Republican Does Not Equal Conservative

They're definitely not the same thing:

It is highlighted in this comment here with the guy weighing in as the mouthpiece of the establishment GOP.

And then there is my response.

One of the things I always find amusing is the leadership flacks for the GOP who come to RedState to lecture you and me that we are ignorant boobs who really don't know how anything works because we are not on Capitol Hill.

If only we were there we would know. And yet this guy gets several points wrong, including saying that the minority cannot force votes in the Senate when, in fact, we are seeing Jim DeMint do that [today] when he forces a vote on the constitutionality of the individual mandate.

But we're all just rubes.

It is comments like that first one that generally show how much contempt the GOP leadership has for you and me. Mitch McConnell spent the better part of yesterday parading around a host of talk radio shows and television shows to say the GOP would never give up and would never give in. They would fight until the bitter end.

Then he threw in the towel today because by golly it might snow in D.C. tomorrow night.

There is a reason the tea party movement outperforms the GOP in polls. The tea party movement has the perfect opportunity now to capitalize on the contempt GOP leaders show for the base and launch a coup of the party at the local level. The tea party activists can take over their local GOP precincts and through them take over their local and state parties, thereby taking over the national party.

The GOP is ripe for the taking by conservatives. And we might as well so we get a few leaders and staffers who don't hold activists in contempt.

I called both McConnell's office and Bond's office this morning and asked for an explanation of why the Senate GOP decided to give up the fight.  The staffers had no answer, and were just passing along comments.  The nice lady in McConnell's office mentioned that she'd been getting a lot of that question today.  I'll bet she has.

This is precisely the reason for the simmering anger in the GOP base.  We have to scream and shout and drag them along to get them to even talk tough, and even then it only lasts a couple days.  God forbid we'd actually get some real spine and action out of them!

The polls show a huge majority opposes DemCare, on any number of grounds (abortion, cost, unconstitutionality, shady back room deals, lack of transparency, destroying freedom, take your pick).  We've seen months of tea parties across the nation where literally millions of every day Americans have gathered to express their frustration with Washington.  Obama's approval ratings have tanked.  The economy still sucks and unemployment is through the roof, but the Dems insist on expanding government and taking over health care instead.  If there was ever a time when the Republican party could make a glaring statement that WE ARE DIFFERENT AND WE MEAN BUSINESS, this was it.

They failed, and failed badly.

If they couldn't -- or worse: WOULDN'T -- do it on DemCare, what hope is there for a stand on anything else?

The problem we have now is that most Americans lack real representation right now, and we know it.  Only the crazy kook fringe Left is represented in Washington right now; everyone else is adrift without a voice during a time of big national turmoil.  The country is largely conservative, but the Republican party can't seem to find its way back to the conservative principles that the country wants to see.  The Democrats never will, of course, but the GOP should find it a very simple thing to come home to its base, but they're unfortunately only giving it a half-hearted attempt.  Sure, they held firm and put up all 40 votes against DemCare on the cloture vote.  Yippee.  But what did you do to try to KILL it over the past couple months?  Almost nothing.  It passed out of all the Senate committees with GOP support.  As debate rolled on, there were no poison pill amendments, no killer add-ons, no sustained attempts to bog down the Senate indefinitely until the Dems were shaken to the core, no publicized drama, nothing.  It was one handshake after another in a long string of aw-gee-shucks-we-tried-really-hard-but-we-wanted-to-get-along-more-than-win moments that have infuriated the people living outside of Washington.  The American people are angry and want to see action, but the GOP isn't following through.  The message we need to communicate with crystal clarity to our elected reps in Washington right now is: WAKE THE HELL UP!!!

Or we'll wake you the hell up at the next election.

There's my two cents.