GOP insider Vic Gold launches broadside at state of party

[lanlady]

Source: Washington Post


Rightist Indignation
GOP Insider Vic Gold Launches a Broadside at the State of the Party

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 2, 2007; Page C01

Vic Gold heard from Lynne Cheney a few weeks before George W. Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001. Cheney had an assignment for her old friend: She wanted Gold to write the profiles of her and her husband, the new vice president, for the official Inauguration program.

The veteran journalist and GOP campaign operative was a natural choice. After all, he had shared an office with Lynne Cheney at Washingtonian magazine before she became chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities -- and they even worked on a satirical novel together.

....

His book, to be published this month by Sourcebooks with an initial print run of 20,000 copies, offers quite a different assessment of the two most powerful men in Washington. Under Bush and Cheney, he argues, the GOP has moved away from principles of small government, prudent foreign policy and leaving people alone to live their private lives -- all views Gold associates with his hero, Goldwater. "Invasion of the Party Snatchers" makes plain Gold's contempt for the direction of his party and the guidance of its leaders.

"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/01/AR2007040101211.html?sub=AR

[wakeme2008]

1. Book cover from Amazon

[roguevalley]

3. and may the GOP stay destroyed.

[Supersedeas]

6. don't think Lynn gonna be asking for any more bios.

[saigon68]

7. No kidding

[durtee librul]

2. DQ in cowboy boots...

now that is a kodak moment. What's ol' Dan been up to lately?

[youngdem]

4. Oh, he's a PNAC signatory

Still trying to keep up with the big boys.

[Kolesar]

5. "The brown-haired Dan Quayle" -- Michael Feldman

As for his strength, note how bush* has been pushed around by his cronies in petty industries.

[olddad56]

11. The comparison to W is not fair to SQ, a moron yes, a W no.

[Doctor_J]

8. "Veteran jouranlist and GOP campaign operative"

That could be just about anyone in the Cabal "News", hate radio, or major news weeklies.

[salin]

9. I think I am going to buy a number of copies to send to some mod.

republicans I know (including a couple of relatives) who have turned against bush, but not the party. I would really like to give them some lenses through which to evaluate other GOP figures - so that they can be more discerning and recognize that what we see right now is more than "a few bad apples." I will ask each recipient, if they find the book informative, to pass it on to another person and ask that when they do - they make the same request (to keep the books in circulation with possible receptive readers). Time to knock off another 5% or more of those remaining who still identify themselves as republican "but not crazy about bush" - and turn them into independents.

[Oak2004]

14. Since it is relevant to the topic at hand

I'll do some unabashed promoting here: http://www.exrepublicans.info/forum (the bulletin board is the only part of the site up and running as of the moment), though I'm not so much promoting the board as the agenda. The purpose of the site is to A) reach out to exes and those teetering on the edge and bring them gently into the reality-based community, either with a new party affiliation or with determination to get the extremist cultists out of power within the GOP, (if they are stubborn fools: I personally think the best thing to do with the GOP is to stick a fork in it) and B) try to figure out what went so terribly wrong with the GOP.

These kinds of discussions are something us exes and questioning R's need to have (as well as the rest of this nation the GOP has gang raped), and I think this book is just one of the first rivulets in an approaching flood of books on the subject. I think you have a good idea in passing it around: it's works like this by disgruntled Republicans that are most likely to reach other disgruntled Republicans.

I've long considered the modern GOP monstrosity and the so-called conservative movement to be a cult, one that used mind control techniques to get its followers to fanatically support a package of ideas they originally signed up to oppose. The cult leader is now inescapably proving to be a fraud, and the cult is in crisis. Us exes need to do our part as informal exit counselors, showing current cult members how very far the cult has strayed from the values the cultist signed on for, in whatever way we can, and I appreciate it when DUers without a GOP background help doubters to think rather than attack them back into the cult.

[MasonJar]

10. Dan should love W. The latter actually makes the former look almost

viable.

[truthisfreedom]

12. Can you hear the sound of uproarious applause coming from my post?

Imagine the end of 'O', the greatest of Cirque du Soleil's shows. Imagine the sound of 4000 people clapping with all their might, hooting, whistling, and stomping their feet. That's the sound inside my head while reading that article... amazing!

[hatrack]

13. So glad you could join us, ol' Vic - what took you six years?

Or is the Scales Have Fallen From My Eyes Club suddenly serving filet, fresh oysters and single-malt scotch, instead of the oatmeal and ashes all of us here at DU have been eating for more than half a decade now?