Free Republic

A cancer is eating away at a once Grand Old Party, and if the party doesn't wake up and take precautions, it may wind up only a shadow of its better self -- a hollowed-out refuge for haters and paranoids and the kind of ideological parasites that can reduce a major party to a minor one. The historian Richard Hofstadter spoke of a "paranoid style in American politics," and noted its "sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." He called it "an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life," one that it isn't confined to left or right....

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (left), the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, according to a Gallup poll taken from August 17–21, has reiterated his opposition to a fence along the American border with Mexico. He commented on the fence at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, a crucial primary state. Perry, who served as the chairman of leftist Al Gore’s Democratic presidential campaign in Texas in 1988, has a confirmed liberal history on immigration, as The New American has reported, although he now campaigns as a conservative.