It turns out that voting Democratic — not just for president, but for congress too — might be the only way to save the Republican Party.
Over at the conservative Reason Online, Radley Balko explains:
Nothing short of defeat will put the GOP back on its limited government track. … In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it’s given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending — even on items not related to war or national security — has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that’s supposed to be ‘free market’ nationalizes huge chunks of the economy’s financial sector.
We’ve all watched as the Republican party has moved ever away from its roots as the party of small government, fiscal responsibility, and free enterprise, to a party dominated by a kind of lunatic fringe that is anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and anti-environment. Sarah Palin has been characterized as the last gasp of that fringe.
Doug Mataconis on Below the Beltway points out that electing Democrats may be the only way to save us from socialism, since the current Republican party has “tarnished the reputation of free market ideas in the minds of a public that doesn’t know better”. In the same way that “only Nixon could go to China”, only a Republican president (like Bush or McCain) could nationalize our financial system.
Part of the problem with the current Republican party is that they have pushed away or destroyed moderates like General Colin Powell (who at one time was considered a good candidate for president).
Another example is Slade Mead, who was elected to the Arizona Senate in 2002, only to be rejected by the Republican party because he didn’t support their efforts to “dismantle public schools” and replace them with religious and charter schools. The same article describes how in neighboring New Mexico, social conservatives pushed moderates out of positions of power in the Republican party.
Rush Limbaugh himself once said that if McCain got the nomination, “it’s going to destroy the Republican Party. It’s going to change it forever, be the end of it!” Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal disagrees, claiming that it is Bush who destroyed the Republican party, and if “you don’t know what broke the elephant you can’t put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can’t trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.”
By its actions — grasping onto Palin, and running negative and hateful campaigns — the Republican party is showing that it still doesn’t know how it is destroying itself. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent column giving concrete examples of how confused the Republicans are acting. Only by voting Democratic can we save the Republican Party from itself.
One Comment
Save the Republican Party! Why? So we can support a bunch of liberals? The Federal Government has two main jobs; Deliver the mail + defend the shores = Get the hell out of my way.
Deliver the mail; under this falls the transportation system, roads, trains and planes.
Defend the the shores; this includes international commerce, the miltary and immigration.
I am tired of the lack of backbone in the people who are to have the best interests of our Country at heart, to a person they are more concerned with keeping their position.
Why are our sons and daughters in the middle east? Afghanistan supported the people who attacked us in 2001. We should have bombed the country off the globe and told the rest of those people to keep their litter in their own sandbox, if you bring it back to our shores we will wipe you out. If the people of Iraq wanted Hussian out, they could have killed him, they seem to have a good supply of munitions…It is their own choice as a sovereign nation. We wouldn’t allow an outside people to decide our election…wait foreign money is allowed to pour into our campaigns.
What economic crises? America has borrowed itself into a hole, and the day of atonement is at hand. Too many foreign countries hold our lines of credit. Therefore they have vast amounts of control over what we can do. There is only false freedom in this country. The last thing we need is more credit. If you can’t pay for it, don’t buy it. Too much paper (fake) money is chasing too few goods and therefore prices are too high. Lower the money supply and prices will lower. Bigger isn’t better. If we don’t clean house in DC and put the Fed back in it’s place, our country is doomed to short place in history.