The hypocrisy of the GOP

Colin Hannifin Columnist

The Grand Old Party has a tough mission: to represent the fiscally and socially conservative.

They’ve billed themselves as the purveyors of small government, advocating for decentralization and deregulation. Yet they also push for regulation to impart and impose social wisdom on their constituents. It’s awfully tough to reconcile these two views, and attempts to do so have turned the Republicans into hypocrites.

The Republicans have a grand opportunity this fall. The American people remain discontent with a stillsluggish economy and are growing angry at rising gas prices. President Obama’s approval rating sits discouragingly low for an incumbent seeking reelection. Yet the GOP, in trying to please everyone they claim to represent, is losing touch with the voters that matter most.

The division within the GOP is best illustrated by the highly fractured race for the presidential nomination.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum lead an ever-dwindling field of candidates vying for the Republican Party’s official endorsement. Romney sells himself as a business man, who can return fiscal responsibility to the federal government; Santorum is the spokesperson for the outspoken social conservative.

No matter who wins the nomination, the GOP still stands a fairly good chance, thanks to those that will come out only to vote against Obama. But winning the election is not enough; the Republicans have to perform once they’re in office, something of which there’s been far too little. In the fall of 2010, the Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives and immediately became the Party of No.

Instead of working across the aisle and collaborating on issues on which nearly everyone can agree, the GOP decided to become the roadblock to meaningful progress.

It’s understandable that there are some issues on which the party is unwilling to bend, but that shouldn’t include every single issue. For instance, many people realize that America's energy future is not in oil. It’s a finite resource and we’d do well to lessen our dependence on it – an issue both sides should agree on. Yet the Republicans, despite billing themselves as the spokespeople of the American people, push against the development of new energy, if only to save themselves the oil money that funds their campaigns.

The Republican Party desperately needs to take a step back and determine its identity.

Is it the party of small government and limited spending or the party of social conservatism and imposed morality? It’s impossible to be both; you can’t legislate morality and claim to be shrinking the government. This fundamental division in the party may lead to a complete split into two new parties. Indeed, this split may have begun with the formation of the Tea Party, advocates of fiscal responsibility and social libertarianism.

The times are shifting. We’re more accepting and less prejudiced than any generation before us. Though we still have work to do, we are harbingers of new kind of American. An American that is patriotic, yet has the insight to look beyond our borders. An American that is socially conscious, and not always willing to put profit before responsibility.

It is these kinds of Americans that the GOP is failing to capture, thanks largely to their emphasis on social conservatism. Few conservatives deny the importance of fiscal responsibility, but there are many that question the wisdom of enforced social conservatism.

The Republican Party is at a crossroad. Its fractious nature leaves its future undeterminable. It will likely show strongly this fall, but beyond this election cycle, the fractions will only widen. If the GOP stays on its course, those that are fiscally conservative but socially libertarian will find themselves without a home – and the Party with a much diminished voting base.

The ball is in the GOP’s court, and it’s their future to seize, but will they? CT

Kimberley Glascoe Columnist

American teenagers and 20-somethings are dumb.

At least that’s what everyone’s saying: “Back in my day there were no such things as calculators, iPods, cell phones or computers.”

So what? What’s so wrong with our technology-savvy generation?

Yes, a lot of us do spend more time on our cell phones, tweeting and updating our Facebook statuses than we do reading books, but really, when people look at us as the “new generation,” have they lost all hope?

Face it: We live in the age of technology.

Almost everything we do, we can do from the touch of a button or the flick of a finger. Just because we’re in the “know,” we can automatically be labeled as lazy buffoons. Of course there will always be people who abuse technology, but older generations have a way of stereotyping all of us.

The issue goes both ways and revolves around the issue of convenience. We’re always on the go, and maybe if we had more time to sit and do things, we’d be able to do them in a more traditional way. When it comes to technology, the same thing that helps us hurts us.

Technology has helped everyone, especially us college students, tremendously. One innovation in particular stands out: Google. Personally, I don’t know what I would do without Google. If we didn’t have search engines like Google, we’d still be reliant upon large, multivolume encyclopedias.

If somebody asked you to name every country in Africa, you wouldn’t turn to a map. You’d ask Google. That’s the extent to how much technology has subconsciously managed to dumb us down.