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Lost Decency

I keep thinking of a goodbye line at a party:  "Don't think I haven't had a good time, because I haven't."

 I keep trying to understand the philosophy of the Republican Party, but I haven't.  They speak of fiscal responsibility, but they are the Party that conducted two wars without paying for it (not even putting them in a budget:  just making special appropriations), cutting taxes without regard to budgetary needs, and initiating a medical drugs program that made drug companies deliriously happy.  

 They hate the very notion of a federal government, but run like a herd of bison to be elected to office in it.  When they get into office, they continue to run like a stampeded herd of bison, trampling, thundering, bellowing, and blowing.  

 They accuse almost everybody of being fiscally irresponsible, but will not cut the wartime military budget, even after the war is over, rail against unemployed people, immigrants, the poor, while seeming to defend the ultra-rich whom they seem to think ought to be super-ultra-rich.  

 Who are these people?  

 Some of them are indeed what used to be Republicans:  older, white, modestly comfortable people who do not want to the hasty to change things.  But the Tea Party despises such old-fashioned folk.  They work to disenfranchise whomever they can, but mostly the young, the immigrants, the brown- and black-skinned, and anyone who does not share their religion and also own a gun.  

 The fact is that the "new" Republican Party is a southern party, and a rural party.  The heart of their political power and opinion is precisely the old Confederacy--the one that lost the Civil War.  Once it was Southern Democratic territory, but Richard Nixon persuaded them that they really were Republicans, and so they are!  Not Civil War Republicans, but anti-civil-rights Republicans.  Poll tax Republicans.  White, southern Republicans.  Anti-immigration Republicans.  Control-women Republicans.  Support the rich Republicans.  Obama was born in Kenya Republicans.  Bring the government down Republicans.  Refuse to pay the bills Republicans.  

 I do not know what I would do if I were one of those old-fashioned, don't go too fast Republicans.  One of those pay your bills and save some money Republicans.  They don't have a Party, anymore.  They aren't exactly orphans.  They are childless Republicans.  

 They are looking at a Party that was defined by Abraham Lincoln and an abhorrence of slavery, that has become almost its opposite; that has become what the southern Democrats once were.  

 Are there not gatherings of childless Republicans, somewhere, driven almost to a serious drinking problem, talking to each other about how to recapture a lost sense of decency?  

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