Since moving back to Maryland, I re-registered with the Republican Party. In Tennessee it was the Bible-thumping social conservatives that chased me out of the party. In Maryland, it’s the tax-it-till-it’s-dead liberals that chased me back in. For pretty much as long as I can remember, presidential politics has been an exercise in holding my nose and voting for the one who smelled least worst. Up until now, I’ve been avoiding the coverage as much as possible, but as the Republican candidates gather to debate tonight, I think it’s time to tune in and see if there’s anyone I can stomach supporting. This is America, the greatest democracy in history… Please let 2012 be the year we have something other than a socialist, a religious zealot, a village idiot, and protectionist to choose between.
Tag Archives: republican
Default and disfunction…
Watching the nightly news or reading the newspaper headlines is something of a lesson in dysfunction. If the two major political parties that have run the country for the last 100 odd years can’t come to grips with the fact that the thought of the US Government defaulting on its debt should be unthinkable, perhaps it’s time to consider the value of having either of those parties around. The men who founded this republic literally risked their lives just by signing a document proclaiming themselves free from Great Britain. Today’s politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are so entrenched in ideology and in playing to their base that they seem willing to let the ship of state sink with all flags flying and their hands around each other’s throat. So much for heroics. So much for for their obligation to the republic they were elected to serve.
I’m not a mathematician, but the formula seems obvious. For the staggering debt this country labors under to come down, spending must decrease and revenue must increase. Yes, some social programs will go away and that will hurt some people. Yes, some taxes will go up and that will hurt some people also. It’s going to be painful for many of us to adjust to a world more austere than then one we think we’re entitled to. It was painful for our grandparents, too, when they went though the “economic adjustment” of the Great Depression, but they emerged from it and worse to be recognized as our greatest generation.
Where are our great leaders today? Where’s our FDR with his Hundred Days? Where’s this generation’s Reagan standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union? Where’s our Kennedy calling on men to reach the moon? Where’s our Nixon opening China? Maybe such men don’t even exist anymore. Today’s politicians aren’t fit to carry the water for those giants of the 20th century and shouldn’t be in the same history books with the leaders of our distant past like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
This current crisis doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, but only if the men and women we’ve elected start behaving more like statesmen and less like common street thugs. How optimistic are you?
Early Voting…
In one of the great lines that endeared him to the party faithful, Ronald Reagan once told his fellow Republicans “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me.” My feelings about the Republican Party are more or less the same. My Republican Party, the party of Reagan, has been hijacked by fanatics and religious extremists inflexible on a single issue and unable to see a broader policy agenda. The Republican Party left me and for the first time since I registered to vote in 1996, today I voted for a Democrat at the top of the national ticket. I take no joy in it, as I believe John McCain is a good and true servant of the republic, but the thought of a vice president who doesn’t believe in evolution or in letting kids talk about sex in an academic setting and who thinks that living near Russia counts as foreign policy experience is more than I could bear. America deserves better than either of our alternatives this year and in the end I cast my vote for who I believe is the least bad alternative.
JEFFREYTHARP.COM 