The long game

Savvy politicos know that the winning hand is often held by whoever has the nerve to play the long game.  It helps when opponents are virtually clueless about the game that's actually being dealt.

Praise be for a sister - as committed a mid-late 20th century conservative as you could find - who ALWAYS pointed out the fallacy of ever believing a Republican who seemed to say that Roe v. Wade was untouchable, that Social Security was now the law of the land & untouchable, ditto Medicare.  She said that bringing down those three things were always & would be forever the core goal of the modern GOP.  I think she could have thrown in the any civil rights act & still been on target.

 

Bill Buckley was the erudite master of the long game.  It's time to get very afraid, Heather Cox Richardson's article in Salon, is an important read for understanding the genesis & evolution of his Conservative Movement that, seven years after his death, took down John Boehner.  A very long game, indeed.

 

 

One brief excerpt, that particularly speaks to what I've seen over the past 15 years, especially since 2009:
By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”  


photo credits:  neveryetmelted. com, mrctv.org