Consider yourself officially invited to change parties. Become a Republican. Start using that powerful pen of yours among those who value and sustain your viewpoint.
Honor in the Democrat party has always been a scarce commodity, yet still undervalued due to lack of demand.
How would anyone join the Republican Party for honor’s sake? I vote Republican because it is the lesser of two evils. A party that lets in a tide of unchecked immigrants to drive down wages of poor Americans for the benefit of the rich, without regard to social consequences, has at best a partial sense of honor.
Mrs VS
“Orson... You continue to brilliantly outline precisely why it’s so maddeningly illogical to remain a Democrat... What are you waiting for? An invitation?”
He doesn’t do it because he sees the Republican Party as the party of incomprehensibly stupid, shortsighted and greedy economic policies. He agrees with FDR, and sees the Republican economic agenda to try and dismantle Social Security, ship every last job to China because it’s so cheap, et al, as idiocy incarnate. And he is right.
He won’t become a Republican until the Republicans adopt rational economic views. But bad economics is THE CORE of the Republican Party. It was to preserve the domestic economic agenda, after all, that Bush eschewed going to Congress after 9/11 to get a full outright Declaration of War. THAT would have preserved national unity, but at the cost of a massive mobilization, and the tax hikes that would have entailed. The GOP core was ready to gamble on winning the war on a shoestring rather than back away from their economic agenda. The GOP economic agenda, and not the war, was always the President’s team’s priority.
Which is why we are losing the war. We didn’t commit to it at the start by actually declaring it. We didn’t commit the necessary resources to it. We didn’t, therefore, either maintain national unity OR win convincingly on the battlefield. Instead, unity is gone and the lack of battlefield success will force a withdrawal. The battle Bush WON was to keep the foolish tax cuts, the open trade door to China, and the open border for cheap exploitable labor.
That’s why folks like Card do not leave the corrupt and weak Democrats for the Republicans: because Democrats are a whole lot smarter than Republicans when it comes to managing the national economy and understanding what really makes sense for America in that regard.