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Republican Diet

In the last presidential primary season, religious evangelicals were huffing and snorting about restoring our Christian honor and stopping all abortions and praying to God that he would require King James English as a first language.  It was something like that.

The Republican Party cozied up to Iowa and Mike Huckabee and it seemed likely that a Republican vote was the only way to restore the nation to its fundamentalist, God-is-an-Old-Man roots.

Try, now, as hard as you can, to explain how the last Republican Congressional delegation changed after it swallowed all those religious evangelical principles:  restrict health care, fight against financial regulation of banks and investment houses, defend Abu Graib, cut public spending on education, public services, and so on.

I saw a report about Mike Huckabee, recently.  He looked like something the Republicans had forgotten to swallow.  "So there you are!", I thought.

During this mid-term election, it was not the right-wing evangelicals the Republicans cozied up to:  it was the Tea Party enthusiasts.  Some of those Tea Party patriots actually won seats in Congress, most as Republicans, some as Tea enthusiasts.  How well do you think Tea Party people will be at shaping the Republican Party?  Or to put it from a different perspective, what are the chances that Republicans will swallow the Tea Party without noticable indigestion, and go on to their agenda of cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting public funds for social services, schools, the unemployed, and everybody except the wealthy, whom they see as the key to a great society?

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