Meeting Republicans at their level

hilzoy's wit goes there:

I have just concluded a special extraordinary session of me, in which I unanimously adopted the following resolution:

WHEREAS the Urban Dictionary defines "Poopyhead" as "The single most offensive thing you can call someone. It's like the atom bomb of arguments. Men fear it's omnipotent and awesome power. It it literally unmatched and all humble themselves in the presence of it's divinity. Few have survived to tell of it..." [sic];

WHEREAS the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, is deserving of any number of schoolyard epithets;

WHEREAS something has to stop them from making fools of themselves, and neither reason, decency, good sense, nor the prospect of an endless series of electoral defeats seems to do the trick;

WHEREAS the time therefore seems ripe to deploy "the atom bomb of arguments"; therefore be it

RESOLVED: that I, the member of me, recognize that the Republican Party is dedicated to reorganizing American society along poopyhead ideals; and be it further

RESOLVED: that I, the member of me, do call upon the Republican Party to be honest and truthful with the American people by acknowledging that they have devolved into a party of schoolchildren and should, therefore, agree to rename themselves the Grand Old Poopyheads.

Clearly the party needs to raise its level of discourse and take liberalism seriously; mere socialist monikers aren't going to fly.  The conceit that government intervention is a force for good leads to many bad ideas, and if conservatives keep resorting to name-calling instead of explaining why economic populism does not work well, they won't be persuasive.

The days when Republicans could get elected just by painting lefties as pinkos and promising to cut taxes and save us from terrorism are over. Grow the hell up, people.