Whereas Buckley — save his venomous brushes with Vidal and with the ultra-conservatives such as Ayn Rand and Robert Welch and Welch’s John Birch Society — was always both generous and kind, the Party just got mean. Damned mean. And damned, despicably conniving, all the way to unfettered dishonest: The ends always justified the means. There just was no longer a place for honor. Rather, honor became weakness. If the “Southern strategy” — the highly deliberate play on Southern white bigotry — worked, that was all that mattered. And if that disingenuously cynical tactic worked, and if lying, brutal attacks on an opponent worked, well, so what? they worked. And if voter suppression and ballot-box manipulation further enhanced the margins of victory, so what? they worked. Power had become the end-all of all ends and means.
There are a few in the mold of the old-line Republicans who have not dived into the toxic pool of fetid slime that is the party today; Senators George Voinovich, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, and Representative Walter Jones, and Governors Charlie Crist and Schwarzenegger. The tragedy for the country is that they’re not just fading away like Nebraska’s Senator Chuck Hagel or Connecticut’s Representative Chris Shays, they’re being ruthlessly kicked out.
And they’re being kicked out, not so much by the party bosses as by the more and more narrow-minded Republican voters who long ago forsook any desire to see the success of this constitutional republic, as a constitutional republic, as a first guiding objective. No, Republican voters much preferred the malevolent anti-science, anti-intellectualism machinations and vitriolic sleaze of the ilk of Newt Gingrich, Tom “The Hammer” Delay, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, George Bush, and of the virulently hate-filled empty heads of Sean and Rush and Ann and Laura.
It’s not only the party that has lost in the exchange, it’s the United States of America. I miss the Republican Party.
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