More proof that this is not Ronald Reagan’s GOP
“The Republican Party, both in this state and nationally, is a broad party. There is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths…
Within our tent, there will be many arguments and divisions over approach and method and even those we choose to implement our philosophy. Seldom, if ever, will we raise a cheer signifying unanimous approval of the decisions reached. But if our philosophy is to prevail, we must at least pledge unified support of the ultimate decision. Unity does not require unanimity of thought.”
– Gov. Ronald Reagan,
in a 1967 speech to California Republicans
——————————–
“In the current climate, the extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn’t meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn’t allow compromise….
It’s time for the Republicans who are so bent on enforcing conformity to ask themselves a question: What would Ronald Reagan have done? He worked hard to maintain a welcoming, open and diverse Republican Party. …
We need to remind the Republicans who want to enforce ideological purity that if they succeed, they will undo Reagan’s work to create an inclusive party that could fit many different views.”
– Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times
———————–
“And that’s why the RINOs like Lugar and Hatch have to go. The GOP cannot offer a credible alternative to the destructive hate and social division of the Democrats — the party, let us remember, of slavery, segregation, secularism and sedition — unless it cleans out its own Augean stables first, removes the collaborationists and rejects “bipartisanship” as an absolute good in itself, instead of an occasional, pragmatic means to an end.”
– Michael Walsh,
in an overwrought column in National Review
——————
John Danforth
“If Dick Lugar, having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”
– John C. Danforth, three-term Republican senator from Missouri and former ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush.
——————-
“A new poll shows Treasurer Richard Mourdock building a commanding lead over Sen. Richard Lugar.
The Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll, conducted by two prominent Republican and Democratic pollsters, shows Mourdock with a 48 percent to 38 percent lead over Lugar.
Voters will decide the fate of Lugar, a six-term incumbent, in Tuesday’s primary election. And today Lugar pleaded with all those he has helped in his career, no matter what their political party, to step up and salvage his.
“Every person in Indiana who wants me to continue, every person wherever they might be at this point, I encourage them to come out,” he said. “Come out immediately, as fast as you can.”
The poll’s 10 percentage point deficit for him, Lugar said, is not surprising given the millions of dollars spent by groups that oppose him. Those include the anti-tax Club for Growth and the tea party group FreedomWorks. There has been no similar response from the groups he has helped over the years, he said. He cited farmers, veterans, minorities, students, Jews and others as he appealed for help.
——————-
– Jay Bookman
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523 comments Add your comment
Stevie Ray...Clowns to the left and Jokers to the right here I am....
May 8th, 2012
6:51 am
I was just looking at the deficit numbers for past 10 years….what is President Trillion gonna do to reduce that number…staggering projected to be $17.5 Trillion or 100% of GNP in 2013. This is getting worrisome…raising tax on the rich helpful but spit in the bucket….It will be up 70% since this incompetent, underqualified dope took office….his watch….
Milo83
May 8th, 2012
7:07 am
Anyone who supports term limits should vote Lugar out. 35 years in D.C. is too long at the fair.
JamVet
May 8th, 2012
7:21 am
After reading the comments last night and this morning, I am inclined to agree that Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle.
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/153819/republican_racism_is_an_air_raid_siren,_not_a_dog_whistle
I seriously doubt that until latest collection of bigots, would be BullConnors and scared little men all die off or have some sort of radical racial epiphany, that they will EVER attract more than the smallest percentages of any and all minorities – blacks Latinos, Asians, Jews, et al – to their Lily White Party.
Seriously.
At least here in the Deep South where it seems that integration is horribly out of place in the GOP…
Normal Free, Plain and Simple
May 8th, 2012
7:33 am
JamVet,
Good morning…Interesting read, thanks for sharing. The GOP is headed for a fall sooner than later. The Radicals and Fat Cats of the party have enjoyed success for too long. Success breeds arrogance, arrogance breeds contempt, and contempt breeds miscalculation of what the American people really want. Then comes the slap down. It won’t be pretty, but it will be worth waiting for…
JohnnyReb
May 8th, 2012
7:37 am
Next thing you know Jay will have an article on how Reagan would have voted for Obamacare!
When in November Obama and gang are handed their ass on a plate, will the Left then confess they are the minority with whom few agree?
Mary Elizabeth
May 8th, 2012
7:37 am
This incessant penchant for “balancing” points/thinking is distorting truth. Yes, the Republican Party has become more extreme. However, the Democratic Party, though it has evolved with time as any would, is essentially the same party – in terms of its values – as it was in FDR’s administration.
