Earth to GOP: We Can Save the Party

The Newsweek cover is vile and even overtly racist. Still, it's a bitter reminder of a big election day fail for the GOP.

The Republican base is hopping mad and, quite frankly, very disgusted with their party. Republican voters keep voting for less government, lower taxes and balanced budgets. Instead they get Democrats in elephant suits who spend, increase the debt, endorse entitlements and pursue an insane foreign policy that is bankrupting the nation.

The battle for the heart and soul of the GOP has always been the fiscal conservatives and liberty activists vs. the statist GOP elites. It wasn't just Ron Paul supporters who didn't show up to vote Republican. Many independents and very angry Republicans finally refused to vote Republican.

There's a WAR going on in the GOP and unless grassroots activists, Paulites, Libertarians, fiscal conservatives and independent voters can wrest control of the GOP from the clueless and revoltingly obnoxious elites who lord over the GOP, the Republican Party will be headed straight to the trash heap of history. Many who comprise the Republican base have been furious for a long time over what they perceive as a betrayal of conservative principles.

The independent Internet media and even mainstream media has been buzzing with tales about disgruntled Republicans.

There Is A Brutal Civil War In The GOP, And It Looks Like Karl Rove Will Be The First Casualty

Grassroots Republican operatives and Movement conservatives are quickly turning against the GOP Establishment in the wake of the party's expensive defeat this election cycle.

Republicans we spoke to this week voiced a near-universal disgust with the national Republican Party leaders and Washington political class, who are seen as having put their personal financial interest above winning the election.

What is finally happening is something that should have happened a long time ago - conservatives are finally revolting against their own damn worthless fraud of a party.

The GOP is not a unified party and never was.  The GOP has always been a fragile configuration of establishment Republicans, fiscal conservatives, paleo-conservatives, Buchananites, social conservatives, Libertarians and independents. That constituency fractured in 2006 because conservatives, diverse as they are, were thoroughly disgusted with the Republican Party and they still are.

The Republican Party didn't lose because of the Ron Paul voters and the fact that the Paulites were treated like pond scum at the RNC Convention but the Paulite vote definitely contributed to the Republican defeat because it combined with other disaffected conservative factions to deliver a decisive rejection of the GOP.

So how do we bring the cantankerous conservative factions together?  Actually, it's not that hard.  Stop spending money.  Stop building mountains of debt.  Stop the unconstitutional wars.  Balance the budget and don't spend anymore than is collected in taxes.  Stop corporate welfare and subsidies.  Stop draconian regulations that are killing entrepreneurship and driving business and capital offshore.  Endorse sound money and an end bankster bailouts.

Why is this so difficult?  It's not.  In fact, it's pretty straight forward conservatism.  But try finding one Republican who would agree and vote accordingly.  The voting records of nearly all Republicans are atrocious and an absolute affront to conservatism.

American isn't starved of conservatives or small government advocates.  America is swimming with conservatives, albeit very angry and frustrated conservatives who are delighting in extracting their pound of flesh from the GOP that betrayed them.

Conservatives need a platform of core issues that they can rally around and such a platform must be devoid of all the social conservative issues that are best handled at the state level.  Marriage has no business being a national campaign issue.

The best place for conservatives to start is with the specific enumerated federal powers stated in the Constitution.  Just stick with the Constitution and reject everything that is unconstitutional and, therefore, not authorized by the Constitution.

I suffered through the Republican debacle on a balanced budget amendment that was a total farce because it was loaded with more loopholes than Swiss cheese.  Why should a Republican need a balanced budget amendment just to balance the budget?  Just balance the damn budget.  Period.

The conservative base must fight for control of the GOP.  We need to get rid of a ton of corrupt dead weight Republican statists in Congress and at the state and local level.  The Republicans in Congress vastly contributed to the fiscal and economic nightmare we now face.  These folks need to be FIRED and replaced with true liberty candidates in the mold of Justin Amash and Rand Paul, and, of course, America's strongest constitutionalist and consistent advocate for peace, liberty and prosperity - Ron Paul..

