Reply #25: Not to mention their overriding wish to take us back to the 19th century.

[calimary]

You know, that swell time before so many of our more recently-won rights were secured. When women were second-class citizens (on a good day, maybe), and blacks were slaves, and other ethnics were either did the laundry or the cooking or the railroad-building, or just really didn't exist at all in the minds of most. When scores were settled unilaterally by Wild West vigilante justice, and nobody'd heard about the ACLU. And when religious life in this country was segueing from witchburnings to Elmer Gantry.

You know, the "good old days."

I am hesitant about the talk of original "Republican" values. Some of them sound relatively harmless, don't they? I mean - smaller government so, presumably, we all have to pay less in taxes to underwrite it, no busy-body crap - sounds nice, doesn't it? Yeah. Like the soothing words from some snake in the garden to a gullible young woman with a taste for apples. What concerns me, though, is that this was the cradle from which the republi-CON party we have now was spawned. THIS was where that found a comfortable, inviting, nurturing nest. So, in the long run, I'm not all that comfortable with the idea of just going back to original "core Republican values" from which certain individuals just got "sidetracked."