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.
\nMore 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.
\nThe 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…
\nWe’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore<\/b>
\nby Garrison Keillor
\n“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
\ngenial 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.<\/p>\n
\nIn the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
\nThe party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
\nRich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest!
\nWild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering!
\nPocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms
\nand write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires!
\nHypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where
\nart thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated
\ngaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine
\nGrace.
\nHere in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform
\nof tragedy–the single greatest failure of national defense in our
\nhistory, the attacks of 9\/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this
\nnation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House
\nfought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the
\nhubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead
\nus into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent,
\neven as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken
\nfor the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public
\non the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to
\ndistract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country,
\nflowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
\nThe concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is
\nthe death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity
\nhas survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what
\nhappens to ours. The omens are not good.
\nOur beloved land has been fogged with fear–fear, the greatest
\npolitical strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat
\nof whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence
\nthe opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint
\nbullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate
\nfederal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill,
\nstupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
\nThere is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the
\nFlorida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9\/11 that we
\nkeep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning
\npoint in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse
\nof security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard
\nquestions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security
\nat the time.
\nWhenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or
\ngetting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on
\nthe 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that
\nnon-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with
\na little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory
\nin November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his
\nsecond term.
\nThis year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
\nembittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
\ncommunards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the
\nDeadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the
\nfootage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies
\nbeing carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with
\nastonishing enthusiasm.
\nThe Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron
\nand by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as
\nwhat Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has
\nhumbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and
\nschool prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books
\nwe read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the
\nforests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of
\nintolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves
\nand to hell with anybody who opposes them.
\nThis is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We
\nhave a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape
\nthan however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not
\ngetting any younger.
\nDante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who
\nin time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank
\nyou, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is
\nmore to life than winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading