I have been enjoying every single moment while watching the Republican Party implode – their chickens are simply coming home to roost, and coming home big-time. Back when Karl Rove orchestrated Ronald Reagan’s bid for President, by playing to the issues of the religious-right and the evangelical-Christians; he probably never even realized that this move would come back and bite the party in the ass big-time. Now the party has become the party of the ones who live on the outermost fringes of reality.
It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.
How does one respond to this type of lunacy?
As he tells this story, the veteran lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary runoff by Spartanburg County 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative roots, pointing to his vote for the bank bailout and against George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state’s 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to “turn Glenn Beck off” and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting “You lie!” at Obama during the president’s State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven “demagoguery” that he believes will undermine the GOP’s long-term credibility. And he’s freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance….
This is what happens when those who historically didn’t even vote in the national elections – the ones who believe that there were ghosts running around 2000 years ago, and raping little girls and making saviors, bring their bat-shit crazy lunacy into politics. Most Christians are not only extremely deluded, but a lot of them are extremely hatful – they hate Muslims, atheists and even other Christians who have a different understanding of “ god’s good-word.”
I simply say: good for them – like that old saying goes; “when one lies with dogs, one shouldn’t then complain about the fleas either.” They invited the right-wing Christian lunatics into the main stream of the party – now they just have to deal with them.
The good news is that less than 25% of the voters now identify themselves as Republicans; and the tea-party has further divided the party right down the middle – I believe that the Republican party is well on its way to becoming just another fringe party of nutters.
I believe the time has now come that we need a new party – a party of real progressives. The way I see it is that the republicans are fast going to “hell” in a hand-basket – so let them take the democrats with them!
