The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Michael Wolraich's picture

    Once upon a time, a liberal Republican was a star

    By Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 11:30am | Politics

    If presidential hopeful Rick Perry should awaken one night in a cold sweat with the Ghost of Republican Past hovering by his bedside, the apparition will likely take the form of Sen. Charles Percy, who passed away on Saturday after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

    Percy's political career ended when he lost his Illinois Senate seat in 1984, the same year that future Texas Gov. Rick Perry won his first election to the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat. Charles Percy's fall from GOP wunderkind to party outcast offers a vivid illustration of the Republican Party's mutation from a vibrant and diverse coalition to the dogmatic cult of conservative ideology that it has become today.

    Read the full article at CNN.com

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    Comments

    I thought you might mention Senator Lamar Alexander's recent announcement that he's stepping down from the GOP leadership team so he can feel at greater liberty to pursue bipartisan agreements on some issues (!). 

    That announcement, and the reactions to it, should have drawn a chorus of commentary on what it says about today's GOP, but didn't.  Alexander was quoted as saying he's very much a "Republican Republican", not a party-switcher or anything like that.  And the announcement was greeted with public approval from his GOP peers in the Senate, which I thought was, perhaps unintentionally, quite revealing, but also did not seem to draw much comment.


    by AmericanDreamer on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 1:09pm

    I missed the news. It would have been a great point.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 1:28pm

    I was impressed by this and immediately I drop my guard or my dem garb.

    It takes sooooo very much courage to even say the things he has recently.

    And normally I do not trust people called Lamar or Alexander. hahahah


    by Richard Day on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 12:14am

    A brilliant piece. And maybe Perry is a "bridge" too far. Let's hope he's too far out of the spectrum and it will be a bridge back to sanity in the Republican party.

    I watched the first Contender series on C-Span, Henry Clay of Kentucky. He tried and failed in three Presidential elections.

    During the program there were snippets of Ron Paul and McConnell making Senate speeches referencing Henry Clay. I felt the bile rise up in the back of my throat. The juxtaposition of these small minded hacks compared to Clay was almost unbearable.  

     


    by Oxy Mora on Thu, 09/22/2011 - 2:01pm