I am truly at a loss to come up with examples of Republican party accomplishments that can be viewed as anything OTHER than trolling on a national scale.
As of late, House Republicans have offered nothing but pointless ObamaCare repeal votes, a multitude of proposals that seek to regulate and otherwise limit women's reproductive rights, and ZERO jobs bills. Senate Republicans have been even more productive, having offered a wide variety of filibusters for everything from judicial/administrative nominations to gun background checks and everything in between.
We've got “patriots” infesting Sunday Talk shows and Twitter hashtags screaming BENGHAZI like it's a crisis of such magnitude that nothing short of impeachment will avenge the four deaths that resulted from the incident. Republicans seem to be under the impression that relentlessly droning on and on about Benghazi will eventually transform it into something larger than it is. The possibility that the exact opposite might happen instead — the complete desensitization of the public to an incident Republicans will have only succeeded in further obfuscating — never even crosses their minds. Conspicuously absent from their around-the-clock coverage of this drummed-up has-been of an issue is their role in creating the conditions that allow these types of incidents to happen in the first place.
As far as Republicans are concerned, the incompetence of the Bush Administration — if they ever believed it existed in the first place — and the national nightmare borne of it, are all but forgotten. The fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney avoided prosecution and impeachment themselves, as well as the results of the GOP's last foray into this type of politically-motivated show trial, have similarly slipped their minds.
When you're a party so far out of touch with reality as the current GOP, with nothing else to offer aside from the tried-and-failed policies of the past, and when changing demographics are rapidly chipping away at what's left of your traditional base, what do you do? You troll the country with phantom conspiracies and piss-off the constituencies essential to future electoral success, of course.
And when you're terrified at the thought of the electoral destruction your party will incur should a certain candidate decide to run in 2016, you troll an issue by perpetuating and inflating it, long past it's freshness date, in the hopes something might stick. What Republicans fail to recognize, or, more likely, willfully ignore, is that said potential candidate has dealt with this type of crap before. Several times, in fact. And yet she's still in a position to mop the floor with whatever degenerate 19th-century throw-back the Republican party manages to offer-up as their nominee.
For whatever reason, be it racially-motivated hatred of President Obama, or just the pathological obsession to regain power by a cornered opposition party, the non-stop filibusters and goal-post moving, along with refusing to take “yes” for answer, even when the Left finds itself in the uncomfortable position of hoping they won't, can be neatly summed up as, you guessed it, trolling.
The goal? To hoodwink the country into putting yet another Republican in the White House so we can get yet another one or two terms worth of freedom, liberty and UNMITIGATED DISASTER. As if the last eight years of their brand of “leadership” wasn't enough. And they expect this power to be handed over to them without having to do a single damn thing to prove to the American people that they'd do anything differently than last time. The only thing they have managed to demonstrate they'd do better next time around is to make things worse.
As if Republicans weren't a big enough problem in and of themselves, we've got a few Republican-trolling enablers here on this side of the aisle helping them out. Democrats in congress, with the exception of a precious few, aren't out making the case to the public adequately enough for voters to discern the difference between parties on non-social issues, because it's getting harder and harder to do so, and quite frankly, Democrats don't seem to be as proficient at defining the message as Republicans are. President Obama, for whatever motives one chooses to ascribe to his actions, hasn't done us any favors either lately. With his budget proposal and the “cuts-that-really-aren't-cuts-until-you-look-a-little-closer-and-realize-they-really-are-indeed-cuts” Chained CPI lunacy contained therein, our chances of regaining the House certainly haven't improved when we now have to deal with the very real possibility that Democratic candidates will be forced to run against their own president AND their Republican opponents on the issue.
And 2014 will be here before we know it, bringing with it all the difficulties inherent to mid-term elections.
Republicans will likely turn out en masse to mindlessly vote Republican out of habit or some paranoid fear of a conspiracy that'll surely come to pass because of Democrats. The fact that their party loyality translates into policies, with the exception of their precious Second Amendment, that are decidedly not in their best interest or that of the country as a whole, will not factor into their votes, as usual.
Democrats will be trying to sell senior citizens on why chained CPI isn't so bad or something, drag themselves to the polls and vote Democratic out of a very real fear of the alternative being much worse, and because Democrats have traditionally been the party of tolerance and have, for the most part, advocated for the average citizen. All the while not realizing the stealthy but significant steps the party has made in recent years towards becoming something much different than the one we've come to know.
Swing voters will, as usual, likely vote for the party that produces the most convincing propaganda and/or the party opposite the one that fails to play for keeps or adequately push back against misinformation, and certainly the one that succeeds in all of these areas.
So in the meantime, the Party of Troll does the only thing it knows how to do, pretend it is “growing the party” with faux “outreach” initiatives that anyone with a pulse should be able to recognize are patently insincere, dredge-up “nontroversies” and other shiny objects that are completely inconsequential to the plight of average citizens, and relentlessly point out every single possible fault with the Democratic party in an attempt to lower the bar by which they themselves might be compared, if only the media had an interest in doing so.
So the question is, how do you avoid “feeding the troll” without allowing them to define the message?
The only answer I can come up with is essentially the same one we've been screaming for all along, and the one that seems to be continuously ignored by Democratic Leadership in DC: troll back harder.
And yet here we are. Still.