Judge Andrew Napolitano took a swipe at the Republicans in his explanation of what 4 more years of Obama will deliver.

Four More Years for the Unwitting Authoritarian

What's going on here?.

What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans..

Mitt Romney is one of those Republicans. He is no opponent of federal entitlements, and he basically promised to keep them where they are. Where they are is a cost to taxpayers of about $1.7 trillion a year.....

As a practical matter, we are in for very difficult times during Obama's second term. Obamacare is now here to stay; so, no matter who you are or how you pay your medical bills, federal bureaucrats will direct your physicians in their treatment of you, and they will see your medical records. As well, Obama is committed to raising the debt of the federal government to $20 trillion. So, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives goes along with this, as it did during Obama's first term, the cost will be close to $1 trillion in interest payments every year. As well, everyone's taxes will go up on New Year's Day, as the Bush-era tax cuts will expire then. The progressive vision of a populace dependent on a central government and a European-style welfare state is now at hand.

Judge Napolitano raises a significant issue because the biggest problem facing America and the debt ridden west in general is that they've been borrowing so much money for such a long time that they now face a most hideous fate, namely that the debt burden reaches a point where nearly all tax revenues go to debt service and nations no longer have any money to fund social programs and other government expenditures.  This is precisely what is happening in Greece.  The Greeks who supported cradle to the grave entitlement programs that were funded with massive debt are now facing forced austerity as benefits are cut to service the debt.

So long as Republicans remain focused on the social issues and the pursuit of endless wars, they will continue to lose.  Most of the Republicans that currently hold congressional seats have as much backbone as cooked spaghetti.  Moving forward, the 'business as usual' attitude won't fly for a conservative base hungry and starved for real conservatism.

Republicans need to understand that their own party played a critical role in delivering the nightmare we are facing.  Americans, meet your future neighbors:

Yes, America really does spend over 50% of all tax receipts on wars

The above photo is from a very disturbing Rolling Stone magazine photo collection of US soldiers celebrating their kills, here.

WAR. WAR. WAR.  It's all America ever does.  America has been at war with somebody ever since I can remember and I can remember as far back as the early 1960's.  What is wrong with America?  Should we change our name to Murder, Inc.?  America is the only nation on the planet that murders folks all over the world for defense contractor profits.

How many folks has America been involved in killing?

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, Americans are addicted to the fantasy that war is noble, that murder is moral and that righteous people kill in the name of their flag.

WW I, 35,000,000 dead

WW II, At least 50,000,000 dead

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

American politicians love to talk about American Exceptionalism and the flag waving voters eat it up. We are exceptional all right – exceptional in the art of war and murder.

What has our lust for blood cost us? It’s cost us ‘Shock and Awe’ economic destruction. We are now barely a shadow of our once free and prosperous republic and we’ve morphed into Nazi Germany. America is now the Evil Empire that threatens life, peace and prosperity everywhere.

What is the annual cost of our perpetual non-stop wars? Let’s start with the federal budget. From the website of the White House, here’s the budget.

                            2011               2012
 Spending             3,603              3,796 Trillion
Tax Receipts         2,303              2,469
 Deficit                 1,300              1,327 

Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/tables.pdf

More astounding, entitlement payouts exceed tax revenues. In April, 2011 Fox News reported in an article titled Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues  that tax receipts no longer even cover entitlement costs. The figures quoted in the Fox News article are now a few years old and if anything, the entitlements have increased while revenues have remained flat as a result of the miserable economy.

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.

But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times. Also, an estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau, based on 2009 data. An estimated 46.5 million get Social Security; 42.6 million get Medicare; 42.4 million get Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million get housing subsidies; and 3.2 million get Veterans' benefits.

How much are we spending on the never ending wars, the foreign policy machine and the Empire? 

