cross post from DailyKos

I have admired John McCain for many years.  When he went after the tobacco lobbyists in the 1990s, when he fought his own party on the need for campaign finance reform, when he attacked his own party and ours for allowing campaign contributors undue influence over legislation (though I found his generalizations about his party being too beholden to insurance companies and ours to trial lawyers a bit like comparing apples to B-52 bombers) , when he went with Senator Kerry to Vietnam to discuss how to normalize relations with our former enemy, he represented the best of what we need more of from those in Congress.

When he ran against the Republican party’s choice of the completely unqualified George W. Bush as their nominee for 2000, he exposed those forces within the party looking for yet another figurehead president, as they had with the Great Reagan, and they came after him with their usual fury and vengeance.   It would be hard for any serious person, looking at the qualifications of George W. Bush and John McCain to even consider voting for the current president, but a majority of Republicans did.

After they finished spreading disgusting rumors about him, and Sen McCain denounced the religious intolerance behind many of those seeking to promote the ne’er do well offspring of a president they did not really like all that much, and one who avoided wartime service to his country by dint of his father’s position only to abuse the privilege anyway over a bona fide war hero, who refused to leave his fellow prisoners when his own father’s status gave him a ticket home and who was, in 2000, deeply interested in repairing the relationship between our two major political parties, his campaign failed.  We knew then, if we only suspected it before, that the Republican Party of Lincoln, let alone of Theodore Roosevelt, or even Gerald Ford, is no more.

Sen McCain’s campaign this year is proof of that.  The person we have seen this year is not the valiant crusader against the corrupted party he tried to take on eight years ago.  He lost that fight, and for reasons it is both difficult to understand, and then, maybe, not so difficult, his response has been to do what they want him to do.  There will be no more apologies for declining to condemn the use of the confederate flag, because to do so would make it impossible to get the support of large portions of his party.

He has made similar decisions at every turn in this election.  While once he would play down his support for repealing Roe v. Wade by suggesting that states could well permit abortions after that, without his objection, he now remains silent about his party’s platform calling for outright abolition of abortions, with no exceptions.  While once he urged an increase in the so called CAFÉ standards, requiring automobiles to be able to get better mileage per gallon of gasoline, he now argues that the best solution to the energy and global warming issues is to drill, drill, drill.

And now, after cow towing to the “agents of intolerance” all year, the final indignity: he would not be allowed to run with his own choice for vice-president, the renegade “Democrat” Joseph Lieberman.  We will not question whether Sen Lieberman was unacceptable because he was a Democrat, or, given all the “I am a Christian” stuff required by that party, that he is a Jew.  Certainly, Sen Lieberman, too, does not agree with many portions of the Republican Party platform, but he was the choice of their candidate, the former “renegade” John McCain.

So, again, he gave in.  He was still required to prove himself worthy to the people that have taken over his party, despite having won the nomination in part based on independent voters or even Republicans who, as yet, have failed to see the handwriting on the wall (I am talking to you Senators Snowe, Collins and Spector, among others) who remembered the John McCain of 2000 and thought they might be voting for the same.  Still, they do not trust him, those guardians of moral purity, who seek to transform the Grand Old Party into a Christian religious sect.
To try yet again to make these people happy (that will never happen, though, until the rapture) he picked of their own: a true blue Christian, who, elected as Mayor of a small town, set out to convince the town librarian that there might be books that ought not to be in a public library, and, as Governor and a candidate for that office has transformed her personal opposition to sex education into government policy.  (Prior to that campaign she and her husband aligned themselves with Alaskans who remain opposed to being part of the United States but, presumably, running to be Vice President, she has re-thought that, although nobody has been allowed to ask her that yet. ) Today we heard that when she became Governor and her step-mother in law tried to succeed her as Mayor, she supported another candidate whose position on abortion she agreed with and who had registered as a Republican and not as an independent.  Tolerance, it appears, is not a huge part of Governor Palin’s platform.

It says something about Senator McCain, to be sure, that he has sold his soul to these forces to get what he wants, but this is not a new story.  (My favorite version of the story remains “Damn Yankee” mainly because I love the name of the musical, but there are at least as many variations of this theme as there are years of civilization among women and men.)

Far more important, is what is says about our politics and about the Republican Party.  I am a child of the baby boom, and of what came out of the New Deal and World War II, grateful that Franklin Delano Roosevelt came around when he did and to my grandparent’s generation that turned to him when things were bleakest.  I grew up as a child of the Kennedy years, and of the age of Aquarius, but I do not yearn for a country with one major political party.

That is where we are headed, though, as long as one of our parties is in the control of people who yearn for the days when a person who made millions could keep it all without any concern for the rest of the country, or when minorities or women knew that their role in society could never rival theirs, or a party which has turned itself over to people that want to turn the United States into a theocracy, with a national religion to which all others must adapt.  This is not the United States envisioned by its founders, and is never going to command a majority vote of its citizens for any lengthy period of time.

They are the ones who foisted George W. Bush on us, and now they want us to accept this refashioned John McCain.Seeing these people stomp and applaud for George W. Bush, and screech as Fred Thompson strung falsehood after falsehood, and angry divisive misstatement after misstatement together as a “keynote address” (though far more entertaining that Governor Warner’s snoozefest last week) made a person wonder from which planet these people had come .  The only people who might have been excited by these speeches, I believe, were either in St. Paul or deranged.  They do not even approach mainstream thought in this country and they know it.

To watch Christine Todd Whitman, who railed about the “takeover” of her party as soon as she left government office, try to explain that nothing that has happened this year suggests that Senator McCain has become captive of the same forces which drove her from that position in the Bush administration is truly pitiful.  John McCain was really the only significant force that could have defeated these people, but he chose to join them instead.

It is that which should sicken us.