They Are All RINOs

That's the assessment of Pedro Primavera at The American Thinker:

Republicans like to point to Ronald Reagan for inspiration. However, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that Ronald Reagan is dead. Worse, his legacy was killed off by his own party, the same Republicans who say he inspired them.

The only lasting legacy of George W. Bush was the nomination of two constructionist judges and a fading response to terrorism. For eight years, we saw GW insist more on getting along than being right. Even the war in Iraq was fought on the cheap, which defies the logic of waging war. In the long run, Bush's own dithering on Iraq cost many lives before finally settling on the surge.

And before GW were Bob Dole and GHW. Both had lengthy though uninspiring résumés. Their only real credentials were that it was their turn. The only conservative voice since Reagan was Newt Gingrich in Congress -- and Bill Clinton co-opted all of Newt's successes as his own. With a willing accomplice in Ross Perot (who probably couldn't stand either GHW or Dole from his Washington days -- Perot, perhaps the ultimate Washington insider, made his billions on Washington contacts, after all), all Clinton had to do to stay elected was refrain from embarrass himself -- and he barely managed that.

We hoped last year that maybe a Republican candidate with common sense would finally step forward. To a man, we heard the same political jargon in the primaries. Again, Republicans were left with another tired candidate in the form of John McCain.

Barack Obama is right on one thing: the Republicans in Congress do what the Democrats say. They have finally voted in unison, which I'm sure Obama expected, but the dissent to his presidency is mere background noise. Obama is playing the Republican establishment like a fiddle only because there is no clear message.

Three primary issues separate the two parties: taxes, size of government, and defense. GW failed on the first two and withered on the third, and his public support withered in lockstep. The current Republican establishment has absolutely no message whatsoever.

Read the rest here. You certainly don't have to look hard to see how Republicans are helping the Obama cause. Instead of standing firm against Obamacare they've been submitting amendments designed to "fix" the bill. All this does it make it easier to pass, and right now we don't need to help them pass a takeover of 1/6th of the U.S. economy. We need to stop it.

The notion that we must "all get along" is as one-sided as it gets in Washington, because "getting along" only applies to Republicans who must agree with Democrats on Democrat issues while Democrats are allowed to take "principled stands" against Republican issues. It's time to stop all that, and if it takes a complete change in GOP leadership and members, so be it.