The Republican Party: Moral And Political Collapse

Every single Congressional Republican has opposed President Obama’s economic stimulus. Bush’s bailouts were fine. But this, to the benefit of ordinary people, is unconscionable.

In the same way, of course, Bush had to be backed up to the hilt as “the Commander-in-Chief in time of war”, whereas President Obama’s decisions on Guantánamo Bay, on torture, on Iraq, and with any luck on Afghanistan after all, enjoy no such loyalty from the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys of the world.

The economic stimulus will be massively to the advantage of rural, Evangelical and Catholic America, just as the New Deal was. Some Republicans had the human decency and the political competence to support the New Deal, however few Evangelicals or, especially, Catholics there may have been among their voters at the time.

Those same Republicans, of course, stood foursquare with the rest of their party in opposing needless foreign entanglements, insisting insteadhat America should only go to war if attacked (as eventually happened) or under clear and present threat of being attacked.

Today’s GOP urgently needs to learn the lessons of its own history. Or else it will die. And it will deserve to die.

The Republican National Committee now has a very significantly more anti-life and anti-family Chairman than has the Democratic National Committee. Democrats need to be out there, asking moral and social conservatives directly, “What have the Republicans ever done for you?”

And they need to be presenting President Obama, entirely accurately, as the true heir of those Republicans who called for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Of that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal. Of Eisenhower, with his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and with his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.

Of those Congressional Republicans whose votes passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance. Of Nixon, who ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and who began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran (and beyond). And of Republican opposition to Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration.

The one missing link is Afghanistan. No one voted for President Obama because of his support for the war in Afghanistan. Huge numbers did so in spite of it, in order to end the war in Iraq. He should announce the fact, for so it is, that, just as the 9/11 attackers included no Afghans but numerous Saudis, so that attack was ordered and funded, not from some cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but from one of the more opulent corners of the Arabian Peninsula.

Among very many other things, he might then need to replace the Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati hired help – and loyal consort of the Great Unpatriot – whom he has appointed as Secretary of State. What’s not to like?