Hotline, National Journal‘s blog, reports some interesting buzz. Apparently the GOP is so inured to the war and so desperate to find allies who support it that, in the event of a Lieberman loss, they will encourage Connecticut Republicans to support an independent Lieberman bid. Perhaps they hope that they can throw enough support Joe’s way to convince him to vote with the GOP to organise, a la Jeffords, and help them keep the majority? In any event, it is worth noting just how unhinged the GOP is becoming: they will throw their weight behind a candidate who opposes them on everything except one issue just so that they will not have to suffer the ignominy of having their war repudiated in a statewide election.
For Desperate GOP, The War Is Everything
4 Responses to For Desperate GOP, The War Is Everything
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There is a certain consistency to it: support corrupt incumbents who do your bidding (at least when it comes to attacking other countries) rather than relatively independent and (probably) principled people who may be harder to cajole and control. But, yes, the GOP is showing everyone just how degenerate it has become. This should do wonders for encouraging their own base of supporters…to stay home!
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Well, you really ought to consider a trademark for your encapsulation of the GOP platfrom: Immigration, Imperialism, Insolvency. For it does appear to sum up the core, non-negotiable commitments of the party apparatus.
Of course, as one who joined the GOP as an opponent of such things, and for the purpose of advancing entirely other concerns, such as an end to judicial usurpation, particularly that which has enabled the cultural left to entrench itself as the arbiter of Constitutional meaning, and end to mass immigration, and federal devolution. I’ve known since about 1998 that I was fighting a losing battle within the party, but the past year has been truly disillusioning: I knew that it was bad, but had no idea it was reallt this bad.
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Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe I should get a trademark for that. Yes, it took me a while to recognise the depth of the GOP’s corruption, and my bitter awakening to this fact started right around the same time. Oddly enough the fact that there was some real Republican opposition to Kosovo led me to believe that the GOP still represented a sane foreign policy alternative, and I was even lulled into a false sense of security when Bush started talking about “humble” foreign policy. When he beat McCain, I was pleased that the neocons’ poster boy had been routed, and when he finally won in 2000 I have to admit that I was relieved that Gore had been kept out. But it all began to go downhill very, very quickly after that, and then reached critical mass in late ’01-early ’02. The subsequent GOP sell-outs confirmed what I had suspected about them for a while, and by the end of ’03 I could proudly declare myself an opponent of all the works of the Grand Old Party–because all their works had become the enemy of every conservative principle there was and had become hostile to the country itself. The war has simply exaggerated latent qualities that have been there for a long time, which I did not want to acknowledge for years. This Lieberman episode simply puts the icing on the cake of unprincipled warmongering that has become their stock-in-trade.
This is truly nauseous. The party establishment feels compelled to tout a man who has voted against every item, save one, in the party platform, yet in the case of my home state, faught against the candidacy of Pat Toomey, who actually espouses most of the items of that platform, in order to save the withered hide of Snarlin’ Arlen Specter.
This failed war policy does appear to be the one non-negotiable item, and when this fact is considered in conjuction with the indifference of the party to the social issues that motivated the ‘base’ to return them to power, well, what can we say but that we have glimpsed the soul of the party and stared into the abyss?