To John McCain and Peter King: When will you meet me at a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan and say to my face everything you're saying about Ted Cruz? It's important you see the faces of Americans you attack when you attack Senator Cruz

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Update, Exactly right! Like I said (below) on 10/17. We have no voice without Ted: 11/13/13, "Ted Cruz: When You Attack Me, You’re Attacking the ‘American People’," MediaIte, Matt Wilstein

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10/17/13, To John McCain and Peter King:

I'm not going to link to your rants against Ted Cruz. You seem unaware that you're personally attacking millions of American people including me every time you attack Ted Cruz. Everything you say about him you're saying about me and you've never even met me. To help solve this problem, I'm willing to meet with either or both of you at a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan next time you're in town. When we sit down at a table, I'd like you to look me in the face and say all those words to me you're saying about Ted Cruz. The truth is I'm taking a bit of a risk meeting with people so filled with hate. But I'm willing to do it because you need to know exactly whom you're viciously attacking. To give you some perspective, this isn't about a political party. The GOP has technically been dead since at least Nov. 2008 anyway. You can leave a comment on this blog if you're able to meet. Thanks in advance for your time. Susan

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Regarding the death of the GOP, in 2007 Peggy Noonan wrote the Republican Party had been broken by both George Bushes. This obviously left only one functioning political party. Great for special interests but very bad for the country:

6/1/2007, “Too Bad,” Peggy Noonan, Wall St. Journal, “President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.”

“What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future. 

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
 
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad. 

But on immigration it has changed from “Too bad” to “You’re bad.”

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

 

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill–one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshaling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that.

 They make a call to emotions–this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position–but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate…. 

If they’d really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done–actually and believably done–the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
 

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
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What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks. 

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had.  
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Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

 

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
 
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than time.”

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2/20/13, “As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voters Are Orphaned,” Angelo Codevilla, Forbes
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“Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand submission as did the royal courts of old.”… 

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The Constitutional problem of ObamaCare:

Two days after Obama’s re-election John Boehner enthused that ObamaCare was “the law of the land” simply due to Obama’s re-election. ObamaCare isn’t the law of the land, for at least one reason. Mr. Boehner failed his constitutional duty to hold a vote in the House up or down on ObamaCare as a tax:

• 11/8/13, “John Boehner: ‘Obamacare is the law of the land’,” Politico, David Nather

“House Speaker John Boehner made it official Thursday: Obamacare isn’t going anywhere. In an interview with ABC News, Boehner seemed to suggest the election ended any efforts to wipe out the whole law. When “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer asked if there would be any more votes to repeal the law, Boehner said “the election changes that” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.””  
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