The Democratic Party remains the party of the common man; it still seeks jobs for the common worker. FDR used the government to establish jobs. The current Republican Party has insisted on cutting government jobs, and giving government money in the form of subsidies to the wealthy and to their interests. Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong proponent of Civil Rights which view continued in momentum through the administrations of JFK and LBJ (regardless of the stereotypcial thinking some have shown of LBJ. Don’t focus upon a word LBJ used, or a crude joke he told, but by the Civil Rights Law he got passed. That was the point of Caro’s book.) Reagan reinforced a hierarchial thinking relative to the races (and classes), deliberately, which was discussed yesterday by his choice of locale to kick off his presidential bid, and members of the current Republican Party often still see with those judgmental eyes of others, unfortunately. I could go on, but enough. . .
BTW, JFK meant by “Ask not. . .but what you can do for your country” in order to inspire citizens to support their government through service to it, like becoming a teacher or a peace corps worker, or any other job that involved giving of oneself to others in service. That, too, has been twisted in meaning. The priority today is upon personal accruing of wealth, a Republican ideological goal. Quite the opposite of what JFK was focusing on in his inauguration speech. And, the Tea Party arose in the same month of Obama’s inauguration and it was funded and developed by wealthy Republican ideologues such as the Koch Brothers. Don’t be fooled.
JamVet
May 8th, 2012
7:42 am
In an effort to avoid cuts to defense spending, House Republicans are pushing a bill that would shift hundreds of billions in spending cuts from the Pentagon to domestic programs, services for the poor and government regulators.
The plan would strip regulators of the ability to wind down failing financial firms, cut spending on Medicaid and end an Obama administration housing program designed to help struggling homeowners.
The cuts total $18 billion in the next fiscal year, and more than $250 billion over the next decade.
Imagine that! The unquestioning, house-trained neocons pulling the rugs out from under the children of their fellow Republicans along with their millions of underwater fellow Republican homeowners and the millions of poor Republican men, women and children in the rural south, Midwest and elsewhere.
Screw those Republicans, right?
They can go to bed hungry, working for little more than slave wages, knowing that there will be a bunch of new fighter planes, smart bombs and weapons systems to protect them from the hoards of invading Communists and Moozlims…
JamVet
May 8th, 2012
7:51 am
Reb, notwithstanding your self-imposed ignorance on health care legislation in this country, a SLEW of Republicans were very much for the individual mandate, going back to 1993.
Did you miss twenty years of news about all of that?
In the early 90s the Republicans embraced a health platform that proudly features an individual mandate as its main component. Newt Gingrich argued for individual mandate in 2008. Mitt Romney urged Obama to embrace the individual mandate in 2009.
In 1993, Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., introduced the Health Equity and Access Reform Today (HEART) Act of 1993, which included a requirement that individuals purchase health insurance. That provision was to take effect on Jan. 1, 2005 — more than a decade after the bill would have been enacted.
In mid 1994, he and a fellow member of the Senate Finance Committee — conservative Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana — worked on a new version that also would have required all Americans to buy insurance.
According to a New York Times account, the bill would have imposed an individual mandate in 2002 only if “other methods to spread health insurance had not led to either 95 percent or 96 percent of the American people’s being insured.”
So yes, there was legislation that included a mandate — a bill by Chafee and a subsequent proposal by Chafee and Breaux. The Republicans embraced a health platform that featured the individual mandate.
The HEART Act attracted 19 Republicans as sponsors or co-sponsors, including Chafee, Bond and Dole, who was then the Senate minority leader, plus a number of ranking Republicans on Senate committees — Mark Hatfield of Oregon (appropriations), Pete Domenici of New Mexico (budget), John Danforth of Missouri (commerce), Orrin Hatch of Utah (judiciary) and Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas (labor and human resources).
Hey, BTW, did you hear?!
We put a man on the moon!!
jconservative
May 8th, 2012
7:56 am
If Lugar is not reelected he would make an excellent candidate for Sec of State in the next administration, Obama or Romney.
GT
May 8th, 2012
8:11 am
Mary Elizabeth you write so brilliantly.
An American losing his life for his country needs to ask why. They were asked to give the ultimate sacrifice to the country, while not so Americans complain about taxes and superficial sacrifice. And the soldiers making it through these foreign wars, come home to joblessness, depression and little long term honor. It is like the private sector think they are suckers, like plantation owners expecting the help to fight their battles while they entertain the guest. More and more money is checking out of this country, they think they have a right to, these sacrifices mean nothing to them, they can abandon this country in a heartbeat if the fields look greener in some far off land. I say fine but the money stays here. This could be a Darwin in reverse, where the true Americans replenish the country and the not so patriotic are shipped off. I think you will find if the intellectual property is left to the people who are Americans, the real market of this product, that the second string or third can do just as well as the first. Let these products compete in free enterprise or the inventor shows some respect for the country that allowed him or her to invent them. You will see more activity in the grassroots of America.
