Should @TedNugent And The NRA Just Morph Into A Political Party?

Posted on | January 19, 2013 | 51 Comments

by Smitty

His Tedness remains quintessentially American:

My point here is:

The GOP seems kinda feckless.
Political parties ain’t beanbag.
The NRA offers great depth, if not breadth.
The threat of an under-bussing might get a bit of notice from the GOP elite, once Boehner’s tear tank runs low.

The NRA has succeeded by focusing on just the one amendment. However, the collapse of the other nine in the Bill of Rights is truly worrisome.

via Fox and Bunker91

Category: Celebrities

Comments

51 Responses to “Should @TedNugent And The NRA Just Morph Into A Political Party?”

Steve in TN ™
January 19th, 2013 @ 11:25 pm

It is well past time that #TeaParty types understand that we MUST complete our take over of the #GOP. Whenever we choose to, we win. When we stay home we get terrorists occupying the White House. This “we need another party” crap is what is feckless.

If you don’t like the GOP… CHANGE IT.
MrPaulRevere
January 19th, 2013 @ 11:53 pm

Ted telegraphed this message to todays times back in the 70’s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSRso98V-os
Wesley Mcgranor
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:18 am

The Constitution Party could use some ‘P.R.’
Freddie Sykes
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:19 am

Never forget that the NRA is a single issue organization. If the incumbent and the challenger have equally good records on the 2nd Amendment, the NRA always endorses the incumbent without considering any other issues. They supported Harry Reid on this criteria

Appreciate the NRA for what it is but never assign to it a role for which it is not suited.
Adjoran
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:00 am

Ah, yes, more “third party” talk.

As Mark Twain observed about the weather, everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it.

Does anyone believe this scares Republicans? Or does it make those committed to the party more likely to dismiss the disgruntled grumblers as a bunch of malcontent kooks whose votes might be missed but whose incessant pathetic whining and complaining would not?
Adjoran
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:00 am

In 20 years of trying, their top national vote for President topped out at 0.19% in 1996, total votes for the House at 0.14% in 2010, when they also set their all-time national total for Senate votes at 0.51%, or close to what Libertarians get every cycle.

They need a heckuva lot more than ‘P.R.’
The Political Hat
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:58 am

The Republican Party started out as a primarily anti-slavery party when both the Whigs and the Democrats were wishy-washy on it (if not outright pro-slavery).

Of course, the GOP benefited by the implosion of the Whig party.

The GOP hasn’t imploded irrevocably yet… but if it does, I fear the damage from the Progressive left will be such that ANY pro-freedom party that is formed will form too late to save the country.

This will not end well…
firefirefire
January 20th, 2013 @ 5:51 am

I don’t know about the NRA but it’s pretty clear that the GOP no longer represents conservative voters. This is how I see it; The gop is like the 60’s Dems and the dems are now Communists. We need a new party to represent Conservative and “America First” type Americans. Maybe after the Civil War?
smitty
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:50 am

This post is part of that effort. However, one always needs a Plan B.
Matthew W
January 20th, 2013 @ 8:29 am

“The GOP seems kinda feckless”
Understatement of the decade
jsn2
January 20th, 2013 @ 10:13 am

Nah, but having Ted as Secretary of Homeland Security would be good.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:22 am

Losing is losing. The GOP has lost repeatedly in national elections. And their ‘victories’ aren’t anything to be proud of for conservatives. Conservatives represent almost 40% of the electorate, and they haven’t had a President since Reagan.

So how long do you propose we continue losing with the squish GOP? One more cycle? 10? How long is long enough?
richard mcenroe
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:28 am

The NRA has a lot to offer any nascent political party. A solid and growing base, an efficient and active nationwide organization, media experience AND its own outlets, an awesome fundraising organization, all already in place. Seriously, the Tea Party might do better working with the NRA than trying to pry the decaying GOP structure out of the arthritic hands of the DC GOP.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:28 am

Ah, more talk about how the GOP deserves unquestioned loyalty for continuing to serve us losers who insist on fighting every issue and election on the Left’s terms. More talk about how a party that spits in our face and betrays the majority of its base to appease the media should be propped up by our efforts.

