GOP Chaos

I have written several times that I would like to pull out the “I Like Ike” pin my dad and I got at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago when I was about eight, and got to shake the President’s hand in the lobby; and wear it today.  Eisenhower may have played a lot of golf, but he was basically an honest man, with values I could sign up for in a heartbeat.  He won World War II, but warned us about the insidious threat of the Military Industrial Complex (Yes, Cheney, that is you).  And he represented a party that was safe and sane: keep the government out of the bedroom, separate Church and State, balance the budget just like the family checkbook, do what is good for American business.

I Like Ike.

Unfortunately, since then the party has been the private vehicle of a number of groups, none of which really believed in America in the way Ike did.

Here’s one story: the CIA killed Kennedy (see my piece on this earlier in the blog), and has spent most of the rest of the time since then running the country: Johnson (a murderer, by his own attorney’s account), Nixon (no need for comment about CIA involvement here, given Watergate), Reagan (Iran Contra leading to the largest list of federal felony convictions of Cabinet members in history), and the head of the CIA himself, George Bush Sr., ascending to President.  Imagine his later surprise when his proxy, Cheney, made himself (vice) king (instead of finding a VP), changed beyond recognition (in his friends’ eyes) and stopped taking phone calls from the old gang (according to senior security advisor Brent Scowcroft), and turned out to be a Neocon robot, pushing the U.S. into wars dictated by Israel’s, and not the U.S.’, interests.  And Big Oil’s.

It isn’t a pretty picture, particularly if you actually are a patriot.

Then there’s another thread of the GOP story:

How Reagan, desperate for money and votes, having left his family and party,  saw the Christian Right, with Richard Viguerie’s multi-million-dollar direct mail money machine, and made a deal with — one wants to say “the devil,” since money is the cause — but in this case that seems inappropriate.  He made a deal that would destroy the party over the long term, for money.

In return for their money (and church-provided votes), the GOP changed forever, and the seeds were sown for the chaotic dissension which describes it today: a party insistent on dictating bedroom behavior, the greatest spenders in history (under George II), destroyers of the domestic and global economy, friends of the very rich and enemies of main street business, corrupt beyond description, so confused as to no longer have a platform beyond a Limbaugh-inspired desire for the President – the President of our country – to fail miserably in everything he tries.

Wow.  Thanks, Ron.  Ike would have considered you a fool.

Having now weathered the completely – fairytale McCain / Palin campaign, we are left with a vast number of confused people who, thanks to the constant propaganda work of Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, are really, really mad, all the time.  Their anger, they feel, justifies their position, as a new party, the Tea Party.  There is only one problem: they really have no position. They are the unfortunate personal car crash victims of misused mass media.  They are, themselves, car wrecks: unwilling to “take it” any more, and unaware that they have no direction or use, other than Rove’s continuing plan to reign them in just before November.

They don’t know it, but they are almost all going to vote Republican.  So much for the Tea Baggers.

And then, this morning, we have the next sorry step: Newt Gingrich.  Newt’s role in the GOP tragedy is a critical one: under the guise of the Contract for America, Newt, as Speaker, forced party line unity, by signature, in a way it had perhaps never been practiced before.  Every Republican would simply, from then on, vote the way Newt said.  If not, he would personally raise money and spend it on their – his colleagues’ – defeat.  And he did. Moderate Republicans became instantly extinct.

The result was a polarization of both parties that, today, is the hallmark of a do-nothing government.  Later, of course, he was thrown out of Congress on ethics violations charges, and he then seems to have had an affair with his secretary, maybe there were drugs, it’s all kind of typically post-Ike GOP anti-ethical  confusing.  Tapping toes for gay trysts in the Minneapolis airport, Christian TV pastors soliciting whores  in New Orleans, the list is literally endless.

Having been through all this, nothing could really surprise, coming from the post-Reagan, post-Cheney GOP.

But even so, hearing this morning that Newt wanted to be President — ahhhh, please spare us.  Won’t someone just tell him, “Enough!”?

Won’t someone bring sanity back to the GOP?  We need Ike as we never have before.