Neo-Con Agenda: The "New" GOP(.com)?

This was just too good to pass up.  When the news of the new RNC website came to my attention a few days ago I avoided it because it sounded like a pathetic (and failed) attempt to reach younger voters.  Here were some of the initial problems:

#1 - Michael Steele's Blog was called "What Up?" - I am personally offended by this.  not only am I offended because this is a national figure advocating improper english, but mostly because he is attempting to reach out to a younger generation that has no interest in republican politics.  Younger people are liberal, not because they are indoctrinated, but before your party is about 20 years behind the times.
#2 - No Future Leaders - The party has no future leaders because no one wants to be Republican
#3 - Jackie Robinson is a GOP Hero? - The party, in it's effort to protest their racist image, has declared that Jackie Robinson is a GOP Hero.  I'll talk about these issues later in this post, but for now lets just say, this isn't really true, he was actually very critical of their racial tactics.
#4 - Iraw War was the ONLY accomplishment? - Nope, I was not the one who misspelled that, the website misspelled it.  Spellcheck?  and doesn't it make sense to wait to launch a website until it's finished?

Alright, so now it's been a week, and I decided to go check out this website.  I figured I would get a good laugh and maybe, just maybe, I'd find something interesting.  Let me try to describe to you what I found.

Front Page:
I went looking around the front page.  Aside from the extremely irritating faces that replaced the "O" in GOP on the title bar, I found it to be quite pleasing to the eye.  There is a misleading video titled "Trillions in new spending" and a blog called "Sound Reasoning" that made me giggle a little bit at their hilarity, but then I stumbled on something very interesting.  You see I had recently caught up on my CNN Ticker reports, and found out that the insurance industry is now on the offensive against the Democratic health care bill.  Then, on the new RNC website, I saw this from the Facebook feed on the left hand side of the screen:

Realistically only one of them can be right, which leads me to believe that again, the RNC is deliberately misleading people...AGAIN!

Heroes:
So, I wanted to go see what all the fuss was about on this heroes page.  It does still include Jackie Robinson.  What really shocked me is that their heroes (aside from Reagan) are predominantly historical figures.  This is very smart on their part, because it's impossible for someone to claim with any certainty that Susan B. Anthony was NOT Republican (this assumes that they have no responsibility to prove that she IS, which seems to be that accepted assumption).

Steele's Blog:
Most likely as a response to the uproar of criticism (and outright mocking) that followed his first Blog "What Up?", Michael Steele's blog has been renamed, "Change The Game."  Nothing particularly surprising about this.  Once again Steele screwed up.

Accomplishments:
Alright this was the section that kinda pissed me off.  Why?  because it completely lacks a historical perspective and it does so for the purpose of misrepresenting history.  Is it factually correct?  Yes, but as any good historian knows, thats rarely the whole story.  In the Accomplishments section the GOP takes credit for all of the following:
The first hispanic governor
Freeing the slaves
Extending voting rights
The 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments
Opposing Plessy v. Ferguson
The first African-American Senator
The Civil Rights Act 1875
Women's rights
The first women mayors
The first jewish cabinet secretary
The first hipanic Senator
The first asian Senator
Wrote Brown v. Board (Justice Warren)
The interstate Highway System
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Ending Segregation in Little Rock
Opening Relations with China
-----------------------------------------------------
Tax Cuts (Reagan)
"Tear Down This Wall"
Contract with America
Welfare Reform
Operation Enduring Freedom
More Tax Cuts (Bush II)
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Vouchers for DC Schoolchildren

I could go on for HOURS about how each of these is somewhat misleading (like how the Republicans actually openly HATE Justice Warren), but I'll focus more on the big picture and why you should think hard before you vote Republican because of all the good stuff they've done.

History lesson: I purposefully added the line between "Opening relations with China" and "Tax Cuts (Reagan)."  I did so because this represented a major shift in the Republican party.  Yes, republicans up until that point had been extremely supportive of equal rights (notice how they have been silent on the matter for the past 30 years), however, that was a different party than the one we now know as Republicans.  When Reagan came to power, he did so by casting aside the old (racially diverse) republican party and bringing in three new (Neo-Conservative) interest groups: War Hawks (Political Conservatives), Free  Marketeers (Economic Conservatives), and the Religious Right (Social Conservatives).  This was Reagan's "Big Tent."

This process was made easier by the recent loss of minorities and women to the democratic party, who had become champions of equal rights in the courts.  "Liberalism" was championed by Earl Warren, whose leadership on the court is celebrated as a golden era for equal rights.  The only way that Republicans could regain their position of power was to incorporate the three extremist elements that had been left out.  Notice how ALL of the "accomplishments" since 1980 represent one of the three interest groups in the "Big Tent."  Tax Cuts for the rich (Free Marketeers), Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (War Hawks), Contract with America (Religious Right).  The Republican party has become the party of extremists and they have done so by implementing a populist propaganda campaign, while pushing and extremist agendas behind closed doors.

The current party has no right to claim pre-1980 Republican accomplishments as their own, because it's no longer the same party.

I give this Website an F, and I refer them to the office of judicial affairs for having perpetrated academic dishonesty