Really. I’ll ask again: How long until we realize the GOP is just one half of a Duopoly? And is as much part of the problem as the Democrats.
Your Sunday Best « The Daley Gator
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:37 am

[…] Smitty has video of Ted Nugent. I cannot agree more Ted […]
StrangernFiction
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:45 am

Good luck with that.
StrangernFiction
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:47 am

Plan B — States telling Fedzilla to F off — is the only plan with any chance of success.
StrangernFiction
January 20th, 2013 @ 11:49 am

It seems it will be a good while longer before they realize this, unfortunately.
20 Jan 2013 Headlines Courtesy Of Adriana Lima
January 20th, 2013 @ 12:10 pm

[…] The Other McCain: Should @TedNugent And The NRA Just Morph Into A Political Party? […]
ReaganiteRepublican
January 20th, 2013 @ 12:21 pm

That, or a militia
richard mcenroe
January 20th, 2013 @ 12:36 pm

I’d just like to take a moment to say “Hi!” to our new visitors from Echelon…
Jaynie59
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:04 pm

“The NRA has succeeded by focusing on just the one amendment.”
I think you’ve hit on something important. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and that seems to be the problem with conservatives. When they concentrate on an issue they care about they always win. The problem is the cave on everything else.
Reagan’s biggest concern was communism and the threat posed by the Soviet Union*. Jim Inhofe pretty much single handedly prevented cap and trade and probably did more than any other politician to undermine the whole climate change scam.
I saw a speech Mitch McConnell gave about threats to the First Amendment and I was amazed at how strong and forceful he was. Gosh, I thought, if only he showed the same backbone when it came to fiscal issues. How could this man I’m watching, this squish, be the same man who not only caves to Democrats but goes out of his way to undermine his own side?
*That’s not a dig at Reagan. He got a lot done considering he had a Democrat House and the fact that they’re lying scumbags who didn’t keep their word is not his fault.
Jaynie59
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:08 pm

I have to disagree. The Republican Party is done. Obama didn’t win reelection. The Republicans lost because too many people will never vote for a Republican president ever for any reason. The attacks have worked and when the ecomony crashes in 2014 the Democrats will take back the House and that will be that.
It’s third party time.
WJJ Hoge
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:24 pm

Or maybe Director of the BATFE.
smitty
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:27 pm

You may discover that your state has less economic liberty than you realize.
richard mcenroe
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:41 pm

The problem with single issue politics is it leads to crap like endorsing Harry Reid because he’s solid on guns in 2010. Think that new gun range in Vegas was worth Reid running the Senate through 2016?

Maybe what we need is a network of single-issue groups working together, like the left puts together… but that would involve all of them acknowledging the importance of other issues.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:57 pm

And even longer before Adjoran sees the writing on the wall.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 1:58 pm

You’d better have a lot of body bags. When he goes to the office he’ll probably go postal and kill ’em all.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:01 pm

The Whigs had already imploded and that’s why a bunch of Whigs got together and formed the GOP. The Whigs were a Big Government Party and that got transferred to the GOP. Crony capitalism was also part of that package.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:05 pm

Adjoran will pooh pooh anything that does not include taking over the GOP, and I wonder if he even thinks it’s necessary.

The Constitutional Party needs two things, people and visibility. It won’t get the people when it requires anyone joining be a Christian (this may have changed). It can get visibility if they can get together with something like the TEA Party. The TEA Party would be a very good fit for it, and if that happened the GOP can kiss any electoral future good bye. I voted Constitutional in 2000 and 2004 because I couldn’t stomach Dubya Neoconism and lack of will to enforce immigration law. I also looked at his time as Texas Gov and did not like what I saw. Rush let himself be conned, but I wasn’t going to accept Dubya’s PR.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:08 pm

NRA needs to wake up and smell the French Roast. If the other 9 amendments in the Bill of Rights are gone, the 2nd will end up trashed as well. People will not rise up when you have an org like NRA that pushes just one, but ignores the rest of the picture. NRA likes to say they are a civil rights organization, but I can’t accept that when they ignore the overwhelming majority of civil rights violations.
Dai Alanye
January 20th, 2013 @ 2:13 pm

We lost in November because too many Republicans stayed home. The problem is turning out all potential R. votes, and what is needed are exciting candidates and a stirring message.

