It’s 2010 and Michael Steele Is Still the Chairman of Nothing

I really would love it if Michael Steele’s ceremonial presence in the Republican Party were something other than a failed ploy at the GOP’s sad attempt to tell the world “Look we’ve got a Black guy too!!!” but I have no interest in lying to myself like so many of my fellow Americans do: These are invariably the same swath of the electorate who won’t concede that Sarah Palin’s ascendancy to the Vice Presidential candidacy in 2008 was just an ill-advised play for that energized Women’s vote they cynically attributed to Hillary Clinton’s having a vagina and nothing else. The Republican power brokers seemingly reasoned: “Well we’ll get a vagina too, and the American people will vote for that vagina instead!” Hence the choice of Sarah Palin instead of qualified, intelligent politicians like Christie Todd Whitman, Linda Lingle, who are also women, also Republican, but have substantive records and distinguished careers as Governors unlike Palin who recently quit her elected office. Michael Steele’s appointment last year is part of this same sad reasoning; it’s an indication of a party mired in a long overdue corrosive entropy brought about by the dishonesty with which is has presented itself to America after the Nixon era.

The GOP still wants me to pretend.

I won’t.
It’s too costly.

Interestingly, the tired Republican ploy of accusing an opponent of doing exactly what they themselves are doing to mask their more contemptuous maneuvers is still the go-to tactic for this party. The nation elected Barack Obama, and the GOP assumed that his “Blackness” was the key to his victory; not Obama’s platform, and not the GOP’s own 25 years of bad economic policy and specifically the last eight years of criminal ineptitude and corruption during the Bush administration. Republicans, instead of assessing their own record honestly as a party, launched one of their classic (read “played out”) initiatives; a whisper campaign to present Barack Obama as a “straw man” and an “empty suit” while offering a “genuine fake” of their own:
Michael Steele.

Regnery Publishing, a “conservative” publishing house has issued a book by Michael Steele called "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda" in which he reportedly (according to press releases and the AP) asks that the GOP should acknowledge how they “most glaringly compromised [their] principles" since 2000 and hold its elected Republicans accountable. I’d think Congressman Waxman of California who repeatedly subpoenaed Vice President Dick Cheney to no result last year would laugh heartily at Steele’s disingenuous statement. This book of Steele’s promises to be a straight talking to of sorts but is likely to be a rehash of the pro-deregulatory, anti-environmental, elitist, anti-working class, pro-corporate lies and hypocrisy that have been the real platform of the Republican Party since 1980, but let’s be honest:

Is there one single Republican out there in America who gives a single solitary shit about Michael Steele’s thoughts?Is there anyone at all?
Once you’ve been made to apologize to someone like Rush Limbaugh, you have been exposed as the very thing no one is impolite enough to say you are:
a fraud.

This book is the GOP’s attempt to win back the confidence (read “credulity and trust”) of the American people, but that’s not something you can do by lying over and over again. My collaborator MyeCue23 and I have written about this repeatedly on Random Thoughts, but I’ll say it again, America needs real alternatives to the Democratic Party, not an anti-intellectual opposite, but a real opposing dynamic viewpoint from the Right. I say this as a Liberal who actually believes in democracy, not cycles of power grabs for each side of the aisle. I’d vote for Republicans, if they’d they act like Republicans: stay out of people’s personal lives, support small business, support individual rights, stop kissing moral majority ass, stop awarding corporations welfare, stop defending the rich at the peril of everyone else in the world, stop being a de facto lobby for defense contractors. Above all: Republicans need to stop lying if they are to become an actual party again instead of just a special interest group.


I’ll offer one predictable recurring example of something this book will be missing even though I haven’t even read it, and I’ll gladly retract this statement, and apologize if I’m wrong: but I won’t be:
This book of Michael Steele’s will not acknowledge that President Reagan raised taxes and that President George HW Bush raised taxes just two years later, effectively saving the country (That was actually a good thing). Instead Republicans, like Anne Coulter in particular, would rather demonize George HW Bush and ignore Ronald Reagan’s own sober capitulation to reality in the 1980s in order to hold on to the unethical philosophy that insists the answer to all of our problems is letting the wealthiest people in America pay as little in taxes as possible.

In the end, the title of Steele’s book says it all. This book is not a righting of the ship, but a pathetic attempt to improve one’s fortunes by telling everyone that another ship belonging to someone else is sinking. This is wrong on all counts. The biggest lie Michael Steele is telling people with this book is that we are somehow not all in the same boat…

-well that and the lie about him being Chairman of the Republican Party. I don’t believe either one.
-SJ