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>
>
> 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 genial 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.
>
> In 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.
>
> The 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.
>
> Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like
> toadstools in the forest! Wild
> swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous
> gerrymandering!
> Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid
> lobbyists sit in committee
> rooms and write legislation to alleviate the
> suffering of
> billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds
> in the moonlight! O
> Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise
> and behold the Gilded
> Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding
> great wealth as the
> sure sign of Divine Grace.
>
> Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for
> reelection on a platform
> of tragedy-the single greatest failure of
> national defense in our
> history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men
> with box cutters put
> this nation into a tailspin, a failure the
> details of which the White
> House fought to keep secret even as it ran the
> country into hock up
> to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for
> the well-fixed,
> hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt
> that will render
> government impotent, even as we engage in a war
> against a small
> country that was undertaken for the president's
> personal satisfaction
> but sold to the American public on the basis of
> brazen
> misinformation, a war whose purpose is to
> distract us from an
> enormous transfer of wealth taking place in
> this country, flowing
> upward, and the deception is working
> beautifully.
>
> The concentration of wealth and power in the
> hands of the few is the
> death knell of democracy. No republic in the
> history of humanity has
> survived this. The election of 2004 will say
> something about what
> happens to ours. The omens are not good.
>
> Our beloved land has been fogged with
> fear-fear, the greatest
> political strategy ever. An ominous silence,
> distant sirens, a
> drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to
> keep the public uneasy
> and silence the opposition. And in a time of
> vague fear, you can
> appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark
> off the Constitution,
> eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring
> public education to a
> standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous
> tax breaks on the rich.
>
> There is a stink drifting through this election
> year. It isn't the
> Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision.
> No, it's 9/11 that we
> keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of
> innocence," or a turning
> point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence,
> it was an event, a
> lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't
> prevent people from
> asking hard questions of the man who was
> purportedly in charge of
> national security at the time.
>
> Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying
> along Park Place or
> getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling
> toward their office on
> the 90th floor, the morning paper under their
> arms, I think of that
> non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to
> exploit those people
> with a little economic uptick, maybe the
> capture of Osama, cruise to
> victory in November and proceed to get some
> serious nation-changing
> done in his second term.
>
> This year, as in the past, Republicans will
> portray us Democrats as
> embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians,
> whacked-out hippies and
> communards, people who talk to telephone poles,
> the party of the
> Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and
> wow over and over the
> footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World
> Trade Center and
> bodies being carried out and they will lie
> about their economic
> policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
>
> The Union is what needs defending this year.
> Government of Enron and
> by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is
> not the same as what
> Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus
> Republicanii has
> humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts
> for the comfy and
> school prayer and flag burning and claimed the
> right to know what
> books we read and to dump their sewage upstream
> from the town and
> clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark
> up the constitution on
> behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
> takeover of the
> public airwaves and to hell with anybody who
> opposes them.
>
> This is a great country, and it wasn't made so
> by angry people. We
> have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our
> grandchildren in better
> shape than however we found it. We have a long
> way to go and we're
> not getting any younger.
>
> Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is
> reserved for those who
> in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have
> spoken my piece, and
> thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world,
> rain or shine, and
> there is more to life than winning.
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