Everybody Goes to Rick's

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

When I think of the Republican Party I think of Rick’s Café Americain, the nightclub that served as the backdrop for the Warner Brother’s 1942 film classic Casablanca. Most of the story takes place in a saloon run by the romantic and cynical American expatriate Richard Blaine. His nightclub represents an oasis in an oasis, and a place of escape for refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe. There, they could buy a drink and listen to music from the good-old-days rendered by Sam the piano player. The bar is a Tower of Babel filled with desperate souls of different nationalities and languages united in their quest to escape the insanity of an encroaching enemy. For them, Rick’s is a mere way station on a journey to someplace else.

As the Democratic Party tilted leftward during the Vietnam War, the Republican Party turned into a kind of Rick’s café for F.D.R. traditionalist refugees. Many of these expatriates, however, brought some of their New Deal baggage with them. The media would have us believe that Republicans have always tilted hard to the right, but since the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, the Party of Lincoln has steered a decidedly middle course. Ronald Reagan was a momentary deviation from this decades-long pattern, which, after Reagan’s departure from the political scene in 1988, continued on it’s marry centrist path right up to the Presidential nomination of Sen. John McCain – the “reach across the aisle” centrist.

With the electoral loss last November 4th, the centrist Republican Party nightclub got decidedly smaller. A new generation of Americans, born in comfort and never tempered by war (it’s an all volunteer military these days) or a hard and bitter peace, made its voice heard. They rejected the meandering Republican middle course in favor of the University-approved, Madison Avenue repackaged version of a far more expansive nanny-state than F.D.R. or Lyndon Johnson could ever have imagined.

Now the last plane to Lisbon, and then freedom, will land all refugees in a new Obamaized America; a land of “community organizers” and “change.”

"There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression,” said candidate Obama on Meet the Press. “And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing.' If that were our anthem, then I might salute it. We should consider to reinvent our National Anthem as well as to redesign our Flag to better offer our enemies
hope and love."

For those with memories longer than the average college-age voter, the “I’d Like to Teach the World To Sing” ditty was a 1970s commercial jingle for Coca Cola. How fitting that Obama, a product of slick mass advertising, suggests replacing the nation’s anthem with a 60-second feel-good sing-along. It won’t happen, of course, but it illustrates the unseriousness of the new President and his MTV-addled supporters.

The chief reason the unserious party won such a decisive victory last election (and will continue doing so) is that the Republican refugees in Rick’s café don’t speak the same language. There is no coherent theme uniting them other than “I don’t want to me them.”  It was Reagan’s coherent conservative vision that saw intrusive state power as a menacing threat to the freedom and economic wellbeing of Americans that spoke clearly and convincingly to his fellow citizens – something Republicans have failed to do since his passing.

If Republicans continue on their muddled middle course, defeat and the Republican Party are beginning a not so beautiful friendship.

--Mr. Curmudgeon