The Demise of the Republican Party
By Alan Caruba (06/03/07)
The firestorm of public outcry against the proposed immigration bill is testimony enough that the Senate and the House need to be reminded that selling out the nation is a very bad idea. There are very good reasons why nations have borders.
The bill is just one more way the Republican Party demonstrated that it has been steadily abandoning its fundamental principles. In essence, the Party has stood for sovereignty, the free market, fiscal prudence, private property, and small government. It was a party that historically has been reluctant to be drawn into foreign wars.
In his new book, “The Invasion of the Party Snatchers”, Victor Gold who was a press aide to Barry Goldwater and a speechwriter in George H.W. Bush’s administration, recalled the Republican rejection of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations treaty in 1919. Gold reminds us that the party did not see the nation as “peace-keeper for the planet” because it saw that hubris as “the road to imperial ruin and war without end.”
Regarding George W. Bush’s pre-emptive war, Gold noted that, “…as to committing American troops to battle overseas, until George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 1991, no Republican president since William McKinley in 1898 had initiated a war; nor, until Richard Nixon in 1969, had any Republican president opted to carry on a war initiated by a Democratic president.”
Gold’s book is a scathing look at the depths to which the present Republican Party has fallen and the way George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, have come to represent everything that Republicans have fought against from the days when Lincoln first led the party.
Gold makes no bones about it. He wants the present GOP to die so it can be born again to its former principles. The elections of 2008 are likely to bring out masses of Democrats who feel rejuvenated by the failures and missteps of the White House and the GOP. The recently reported falloff of financial support for the GOP, estimated to be as high as forty percent, might actually suggest they’re doing something wrong.
More than a few Republicans who simply do not want to live in an America that intrudes into the most private decisions of people’s lives, that throws overboard the Constitutional protections of privacy, judicial protections, and whose elected representatives have engaged in an orgy of spending, are desperately seeking real conservative leadership.
So far, however, the Republican candidate debates have more nearly resembled “The Weakest Link” than any promise of a strong commitment to conservative principles.
America has had its political dynasties, the Adams and the Roosevelt’s, but they have been few and I think most Americans are wary of more Clintons. They are not likely to want any more Bushes after the last six years of the President’s rejection of everything for which the Republican Party has stood.
The President has been utterly indifferent to the invasion of millions of Mexicans and others who have illegally crossed our borders, placing all manner of burdens on native born and naturalized Americans. He has made it known that he is eager to sign the proposed immigration “reform” law. This is a security and sovereignty issue of major proportions and it is a total sell-out whether it’s Democrats or Republicans voting for it.
As yet little known to the general public, the President has advocated a “North American Union” that would eliminate the sovereignty of the United States, melding it with Canada and Mexico, to be run by bureaucrats along the lines of the European Union. Its official name is the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” and it offers neither. This non-treaty’s staff is zealously pursuing this, squirreled away in the Department of Commerce, far from the Congressional oversight needed to thwart its “harmonizing” efforts to change our trade and other regulations.
Bush has also turned to the Dark Green side, endorsing the utterly bogus “climate change” agenda that involves reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions. The fact that 95% or more of greenhouse gases consist of water vapor continues to be unreported and ignored by those who want to destroy the economies of industrial nations with “cap-and-trade” schemes. Global warming? It’s the Sun. Get over it!
In the area of fiscal prudence, the GOP seems to have lost its wits. Looking back over his two terms in office, with the support of the Republican Party the President never vetoed a single spending bill in six years until the most recent one that put a timeline on further military engagement in Iraq. Despite efforts to address the vast default that awaits Social Security, the GOP added a prescription program to the bloated Medicare program.
The President’s selection of Harriet Myers as a Supreme Court nominee and then of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General were suspect in the court of public opinion; the former withdrawing from consideration, the latter subject to much criticism. His two Supreme Court choices, Roberts and Alito, however, are a counter-balance of good judgment.
Gold reflects the widespread feeling that elected Republicans no longer have any regard for the voters. “I’d just like to know there were still Republican senators around who didn’t think of the people who elected them as knuckle-walking Pleistocene morons.” This can, of course, be extended to Democrats as well.
Gold warns that what has been passed off as a new kind of conservative politics under the aegis of the neo-cons and the pressures of evangelical groups is “merely a recycled model of the old Liberal politics that led to the decline and fall of the Democratic Party in the 1960s.”
We are left to wonder how long it will take for those who regard themselves as Republicans to desert today’s GOP, mostly by refusing to vote for its candidates, while waiting for new leadership to replace those that have eviscerated it.
© Alan Caruba, June 2007
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