I don’t want to blame this all on Romney and his supporters, but that was part of the problem–i.e. RINOism. But it also indicates that renovating the GOP will be far easier than journeying to cloud-cuckoo land in search of a third party. Not one of the third parties had either an exciting candidate or a message broad enough to carry a large segment of the electorate.

Libertarians, Constitutionalists and Paulites would be better advised to work within the GOP while pushing their individual agendas. Look at Right to Life and Second Amendment backers for examples.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 3:54 pm

I think that’s part of it. Another part of it is the GOP Establishment is too convinced that a squish course can win to accept that 40 years of evidence says it can’t.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 3:59 pm

Why did the GOP voters stay home? Because the Establishment rigged the rules so their guy could win. Both in the primaries, when they moved dates illegally on repeated occasions, and in the Convention, where they silenced their own base to promote ‘unity.’

What makes you think the Establishment is going to do ‘anything’ different. How big a margin does the grassroots need to win by to overcome that. Now ask yourself if it isn’t easier to take the 40% of the electorate they spit on out of the party, make a new apparatus (or take over an existing one), and steal a march on the media for the remaining 10%.

The Establishment is as disinclined to give up their party suites in New England as the NRA is its guns.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 4:00 pm

I have to agree on this. The willingness of the NRA to trample on the 1st and 10th amendments in its attempt to protect the 2nd does not impress me.
Conservatives Don’t Have To Fix The National Republican Party « Blog de KingShamus
January 20th, 2013 @ 4:41 pm

[…] So should the Republican Party just pack it in? Obama certainly wants them broken and divided. The GOP has been so cowardly that there’s been talk that the National Rifle Association could become the opposition party. […]
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 5:52 pm

For the love of…

Why on Earth do people still talk about Conservatives who stayed home in 2012? Romney ended up with a few more votes than McCain did in 2008. It wasn’t conservative non-votes that lost this thing. It simply doesn’t compute.

Most analysts continue pointing to the changing demographics, and the fact that Obama got the lion’s share of votes from new immigrants and illegal aliens who voted. A metric a$$load of votes. He also got almost all union votes; especially conservative, gun owning union members (to see why he got those votes, skip a paragraph).

And nobody wants to address the fraud. They just want to act like the math all works out to enable them to blame stay-at-homes. Pretend math is supposed to be the left’s specialty.

Romney lost because he wasn’t able to convince enough people that he was different from Obama. When you run against a screwup, you have to look like you aren’t going to be the same sort of screwup. Romney never made the case that he would be less of a screwup than Obama.

Why? Because he didn’t believe in the underlying philosophy embodied in the Constitution. He only believes in a list of values. That’s like trying to be a great artist by being good at paint-by-number. If you don’t understand why those values work, then you’ll never be able to explain what good they are. Romney never explained what made his values work. He doesn’t really know why.

Forming a third party sounds great. If you have twenty years to get it done. The timespan worked in Lincoln’s day because the very notion of the American Experiment was not, in itself, under threat. Rather, it was more of an argument about what a Constitutionally Limited Government honoring Individual Liberty was to be: a bunch of states under a weak Federal union, or a merger of weak states into a massive federal system.

This time it’s different: we face the attempted murder, by Obama and his Stalin-like network of cronies, of the very essence of liberty, where only one outcome is to be tolerated: monolithic totalitarianism.

We don’t have the luxury of “organizing” to fight this. We have to engage it NOW. Directly, without surcease.

I’ve proposed we all simply vote for one candidate, and form the party later. I say it should be Allen West. Rand Paul would be a second choice (but sorry, he doesn’t sound anywhere near as awesome at the podium). Rubio is like Romney: paint by numbers. He is not the guy. Not unless he changes.

