With Republicans Like These, Who Needs Democrats?

[mystery-ak]

February 18, 2023
With Republicans Like These, Who Needs Democrats?
By Pamela Garber

Reagan’s famous refusal to “exploit his opponent’s lack of experience” was a class method of swatting away the petty political poking of using age as an automatic determiner of ability. Just as everything once old becomes new again, the conflating of age with skillset has been dusted off by both Nikki Haley and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.

We all know there is some practicality to age limitations.  New football players at seventy and above exist only in fiction and dreams. But, one foundational tenant of our conservative ideology is that demographics are not tea leaves. A specific piece of demographical data does not automatically indicate or forecast other aspects of a person’s capabilities. That territory of cut and paste formulaic explanations -- where one piece of personal data is used to pigeonhole the entirety of someone’s persona -- belongs to the Democrats. Why are Nikki Haley and Sara Huckabee-Sanders borrowing it? The bootlegged explanation is that they are describing President Biden and other members of Congress.

Trump could not pay for a better barb. In terms of Nikki Haley’s campaign, what will she have to say about the savvy style of the ancient Betsy Ross? Maybe Betsy’s colors and proportions are gauche by today’s standards – what can you expect from a Philly gal older than Gen X, after all? Perhaps Nikki could take a page from Philadelphia’s Main Line to modernize our flag, since it is well over seventy. Then the crop of youthful presidential candidates could collectively rework Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Henry Kissinger’s insight can be better replaced with someone younger, perhaps George Stephanopoulos or Susan Rice?

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/with_republicans_like_these_who_needs_democrats.html

[Smokin Joe]

If you want the 'old' America back, you have to wean the children of the idea that only the latest and newest is good, and that the 'old' is bad or somehow lesser.


The mentality is part and parcel of Madison Avenue's planned obsolescence that kept people discarding the functional for the latest gizmos in a constant parade of keeping up with the Jones'.

Sadly, that mentality has bled over onto traditions and institutions that have withstood the test of time, institutions and traditions built on a foundation of the Wisdom of the Ages, ant hose willing to discard those institutions and traditions have yet to find out that the 'new' ideas they embrace have failed humanity, repeatedly, and been discarded under different labels because those precepts just don't work. Unfortunately, those 'new' ideologies have been repackaged by those who would use them to their own gain and humanity's detriment, and trotted out again, despite costing millions of lives to be removed or resisted in the past.

That slaughter may well be part of the cycle, and I doubt if we will return those time tried concepts to the fore in my lifetime, or without the sanguineous social cataclysms so evident in history for those who will only look.

But then, if they had taken a long look at the things they'd propose, they'd see the ancient works of demons dressed in new clothes.