In a piece titled Tomgram: Chris Hellman, $1.2 Trillion for National Security and  posted at Tomsdispatch.com, Chris Helman, one of the few foreign policy analysts to put the true cost of the Empire into focus, writes:

Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year….

For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away….

Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities…

So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of: $703.1 billion dollars For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development….

$711.8 billion.

The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security”… 

$765.3 billion.

The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. …

$818.4 billion.

Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion…

$947.7 billion.

If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction… This leaves us at:

$965.7 billion.

As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:

$1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)

When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending. Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)

Chris Helman isn’t the only person to expose the true cost of the wars that are bankrupting us. Ron Paul said in one of the Republican  debates "I'm not sure I can get anybody to agree with me on this panel, but we spend $1.5 trillion overseas in wars that we don't need to be in and we need to cut there.".

Ron Paul: Time to stop spending trillions on war

The Washington Post, a pro-war and pro-interventionist mouthpiece of the elites, even whined that the current Iraq War alone would cost us more $3 trillion and that was back in 2008. 

The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More

If $3 trillion bucks sounds like an insane amount of money, apparently the Washington Post vastly underestimated our war costs. Steve Chapman in a Real Clear Politics piece titled “The Unaffordability of Endless War” said “Scholars Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard published a book in 2008 called "The Three Trillion Dollar War," which gives a more realistic estimate. But that, too, is an understatement. They figure that when all long-run costs are factored in, the tab will be at least $5 trillion and could reach $7 trillion, or nearly twice as much as this year's entire federal budget.” And that was two years ago. I asked Bilmes for an update, and she said some obligations, like veterans' medical and disability compensation costs, "have exceeded our earlier projections." Do I hear $8 trillion?”

$8,000,000,000,000 and counting? That was back in 2010 and since then Obama and Gang have escalated the war in Afghanistan, extended it into Pakistan, waged war on Libya, now wants to go to war with Syria and is sending troops to Africa. 

Yet, Americans continue to wave the flag and vote for more warmongers. Romney has vowed to increase military spending by $3 trillion. Will American bloodlust ever be satiated?

But by far the worst manifestations of military powers and maintaining a bankrupting empire transgress beyond the horrifying spectacle of the physical and human carnage of war because those same folks who deceptively internalized that war is noble also become its ultimate victims. Sooner or later the flag waving stops when folks realize that they have been systematically shorn of their own liberty and prosperity. The film clips of euphorically happy flag waving Germans idolizing Hitler and his evil is a stark contrast to the starving, homeless and terrified Germans in bombed out and burned out cities after WW II.

Worshiping the flag is most dangerous when folks fail to even realize what precisely the flag stands for. For Americans, they will eventually come to the frightening realization that they put their faith and trust in a government that betrayed them as they are forced to accept that they have been nothing more than pawns on the financial chessboard of empire wherein the wealth and power of the nation has been viciously concentrated into the hands of the ruling few – Banksters and their power brokers who delivered unto the people unemployment, economic misery, fiat currency, wars and grim futures.

Yet, the people cannot be absolved of responsibility.  They voted for everything they got and will get.  They delivered themselves into a totalitarian impoverishing hell.

At this point, what does the flag stand for? Nothing but the tens of trillions poured down the scary black hole of dark nothingness and militarism gone mad as the people ponder the failures of an evil debt ridden empire that bankrupted a once great, glorious, free and prosperous nation.

By the way, America really is spending over half of its $2.3-2.4 trillion in tax receipts on the wars, the foreign policy machine and the Evil Empire that is stretched around the entire planet.

We may as well rename our federal taxes the Military Tax or the War Tax or the Empire Tax because it's very appropriate.

The American people simply made the decision to relinquish their liberty and squander their prosperity on senseless wars and empire.  That's not something that sane folks do.  In many ways, our elected leaders mirror the souls of the people and it's clearly evident that the people and their leaders are in sync - both are psychotically bat shit crazy.

The price of empire is quite steep.  It crushes nations and brings them to their knees.  Every empire in history ultimately bites the dust.  The American Empire will be no different.