…on the basis of crude stereotypes. The GOP had a lot of thoughtful, brilliant, and honest politicians in its ranks before amoral hacks, self-righteous No Nothings, and craven pundit entertainers purged the best in the name of eradicating RINOs.
Here’s former Senator John Danforth one of many such purge victims and his thoughts on the current party:
What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured dont treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that. […]
It doesn’t have anything to do with the republican party that I was a part of. This is just totally different. And all of these people who are saying this, y’know, and claiming that, y’know, they’re for all this stuff, they also sort of ostentatiously say, “Oh, we’re very religious people. We really, we’re just very pious, Christian people.” They were for torture, and electrocution of the people on along the border and all of that. That doesn’t have anything to do with, is contrary to the Christianity that I understand.
BTW: Danforth is an ordained Episcopal Priest. I’m an agnostic but I feel the same way. I’m really glad that my hero Abe Lincoln was all but an atheist in his early life. Newty Gingrich recently said he’d never want an atheist to be President.
I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will bein in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.
How ironic that Gingrich’s party had not only Lincoln as President but William Howard Taft who explained that he did not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ. Neither did the first “Republican” president, Thomas Jefferson. But then these fellows all lived in a nation that didn’t know what it meant to be an American.
