UnNews:GOP starts happy-face Web site

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

29 May 2010

Finally, a way to talk to Republicans (or at least their pollsters) for less than $10,000 a plate.

WASHINGTON, D.C -- Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) used the weekly GOP radio and Internet address to announce a happy-face Republican Party Web site designed to convince voters that the party is listening to them.

The web site, using gentle pastels and graphics that look like handwriting, invites visitors to comment on a wide range of issues--or suggest their own. Authentic Republicans, for example, can suggest that the Party revert to principles, after four years of trying to look like Democrats with neckties. And Democrats can suggest hoax issues, such as, "Send all the Niggers back to Africa," and have it look as though a Republican wrote it. All submissions are voted on by anonymous visitors, lending further credibility to real and fake submissions alike. For example, if a hundred saboteurs voted for the nigger idea, it would get wide coverage on the networks, and some clueless Republican would probably file an actual bill.

Republicans in the House of Representatives launched the web site, in advance of the November elections when all House terms expire, to grope for new ideas that resonate with the voters. Claiming to listen to voters is a proud tradition of both major parties in the U.S., going back to Hillary Clinton's notorious Listening Tour, a stunt designed to convince non-Marxists they could influence her. President Obama's Town-Hall Meetings on his "health care" bill went less well, leading the President to accuse citizens of lacking the decorum and civility that any federal takeover deserves.

The weekly radio address is a tradition, begun under President Reagan, under which the President and his foes each give five-minute speeches, in which they talk past one another, as though this is how any American wanted to spend a Saturday morning in late spring. Indeed, Mr. Obama used his speech to urge citizens to remember military veterans during this Memorial Day weekend--"not just cook barbecues and cling to your guns and religion." These remarks undercut Republican criticism that Mr. Obama was the first President in decades to shun the military cemetery. It also took the issue away from Republicans, as traditionally, the opposition never either rebuts the President nor even talks about the same thing. Instead, Republicans were forced to hump their new web site.

Later in his radio address, Rep. McCarthy criticized the Obama agenda, the two-thousand-page bills loaded with pork and favors on Health Care Affordability, in contrast to the good old days of two-thousand-page bills loaded with pork and favors on Homeland Security. Rep. McCarthy said Americans are, "fed up with the spending, the taxes, the bailouts and the debt." Former President Bush could not be reached for comment.

Sources

• "rj," "Radio: Obama reflects; GOP seeks advice" WBZ Radio (Boston, Mass.), May 29, 2010