FWIW:
The NSDAP (a small third party) was embolstered in times like these.
Posted on 07/17/2005 7:46:15 AM PDT by joe_oak
June 26, 2005
Guest Viewpoint: The party's over for betrayed Republican
By James Chaney
As of today, after 25 years, I am no longer a Republican.
I take this step with deep regret, and with a deep sense of betrayal.
I still believe in the vast power of markets to inspire ideas, motivate solutions and eliminate waste. I still believe in international vigilance and a strong defense, because this world will always be home to people who will avidly seek to take or destroy what we have built as a nation. I still believe in the protection of individuals and businesses from the influence and expense of an over-involved government. I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.
My problem is this: I believe in principles and ideals which my party has systematically discarded in the last 10 years.
My Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and George H.W. Bush. It was a party of honesty and accountability. It was a party of tolerance, and practicality and honor. It was a party that faced facts and dealt with reality, and that crafted common-sense solutions to problems based on the facts as they were, not as we wished them to be, or even worse, as we made them up. It was a party that told the truth, even when the truth came hard. And now, it is none of those things.
Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation's future on three core issues: how we led the world on the environment, how we minded the business of running our country in such a way that we didn't go bankrupt, and whether we gracefully accepted our place on the world's stage as its only superpower. Sadly, we have built the foundation for dismal failure on all three counts. And we've done it in such a way that we shouldn't be surprised if neither the American people nor the world ever trusts us again.
My party has repeatedly ignored, discarded and even invented science to suit its needs, most spectacularly as to global warming. We have an opportunity and the responsibility to lead the world on this issue, but instead we've chosen greed, shortsightedness and deliberate ignorance.
We have mortgaged the country's fiscal future in a way that no Democratic Congress or administration ever did, and to justify the tax cuts that brought us here, we've simply changed the rules. I matured as a Republican believing that uncontrolled deficit spending is harmful and irresponsible; I still do. But the party has yet to explain to me why it's a good thing now, other than to say "... because we say so."
Our greatest failure, though, has been in our role as superpower. This world needs justice, democracy and compassion, and as the keystone of those things, it needs one thing above all else: truth.
Republican decisions made in 2002 and 2003 have killed almost 2,000 of the most capable patriots our country has to offer - volunteers, every one. Support for those decisions was gathered through what appeared at the time to be spin and marketing, but which now turns out to have been deliberate planning and falsehood. The Blair government's internal documentation only confirms what has been suspected for years: Americans are dying every day for Republican lies first crafted in 2002, expanded and embellished upon in 2003, and which continue to this day. This calculated deception is now burned into the legacy of the party, every bit as much as Reagan's triumph in the Cold War, or Nixon's disgrace over Watergate.
I could go on and on - about how we have compromised our international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserve, and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and "staying on message" for real political discourse - but those three issues are enough.
We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.
We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.
We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.
And we're lying about it.
While it has compiled this record of failure and deception, the party which I'm leaving today has spent its time, energy and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn't buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.
Enough is enough. I quit.
James Chaney is a Eugene attorney who has been in private practice for more than 20 years, and who has been a registered Republican since 1980.
GUEST VIEWPOINT
FWIW:
The NSDAP (a small third party) was embolstered in times like these.
Looks like this Chaney feller is suffering from some sort of malady. I'd recommend a Corvette and he should return to normal (if he was ever a member of the stupid party in the first place).....in Eugene OR he might be as close to a Republican as one can get.
I don't know, either- but Eugene isn't a huge town.
Bet they're related...
;-)
So, curbing illegal invaders and trepassers is Nazi'ism???
Right. Let's see the tune you sing when a truckload show up at your house and litter and throw garbage all over the place.
I knew somebody would post something like that, I didn't think it would be so fast. So, we must BLINDLY follow the GOP? I'll tell you, they are pissing me off.
We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.
How? In what way? What kind of poison?
We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.
The deficit just went down by about a hundred billion dollars. How is that teetering on the brink of insolvency?
We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.
Yeah, spreading freedom is pretty selfish, isn't it? Why don't you ask "the best of that generation" if they think they are being needlessly sacrificed. It seems to me that the majority of our military knows what the mission involves and they are one hundred percent in favor of completing it.
And we're lying about it.
Prove it. This little statement tells me that the author of this piece wasn't anything close to being a Republican, and most likely hangs out with the moveon crowd. And the poster probably is too.
I am so sick of these people who throw the labels around when you question things.
I am as conservative as anyone, but that does not mean I sip the GOP kool-aide when they are wring, which they have been on many many issues lately.
I can't honestly say that I fully bought in to all the sabre-rattling rhetoric that preceded the war...
But I'm willing to give the Administration a "pass" on this issue...
When push comes to shove (and it did), Saddam Hussein sealed his own fate...
Papa Bush shoulda finished the job in Gulf I...
Klintoon should polished him off when he repeatedly ignored the "no fly" terms...
Continuing the UN peacekeeper "inspection" charade was not an option because of the Oil-for-Food scam...
So what if Iraq is more about securing the oil fields than spreading democracy?
I may find many of the details distasteful, but the left-wing UN alternative was worse.
My only complaint is that they captured the SOB alive,
now we're going to have to waste a pile of money to put him through some kind of "trial" someday.
Sheeesh, shoulda just dropped a grenade down that "spider hole" he was hiding in...
give him the Mussolini treatment and hung his tattered carcass upside down in public with some piano wire.
Then we wouldn't have had to put up with the silliness of the media publishing "humiliating" pictures of him in his skivvies.
Yep, a grenade down that spider hole woulda solved all that.
I've been on FR for about a year or maybe more. I finally have to ask. What the hell is a zot???????????????
Yeah, I saw it. Not the same guy.
My only question is: Did your tender parts shrivel when you posted this drivel?
I am only making an observation that there are many political similarities to what happen in pre WWII germany with what is happening here.
Abslutely not. Unless I see changes in the GOP, I intend to vote elsewhere.
Again, it was only an observation of the politcal times.
we could tell you but then we'd have to Zot you... 8^)
LOL
I live in NYC outer area. English is becoming a second language and it stinks! Those of us who deal with these "trusted trespassers" understand full well that really should not be here and do not have any loyalty to this country.
Call it what you want, but we are being invaded. Maybe where you live it is not like that, but I am seeing what you may 5 or ten years down the road.
For many, it is easy making the type of statements you did.
However, there were hundredfs of 1000's of citzens who were killed and sacrificied their lives for this country and what it stands for. Many of us are sick of the what seems to be the wholesale sellout of that sacrifice in favor of cheap labor from Mexico and other countries.
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