntz on one of the cable news outlets—probably Fox News, but I can’t recall—giving some GOP talking points a dry run.

Not that he was exactly trying anything new, or innovating. In the context of the budget battle, Obama’s speech and the DOA “Ryan plan” etc., Luntz merely trotted out the by-now familiar threadbare Republican shuck and jive routine about how American families understand that you can’t live beyond your means and that the only remedy for that would be to tighten belts, stop living on credit cards and pay off debts. And the Ryan plan is going to achieve this in Washington by blah blah blah. I don’t even know why he bothered to finish his thought, he just should have said “blah, blah, blah” and everyone still would have understood what exactly he meant, anyway. Who cares? Who gives a shit? We’ve heard this all before, ten thousand times… Enough.

It’s too predictable. Too rote. Too by the numbers. Too old-fashioned. Shtick. The Republican orthodoxy is over-exposed. Transparently obvious. People are sick of hearing it, and when they are forced to listen to it over and over and over again ad infinitum on Fox News and elsewhere, what might have sounded like simple down home “common sense” when Ronald Reagan said it, just sounds like disingenuous bullshit in 2011. Bullshit being dished out, in most instances by mean-looking old white guys on the tee-vee talking about lowering the nation’s prospects, en masse, of living out old age with dignity, in favor of still more tax cuts for the top 1%. The problem with this simplistic focus group-tested “homespun” GOP messaging stuff is that no one buys it anymore except for the very least sophisticated characters amongst us, i.e. the real Republican base: The Dummies.

Republicans need some new material. Badly. With Donald Trump in the race it’s going to take a turn for the “even dumber.” It’s bad not just for them, but for everybody. (Everybody except Obama… and Donald Trump, of course, who is playing everyone, or thinks he is. He wins no matter what!)

A short item that ran on Wonkette, I think, sums up just how stupid the “Republican message” is getting to sound to… the rest of us, when the latest gloss on their talking points goes something like this… Quoting from Team Sarah:

The $60 billion that the Republicans wanted to cut from spending (simple cuts, not “reductions in rates”) was to the Federal Budget what 1/2 of a French Fry would be to a Big Mac Value Meal (medium size). That’s right, 1/2 of a fry. So why did the Dems manage to get the Republicans to cut that down to $38 billion? Do you realize what that amounts to in the same Value Meal? 1/4 of a French Fry. That’s the equivalent amount of calories in the Big Mac Value Meal that the $38 billion represents in terms of government spending. Think about that the next time you get a Value Meal (of any kind) at the fast food drive-thru.

I certainly shall!

Sarah Palin herself has always seemed “one fry short of a Happy Meal” to me—a whole fry, mind you, not half of one—but even accounting for the bottomless pit appetite for the regurgitation of ludicrously simplistic talking points on the right, this is a new, groan-worthy, anti-intellectual low. Even coming from her blinkered camp. Why wouldn’t someone conclude that the Teabaggers are idiots after reading the kinds of… uh… fucking idiocy they espouse?

I mean who can take a metaphor about a Value Meal seriously?

It’s obvious: Dummies.

Below, pro-labor demonstrators nearly drown out Sarah Palin as she screeches nonsense addressing the Tea party faithful some dummies in Madison, WI, on April 15th. She tells them to fight for America, to take their country back and blah, blah, blah…
 

more vuvuzela

You know, I agree with everything you here except for the notion that people are getting tired of hearing these bullshit GOP talking points. It’s easy write off these people as dummies but they comprise a large enough group of voters in enough states that there is little hope of it changing soon. My own parents, who were absolutely ruined by the 2008 crash and survive pretty much exclusively on social security still foam at the mouth about how people are “penalized for being successful” in this country (read: taxed at progressive rates).

I love them but our best hope for this nation is that the boomer generation will die soon.

We interupt this program for a special bulletin.
A few GOP talking points from the old folks home.
Stop so much with the karl marx fantasy word propaganda. Why not focus on people like Franklin
and Jefferson. their ideas are PROVEN to work. I guess the dudes don’t count because they are dead?  ( turn me on dead man ) If you have the power to force taxes on the folks, you also have the power to destroy them.

Correction.  karl marx fantasy world propagana, not word propagana but word could have been used.

jo, everyone you mentioned is dead and that doesn’t matter really. and i’m pretty curious about your assertion viz. taxes. there is this idiotic idea cropping up that taxes are anything but a collective safety net to ensure the development of communities and, hopefully, not to leave some people within the community completely behind. You live in a retirement home that invariable receives state funds. Your entire economic life has been set up around government-initiated infrastructure.

On top of this, Jefferson was a hardcore agrarianist so this is probably the best route to take now, yes? And Ben Franklin was an avid astrology proponent who organized important events in his life around planetary alignments. Jefferson and Franklin arranged to move the signing of the Declaration from July 2 to July 4 for astrological purposes. Now, this is something I personally can get behind but somehow I think you’d say that is bunk.

in other words, they’re just dead guys! YOU are the source of your own ideology, drawn upon from infinite sources individual to you. don’t foist this on some dead guys and say its The Only Way.

Alex e, I can dig astrology. Why it’s nothin for me to pop in a cd of the Fifth Dimension singing the age of aquarious.

I was there.  The teabaggers were huddled at the podium which was surrounded stage right with a canvas-and-wood frame screen, 10 feet high, to keep counter protesters out of the picture. The cameras were on a 15 foot riser/scaffold.  The Madison police estimate was 6500 which appears accurate to me. I would estimate the crowd was 75% counter protesters.  It was blowing, drizzling and really cold, otherwise there would have been many more in attendance.  The line that rotted my socks was something about how ‘the cancer of progressivism needs to be stamped out.’  I can’t get my head around the fact that some libertarian utopian pipe dream can override a simple account of economic interest.

Isn’t this cunt’s 15 minutes just about over?

> I love them but our best hope for this nation is that the boomer
> generation will die soon.

That will help, but there’s a pretty sizable fresh crop of dunces to take their place.

It’s almost as if the corporatists have been breeding them when you look at our education system, media, etc.

that clip with the rifle, i bet that’s what she looks like during sex!just before orgasm!