The lawyers are seeing this very thing, young people not wishing to slave under the old system of partnership have come out of the prestigious law schools and started new practices that suits their lives more. No more feeding a blowhard in the penthouse while they slave in the basement. We need to have more respect for what America has given and less focus on the individual. The establishment has turn that around to you work for me and maybe I will take care of you. All the sacrifice is on the middle and lower class.
lynnie gal
May 8th, 2012
8:11 am
Ann Rant is right about the segregationists split from the Democratic party in the 1960’s to become Dixiecrats, then whole hog Republicans by 1980. It’s hilarious how Republicans go far back into history, even as far as Lincoln, to accuse Democrats of being the party of “slavery, segregation, secularism and sedition”. Ha ha ha!
sheepdawg
May 8th, 2012
8:20 am
the party of the ignorant – god, guns, gays, and controlling women. the american version of the taliban
Adam
May 8th, 2012
8:22 am
Thulsa my answer for your last night’s nonsense is upstairs.
williebkind
May 8th, 2012
8:33 am
JamVet
May 8th, 2012
7:51 am
I do believe some in congress vote for something they know is not going to pass to appease a certain group of constituents but is never the main theme of the party. Yepper JamVet you sure are educatued beyond your intelligenc.
Peter
May 8th, 2012
8:36 am
“Proof that this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party: Obama and trillion dollar deficits”
How much of the deficit is the Iraq War ?
Had any other president in the History of the US started a WAR and cut Taxes ?
Georgia on my mind..
May 8th, 2012
8:43 am
JamVet
May 8th, 2012
7:21 am
Thanks for the excellent article. This was very eye opening and a must read for everyone on the blog!
Schwarzenegger Criticizes Republicans In Op-Ed, Calls For More Inclusion (VIDEOS) – Huffington Post | Politics News Extra
May 8th, 2012
9:15 am
[...] Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog) [...]
Joe Hussein Mama
May 8th, 2012
9:24 am
TBG — “JHM, you should hang with me sometime.”
RIght back at you.
“I have been kicked out of a carwash in College Park because I didn’t feel Obama was a great persident (this was during his FIRST FFS).”
I was lectured by one of my squad leaders in the Army because I dared to express the view that perhaps President Bush (the elder) wasn’t doing such a good job.
“I have been called everything but a child of God because I state I’m not a democrat.”
I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m going to hell because I’m not a Republican. I’ve also been told that I’m not a veteran any more because I had a “Veterans For Kerry” bumpersticker on my car in 2004.
“Do you know what it’s like to be in a setting (barbershop, family gathering whatever) and hear a political discussion take place, hear falsehoods being thrown all over and not participate because you don’t feel like being cussed out?”
Yes, I do.
“Have you ever been cussed out because you didn’t like a politician or party?”
Yes. In both cases above, the cussing out took place in public.
“Ever had your ethnicity questioned because you didn’t like a politician or party?”
Not exactly, but if you’re a white guy and you mention that you’re a Democrat around the wrong people, you’ll get called a n****r-lover real quick. FWIW, I don’t hate anyone, regardless of ethnicity or skin color, so I guess I’m a n****r-lover just like I’m a Hispanic-lover, an Asian-lover, a Native American-lover and a White People-lover. Shrug.
“Sucks to be a Black independent in America these days.”
I can relate.
Mary Elizabeth
May 8th, 2012
9:53 am
GT, 8:11 am
“No more feeding a blowhard in the penthouse while they slave in the basement. We need to have more respect for what America has given and less focus on the individual. The establishment has turn that around to you work for me and maybe I will take care of you. All the sacrifice is on the middle and lower class.”
=================================================
First, thank you for your very kind remarks about my writing. That was a more than generous statement, but I do appreciate your kind remarks.
Yes, I agree with you that the primary sacrifice has been on the middle and working classes, especially in the past 30 years. The answer is for the middle and working classes to see how they have been used and manipulated and to stand up against this injustice. The middle and working classes have the numbers to stop this injustice, but, first, they must see through what has been happening, as you do.
This insight of depth is why Thomas Jefferson supported public education – so that an educated population, of the masses, could see how their individual rights may be taken away from them by the wealthy and powerful few who could easily manipulate the uneducated and unaware lower classes to serve their interests, which would involve monetary gain for the few.
So, one of the propaganda tactics of the present wealthy and powerful few has been to establish a common enemy (the “government”) through which half of the populace would, unknowingly, join forces with them to serve the ends of the few. In using this stealthy tactic, the powerful few could “divide and conquer” the numbers of the masses in order to gather half of their numbers to serve their monetary ends. In addition, by these stealthy means, they could place more limitations on the government to stop their agendas, which may not serve the “general welfare” of all, but only their personal monetary interests.
