Singing the Election Blues

If you'll pardon my saying so, this isn't a good time to be a Republican.

Consider this excerpt from an article by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in last Sunday's Washington Post:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

The article was titled Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem, and it has generated no small amount of commentary ... some (but, sadly, very little) of it even well-reasoned and civil. As of this morning, it had generated more than 5,000 online comments, most of which fall into two categories: ad hominem attacks against the authors; and thunderous denunciations of Democrats/Liberals which consist of nanny-nanny-boo-boo quasi-arguments that have nothing to do with refuting the points made in the article.

This is what political discourse has come to.

In 1969, I turned 18 and celebrated my birthday registering to vote ... as a Republican. I was pretty conservative back then, the child of life-long Republicans and horrified by the behavior of many of my fellow students at Penn State, for whom expression of political beliefs consisted of sit-ins, vandalism, shouting down speakers with whom they disagreed, and conducting the occasional riot. I was a student volunteer for the presidential reelection campaign of Richard Nixon in 1972 (in retrospect, not one of my better political moments, but at the time, who knew?). 

I tell you the above to remind you that I am still, more than 40 years later, a fundamentally conservative fellow. I still agree with some of the most basic tenets of the GOP, including the importance of personal responsibility, fiscal conservatism, strong defense, and the importance of defending our basic constitutional rights. 

However, there's also a vein of ... gasp! ... liberalism that runs through my political makeup as well. I'm deeply offended by the social fascism of the extreme religious right, which ... when you come right down to it ... isn't all that different from that of the most extreme Islamists. I believe in freedom of speech, but strongly believe that screaming insults and demonizing the opposition is not the same as debating issues based on facts and evidence. I believe in the importance of the Second Amendment, but think that the deification of firearms has gone much too far and led to some almost unbelievably stupid results, like this one. 

In short, I'd like to still be a Republican, but the party has utterly lost me for the reasons documented by Mann and Ornstein. I might like to be a Democrat, but the inability of that party to connect reality to policy is a turn-off.

So ...

I call myself an Independent, whatever that means any more. There's no way I can vote for Mitt Romney (or anyone in the present-day GOP), and I'm suffering from a certain level of buyer's remorse over President Obama (for whom I did, in fact, vote in the last election). I can't not vote in November, but I don't know who to vote for. This guy is starting to look pretty good ...

And, of course, there's my old standby ...

It's going to be a bad election year for the country.

And, especially, for the GOP. And it's their own fault.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo