Just yesterday I was wondering to myself if Liberty Counsel had finally had gotten tired of Matt Barber embarrassing the organization his with anti-gay rants and decided to keep him under wraps for a while, because I had noticed that I hadn’t seen his name pop up in articles and columns in recent weeks.
Of course, just like every other time I think that maybe the Religious Right has wised up and started to dial back its rhetoric because they realize that it is hurting their cause, they prove me wrong and Barber is back with a new column blasting the GOP for being insufficiently committed to the right-wing agenda and taking to task commentators and analysts who have “prematurely penned the conservative movement’s obituary”:
Although the marriage issue has, time and again, been a verifiable winner for the GOP, the party treats it like a political third rail.
The American people demand much more. They have forsaken the GOP because it first forsook them. Yet the party’s ideologically emaciated leaders remain oblivious to the obvious – blind to the political sustenance aplenty that pelts thick skulls like manna from Heaven. If the GOP ever wishes to reverse its spiral into the abyss of irrelevancy, it must, in word and deed, make a bold, unapologetic return to the fiscally conservative and socially conservative policies that fueled the Reagan revolution.
…
Yet, as we plunge headlong into the dark age of social and economic Obamunism, the GOP inexplicably continues to treat complete conservatives like that crazy uncle you only have over for Thanksgiving. When election season rolls around, it’s all hugs and kisses. After the returns – not even a phone call.
Well, complete conservatives have finally taken their ball and gone home. And, until the GOP finds the moral compass it so long ago tossed in the unforgiving wilderness sand, it’ll just have to keep pitching to Independents, liberal Republicans and moderate Democrats.
You know, like John McCain did.
The ironic thing about this piece is that it is exactly the same thing the Religious Right says every time the Republicans lose an election. The idea is that the GOP only loses when it is insufficiently committed to pursuing the right-wing agenda and it was this case that they explicitly made back in 2006. But, as I pointed out then, this sort of blame-casting was utterly mistaken considering that 10 of the 20 Republican House members and 5 of the 6 Republican Senators who lost their seats in that election were champions of the right-wing ideology and agenda as determined by the Religious Right’s own voter guides and lists of endorsements.
Furthermore, the claim that the Right is about take “their ball and go home” is, by this point, a tired and meaningless threat, as this is the sort of threat they issue whenever they are feeling neglected. And yet, inevitably, they swallow their pride and rally to the GOP when election time rolls around.
You know, like Barber did for John McCain and Sarah Palin.
