Fire them all, and bring back hope

Politics is about change. If you don't believe change is possible, you're not an advocate for politics; you're simply a guy taking a check, discussing which other guys should get checks.

Ace posted this over a week ago, in reaction to John Boehner's resignation, but it's still worth your time and attention. He explains why Boehner's entire leadership team should be purged and urges Freedom Caucus members and other House Republican outsiders to block them from remaining in leadership.

...Under no circumstances should the Freedom Caucus permit McCarthy, Scalise, or Cathy McMorris Rogers -- all the Boehner Warriors who have brought GOP morale to all-time lows -- to serve in any leadership position. A purge is a purge. To permit any of this crew to profit from their disasters would show the GOP to be what many of us strongly suspect it is -- basically, the Teachers Union for RINOs, an organization devoted to protecting its members jobs and not to serving its alleged constituents.

4. And on that point, note that if McCarthy, Scalise, and McMorris Rogers merely advance one step each in the leadership, then the only person to have paid any price here is Boehner; the rest of them will actually benefit from the Freedom Caucus forcing them out.

They should not benefit. We keep saying, of Obama, that failure ought to have consequences; how can this team be characterized as anything other than complete failures?

Are we rewarding Republican failures while claiming Obama should be held accountable for his own?

At the heart of the GOP failure is the failure to offer Republican voters any hope that things can be better. Congressional Republican leaders offered a great deal of hope in 2014 that GOP majorities in both houses could block and reverse Obamacare and executive amnesty; voters responded enthusiastically, giving Congressional Republicans a clear mandate to block Obama's lawlessness, and the Congressional GOP leadership proceeded to let them down, offering one excuse after another and acting like we were fools to believe their promises of action and resistance.

The fecklessness, failures, and flat-out betrayals of the current GOP leadership has destroyed all hope in the GOP. And a political movement without hope is not a political movement at all; it is simply an advocacy organization for getting a very small number of people cush jobs in the federal government.

If there is to be any hope permitted to the rank and file of the Republican Party, then we need big changes that permit us the illusion and fantasy of hope, without which we are nothing at all, just dejected former Republican voters.

Hope requires a change -- Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Cathy McMorris-Rogers are no change at all; they are simply John Boehner's less accomplished inferior employees.

Ace concludes:

I find it increasingly difficult to write about politics now, you may have noticed; it's because I can no longer even pretend to care which a[-----]e is in which federal sinecure.

I think many people feel the way I do.

And if you want to entice the alienated back into the fold, you have to at least let us dream of the possibility of actual change.

That requires allowing us hope -- and not simply doubling-down on the current crop of failures and fainthearts we are obligated, sourly, to call our "leadership."

Hope is a silly illusion, but it is a necessary, sustaining silly illusion.

Faint heart never won fair lady, fellas. Nor have fainthearts ever contributed anything to society, except cowardice and inertia.

Read the whole thing, which includes an analogy involving the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror."