Live from the Roasterie: Barry Goldwater was the crusader: roll back the New Deal as an un-American mistake that keeps people from learning how to stand on their own two feet and thus be strong. Richard Nixon was the divider: break America into two opposing nations, forcing people to choose sides in the belief that he would pick up the larger half. Ronald Reagan was the optimist: that it is morning and America is great now that we are here to help you by keeping the government from trying to help you.
But now we have a very different Republican Party on display:
: The 'Everything Is Bad' Party: "America’s potential, said Carly Fiorina, is being ‘crushed’...
...America’s military, said Marco Rubio, is being ‘eviscerated.’ Working people, said Mike Huckabee, are ‘taking a gut punch.’ The idea of America, said Bobby Jindal, is ‘slipping away.’ Donald Trump, as usual, went even further: ‘We don’t have a country.’ Last night’s Republican debate in the Reagan Library was not about Morning in America... [but] Darkness at Noon.... With occasional exceptions, usually involving the softer-edged John Kasich... for five hours, the candidates stood in front of Reagan’s plane and described America as a declining nation in a dystopic world... that the national debt is out of control, the economy is deteriorating, the government is corrupt, and the world, as Lindsey Graham put it, is ‘on fire’... ‘our left-wing government is undermining all the institutions that support the family’... the Iran nuclear deal would turn the Obama administration into the world’s largest financier of Islamic terror... the middle class ‘is getting plowed over by Barack Obama.’
The one thing the Republicans didn’t seem too concerned about was climate change, which they agreed was not a problem worthy of solutions....Obama provided an alternative view yesterday before the debate, making the case before the Business Roundtable that ‘America’s great right now’...
