Stereotyping Republicans: Ohio Joke of the Month

Elizabeth Barrette, a Democrat, shared this Daily Kos link with the note that the Republican Party's "branding problem" (formerly known as unfavorable stereotyping, but hey wait lefties have learned that stereotyping = Bad Thing, so they need a new word for it when they're the ones doing it) "gives me one big happy."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/21/1188676/-The-GOP-s-branding-problem-is-worse-than-you-think#

Well...like a lot of baby-boomers who are female and/or belong to ethnic minorities, I've never quite identified with the Republican Party either, although I've been unprejudiced enough to watch them and thus able to concede that most of them, by now, are unprejudiced too. Republicans do not demand that everyone who's allowed to speak look like President Eisenhower, any more. They made an honest effort to package Sarah Palin...as the dumb kid to serve as life insurance for the President, granted, but both parties do that whenever a vice-presidential nominee can't be packaged as the pathetic old geezer to serve as the same. They've accepted Condoleeza Rice, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Allen West, the Bachmanns...

If you believe this set of terms accurately describes today's Republican Party, you are far behind the times, and you just might be from Ohio:

"“Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”"

Though actually, if you believe that either "military retirees" or "farmers" are bad things for a political party to represent, your problems are more serious than being behind the times. Come to that, this web site has no problem with middle-aged White men, either, although we want political parties to represent other demographics too. (We're middle-aged White women; we like middle-aged White men.) And "religious" is definitely good. And "rich" is at least potentially good.

But if you believe that this prescription is what would help today's Republican party, you are, let's face it, a traditional Democrat:

"Asked what would make them change their mind and be more open to Republicans, the respondents urged Republicans to drop social issues, to drop opposition to science, and be more willing to compromise—hilarious advice in the context of the Hagel filibuster."

You're asking Republicans to become traditional Democrats so that the Democrats can become Neo-Progressive-Totalitarian-Global-Socialists. And if you're an honest traditional Democrat like Jim Hightower or Jimmy Carter or John McCutcheon or my Aunt Dotty of blessed memory, openly inviting "moderate" Republicans to cross over and help bring your party back to its roots, I like this. We need two parties. I personally prefer the more fiscally conservative of any two parties at this time of year, but we need both and I respect good people who are in the other one for valid reasons.

If you're a tax-and-spend Republican In Name Only who wants Republicans to become "Republicrats" so that there won't be a real conservative party and the Extreme Left can proceed to destroy our republic unopposed, I do understand that the demolition of the United States is not your goal, that creating more cushy jobs for your less promotable friends at the public expense is all you've really been trying to do...but somebody has to stop you. That's why we have a Tea Party movement.

And if you're one of the clueless proletarians who get all your information from partisan TV networks, of whom these "focus groups" were comprised...well, the Internet is here for you, and we in no way blame you for being working class, nor do we blame you for having been ill-informed. Bookmark this web site. We're here to educate you.

Omigoodness does this analysis mean that Elizabeth Barrette is pleased that young, ignorant people in her party are thinking in rigid, outdated stereotypes? Granted that that's how young, ignorant people, by definition, do think until we've challenged them to outgrow it...I'm sure she didn't mean it that way. Nobody, absolutely nobody, likes a RINO. Bad news for RINOs just about has to be good news for everyone else...except for the poor young people who aren't being challenged to learn to use their human brains in the way nature intended.

(This post is long enough, but I owe foreign readers some explanation of the inside joke. Ohio is a state where people invented a genre of mean-spirited jokes about "hillbillies" from Kentucky, which are basically moron jokes that work on the presupposition that everybody in Kentucky is stupid. So in Kentucky and other mountain states we have Ohio jokes, which are supposed to consist of actual news reports, printed in Ohio newspapers, that document the dumbth found in Ohio.)