This is why I continue to write. I want to help educate the masses, in many ways. This is why I support public education (as did Jefferson). I do not want private education to be controlled by those same wealthy and powerful few who can set personal ideological agendas in their for-profit, corporate schools to serve their own agendas, indefinitely. As someone on this blog has said – so that America’s children would graduate from corporate owned schools, owned the wealthy few, to go to work in corporations owned by the same wealthy few, in which the population would continue simply to be the puppets and servants of the wealthy few – from birth until death. This would be a perversion of America’s egalitarian tenets. It would be a total hierarchial vision for America, which will have perversely transmuted the egalitarian vision of the founders of our nation into a hierarchial one in which the few rule the masses, and the masses are viewed as inferior the few and not equal to them in their common humanity.
This country has been built on egalitarian principles (we hold these truths to be self-evident. . .) and these principles not only serve the common good of all in the society, but they ensure that the right of the individual, for personal freedom, will be secured throughout time. In that regard, I must turn your meaning of “less focus on the individual” to show that by ensuring the rights of the most common man or woman to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in our nation, we will have, in fact, secured the right of every individual to have his or her own freedom of self-fulfillment and personal autonomy.
I believe that your meaning that there should be “less focus on the individual” is that there should be less focus on simply “self-serving” interests of individuals, who have little understanding of how they interact in society, as a whole. There must be balance in an egalitarian nation of serving the common good of all and, also, of allowing for individual freedom. These can and will co-exist, simultaneously, in a nation that is essentially egalitarian in vision. Our Founding Fathers achieved that balance, for us, in nearly perfect form. America is out-of-balance, at the present time, because those with a hierarchial vision of others are trying to dominate through wealth, power, and the stealthy machination of the masses through propaganda. We must see through their machinations and their inordinate desire for the promulgation of their own self-interests, and we must forge ahead with the egalitarian vision upon which this nation was created by our very wise Founding Fathers. As Benjamin Franklin replied to a lady who questioned him as to what the Founding Fathers had formed, “A Republic, Ma’am, if you can keep it.”
The Truth
May 8th, 2012
10:27 am
Reagan raised the debt limit 17 times, raised taxes 11 times, traded arms for hostages to Iranian terrorists and cut and run from Lebanon after American soldiers were bombed there. Is this the guy that Republicons worship? Really?
GT
May 8th, 2012
11:11 am
Mary Elizabeth education is the key. No one disdains education more than a Georgia Republican. If you have it they think you are liberal and if you don’t they think they own you.
They find value of life in the abortion issue, but not in capital punishment. Gays can’t get married yet divorce is À la carte. They found it convenient to fight Hitler, yet strangely share some of the same base beliefs of a few superior beings ruling over the masses.
I often, being an old southern born, think it has been the ingrained purpose of these few to hold back the quality of education of the masses. Our poverty is their way of holding down competition both politically and economically. Look at states like North Carolina that have had the same challenges as this state. They figured out education long ago, and though it excels in banking, research, manufacturing, green power, and on and on. We in Georgia still fight the civil war, believe in ghost and live in poverty, while NC moves on to prosperity.
Mary Elizabeth
May 8th, 2012
12:20 pm
GT, my father grew up in the hills of western North Carolina, and I know well what you mean. Even in his era (graduated high school in 1938) in the deep hills of NC, he received an enlightening education from outstanding high school teachers. My father’s family has always placed priority on education. My grandmother was a teacher before she married and gave birth to 11 children, dying in childbirth in the home she designed, overlooking those beautiful mountains, when she was 44.
How those in power have handled education, especially in the South, is very complex. There is no doubt that they had held back the quality of education for minorities for their own purposes. What education instills, especially what higher education instills, is an understanding that all people are equal in their humanity. Demagogues have played upon the prejudices, and ignorance, of the people in order to maintain personal power by insuring that people are viewed, and divided into, hierarchial status variations. They have reinforced the thinking that some are of greater value than others. Unfortunately, even some with higher education will see with those hierarchial eyes, especially if they have lived predominately in places that have perpetuated a stratified class system for generations. That stratified class consciousness is showing up, in part, today through the impetus of some for charter and private schools, which can segregate people, again, into categories of privilege, but more, now, by wealth and influence than simply by race. A limited number of charter schools could work with traditional public schools for their mutual benefit and betterment, but those in power must not try to use charter schools to dismantle public education for private education for the masses of children to be educated.
North Carolina and Virginia both awarded their electoral votes to Obama in 2008. I am hoping that they will do so, again, in 2012.
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