Republicans

I have said repeatedly of late that I do not know what has happened to the Republican party. Well, I do know, it has been taken over, but I am perplexed that so many in the party have allowed it to be taken over.
More Republicans are asking the same question, and are determining to do something about it, if it isn’t too late already. The party is no longer “conservative,” unless one wants to define “conservative” to mean only that which deals with morals and family values as defined by a small group of men and women who lead American para-church organizations.
The following essay was written by Garrison Keillor. If sums up some of what I feel, although I do not necessarily agree with everything he writes. Here it is…
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
by Garrison Keillor
“Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The
genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned–and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

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