Restoration is the key, not conservatism. Conservatives are too unfocused. Which brings me to the NRA concept. We need that sort of focus, but as Jaynie59 points out, the ones usually trying that will cave. It’s as predictable as daybreak.

I suggest the focus be Restoration, period.

If a libertarian guy is not for restoration, ignore him. If a Republican wants to be the next Romney, ignore him. If someone wants to be the next Reagan, but isn’t making Restoration his main thing: ig. nore. him.
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:01 pm

Not enough actually did stay home to make any difference. That wasn’t the problem.
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:05 pm

I took a serious look at their platform back when Santorum was facing elimination.

Short description: it stunk on steroids.

Until they fix that, there isn’t enough PR to help.
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:08 pm

I had the same experience. (CP wasn’t on my ballot, though, so I voted LP, both times). The second GWBush election was the last time we could really vote for an ineffective third party, though. Now we’re facing a wartime situation, and we need something stronger than just “party organizing.”
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:14 pm

That last bit looks, at first glance, to be a contradiction:

try focus…people will cave…focus on something else

What I mean is, broaden the focus to a well-understood, totally comprehensible set of principles: The Constitution as described by the framers. I.E., Restoration.
Shawn Gillogly
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:41 pm

This is true too. But the Establishment swallowed that meme to feel better about itself.
Dai Alanye
January 20th, 2013 @ 6:43 pm

To some extent at least, we do these things to ourselves. Had Gingrich quit after Florida, as he should have, or recognized his failure after Louisiana and Missouri, as any idiot should have, Santorum could have taken Romney.

Taking it further, had Santorum not listened to his wife before the Arizona debate, he could have taken Romney on his own.

I’m not suggesting that Santorum was the answer to our prayers, simply that not all things are predetermined by an omnipotent party elite. The establishment choice, Mitt Romney, had to fight tooth and nail for his primary win, spending huge bucks. It didn’t fall into his lap by any means.

When the base comes together, the establishment caves. The recent problem was that the base wasn’t sufficiently enamored of any particular candidate or, to put it contrariwise, no candidate had sufficient charisma to unite the base.

The answer to this problem doesn’t lie in a new party, nor do I see any sign of a strong new party coalescing.
McGehee
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:12 pm

The second GWBush election was the last time we could really vote for an ineffective third party, though.

Seems to me voting for an ineffective second parrty isn’t much better.
Dai Alanye
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:13 pm

I dunno, does Gillogly want a new party or a new nation? I don’t see either in the conservative future. If we are able to come up with a candidate who can unite traditional conservatives, fiscal conservatives and right to lifers we ought to succeed.

The notorious “establishment” can’t overcome a united base. They weren’t able to stop Goldwater in ’64, nor Reagan in ’80. Indeed, it took an incumbent to stop Reagan in ’76.

But those were strong candidates, the one thing we don’t have at present.
McGehee
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:19 pm

They weren’t able to stop Goldwater in ’64

They couldn’t stop him from getting the nomination, but they sure weren’t very enthusiastic about getting him elected once he had it — as today, they were more willing to see the Democrat win than the conservative.
Quartermaster
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:34 pm

It isn’t *any* better.
Dai Alanye
January 20th, 2013 @ 7:55 pm

Who is “they?” If you mean Rockefeller Republicans you are correct, but the typical portions of the party I saw were all for AuH2O.

The main difficulty had to do with the muddled middle–those who refer to themselves as independents, and who claim to “vote for the man.” I went to a rally of those types where the speaker referred seriously to Barry’s threat to saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float off into the Atlantic. What a radical! Him and his Constitution.

The point of my statement, however, was that the “establishment” was unable to stop Goldwater’s nomination in the face of a determined base.
K-Bob
January 20th, 2013 @ 8:40 pm

Sometimes I think the Republican party only exist to soak up the spill from the Dem party.
rmnixondeceased
January 20th, 2013 @ 9:25 pm

Mene, Mene, Teckel, Upharsin