I just read an article by a gentleman named Chris Currey. Now, this is the kind of Republican I could sit down and have a talk with. I miss ’em. God help us all if nutjobs like Sarah Palin are the future of the GOP. The real Conservatives are being driven out of the Republican party by the lunatic fringe. We’re getting into dangerous waters when only one of the two major political parties is based in reality. The Democrats are far from perfect, but the alternative is increasingly a bunch of weirdos with tin foil hats on their heads. Today’s GOP has left me no choice but to throw my support behind the Democrats and abandon my long held policy of voting for who I thought was best for the job, irregardless of their political affiliation. There are very few moderate Republicans that I can vote for anymore.
Anyway, I suggest you read Chris Currey’s article. It sums up this growing problem more eloquently than I ever could. Excerpts follow;
How the GOP Purged Me
by Chris Currey
I am an old Republican. I am religious, yet not a fanatic. I am a free-marketer; yet, I believe in the role of the government as a fair evenhanded referee. I am socially conservative; yet, I believe that my lesbian niece and my gay grandchild should have the full protection of the law and live as free Americans enjoying every aspect of our society with no prejudices and/or restrictions. Nowadays, my political and socio-economic profile would make me a Marxist, not a Republican.
I grew up in an era where William F. Buckley fought the John Birch society and kicked them out of the Republican Party. I grew up with -– in fact voted for the first time for –- Eisenhower. In 1956, he ran a campaign of dignity. A campaign that acknowledged that there are certain projects better suited to be handled by the government. See, business thinks in the short term, as he said. That’s the imperative of the marketplace. I invest and I expect that in a few quarters, I garner the fruits of my investment. Government, on the other hand, has the luxury to wait a few years, maybe decades, for a return on a given investment. As a former businessman, I know that first hand. Am I a Marxist for thinking that?
I witnessed the fight for equal civil rights in the 1960s. And as a proud American, I applauded the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and we became a better country because of them. Those acts made America stronger. Those acts, at their core, represented and still represent all the values upon which the Republican Party was founded. Yet today, our GOP representatives and leaders are ashamed of them. When they talk about them, you feel their discomfort, their clumsiness, and sometimes their shame. That awkwardness is so strong that it crosses the television screen and hits you in the face in your living room. Why is that? What happened to this generation of Republicans? We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and yet we act and behave as if we are the party of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
