WASHINGTON – Starting off with a column titled “What the *#@% Is Wrong With Republicans?”, it’s going to be a very long week for Kathleen Parker.
It’s not just Akin. By pushing some of the most invasive state policies in modern history, the men of the GOP are driving their party off a cliff. – Kathleen Parker
She’s hardly alone. The lament from all quarters of the Republican Party as their convention gets underway would be sad if it weren’t completely self-inflicted.
It was proven again today, this time from a man named Tom Smith out of Pennsylvania, who’s running against Sen. Bob Casey. Smith said rape was as traumatic for the father as his daughter having “a baby out of wedlock.” I can only imagine what Parker said after she heard that one.
The setting for this unwinding was the Todd Akin catastrophe last week, which was made worse by Mike Huckabee and his merry men of zealots, which has highlighted the Republican Party’s war on women and magnified its power.
Republicans who are abortion rights opponents are entitled to their position, but the majority of Americans are against having these views enshrined in laws that subjugate women to state or federal laws that abridge their fundamental right to self-determination. Republicans will never win this argument, as I proved in a lengthy chapter in my book titled “Is Freedom Just For Men?”
The cumulative effect of these episodes, combined with Democrats’ carefully crafted GOP “war on women” narrative, have boxed Republicans into a corner of stubborn self-defeat. Hackneyed and contrived as this “war” is, there’s a reason it has gained traction. “Because it’s true,” says Margaret Hoover, a leading voice in the young conservative movement, CNN contributor, gay-marriage advocate, and author of American Individualism—a call to arms for her great-grandfather Herbert Hoover’s rugged individualism tempered with a community spirit suitable for the millennial generation.
Opting for a vernacular expression of her frustration, Hoover queries: “What the (*#@%) is wrong? What has happened within the party infrastructure that has malfunctioned so desperately, so that this minority of representatives are in such positions of power that are so out of step with the majority of Republicans?”
Republicans thinking they’re going to ever win over women with these cast of male candidates is what drove Kathleen Parker over the edge.
Taylor Marsh, a veteran political analyst and former Huffington Post contributor, is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media blog www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women and power.
Paul Szep cartoon used by permission.