The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The End (of the GOP) is near

    By Barth on Wed, 04/29/2009 - 5:20pm |

    What follows below the fold is a slightly edited from a post last September, in which I tried to explain whatever Sen McCain's qualifications were to be president, they  were irrelevant given the party which nominated him.  It is worth re-publishing, it seems to me, not simply because it identified the real crisis which caused Senator Spector to bow to the inevitable yesterday (all of which applies to Senators Snowe and Collins, even if they have no "electability" issues as Republicans), but also since it shows that the rump group that uses the historic name "Republican Party" has next to no relationship to the one that was around in the 1950s, and in one form or another, until around 1980.


    The group which now calls itself the Republican party is the party that:

    ----gave us candidate Dole to run around the country talking about "Democrat wars" meaning World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, thinking we knew no better, but eventually elected a second Bush to start a war in Iraq after we were attacked by people who were allowed to establish a base in Afghanistan and were protected by Pakistan,

    ----piously claimed that government was too intrusive, then tried to remove any regulation that protected the public but retarded profits and then decided to spy on us,

    ----argued that the military was allowed to decay under a Democratic administration, then stretch it so thin by its foolish war as to endanger not only our country but the rest of the world, while sending soldiers out to die for the benefit of private contractors who contribute to their political campaigns, torturing military prisoners and removing the moral plane from which we could reasonably threaten those who did the same to our military with war crimes prosecutions,

    ----were willing to and did impeach a president for lying about his personal indiscretions, but would do no more than shake their heads at the most destructive president since the pure evil they foisted upon us while we were distracted by all that was 1968.

    This is not a "brand" that has been "damaged" as the talking heads were saying last fall. I wrote then that "[t]he Republican party of today is not the party of Lincoln or the first Roosevelt or their last president, Dwight Eisenhower, or even of Taft, Dewey or Vandenburg, not to mention Landon, Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, or even (are you listening Senators), Chaffee (who paid for his 'loyalty') and Spector (who has also, but not in the same way), nor of Snowe and Collins in Maine and, cut the crap Arnold, of Schwarzenegger. It is the party of Rove and the late Viguerie. It is the party that mourns the memory of Joe McCarthy and how badly he was treated. It is not fit to govern any part of this country, let alone have its nominee elected as president."

    And just as the country figured this out in 1932 when they laughed Hoover out of town and destroyed that party until Hoover had become a dim memory, they have figured it out again.

    ...

    This so-called Republican Party means nothing good for our country. That's the change we were are all seeking last fall and my hope then was  that from that change, a great hundred days should follow to change our country if not forever, for a good long time.   This event, capping those hundred days, says we are well on our way to realizing that hope