When the GOP Thinks the GOP is Seriously F*cked Up

It was only three days after President Ronald Reagan was shot that Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill visited him in his hospital bed. The speaker was the first outsider to visit Reagan. O’Neill knelt by the president’s bed, tears in his eyes, took his hand and they recited the 23rd Psalm together.

Now, jump in your fancy time machine and travel into the future. That kind of friendship, that mutual respect between opposite parties does not exist. Does anyone really believe that John Boehner would rush to President Obama’s hospital room, kneel at the side of his bed and pray with him? I doubt that would happen. What I do believe is, that if the opposite occurred, President Obama would go to Boehner’s hospital bed, because in the past 6 plus years, the president has tried, over and over again, to reach across that chasm-like-aisle, and each time, the new GOP has firmly slapped his hand away.

Quite a few Republicans have come out over the last several years and slammed the GOP for their divisiveness, their unwillingness to compromise and their extreme-right politics. Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida, now turned Democrat who lost the governor’s race to the bizarre Rick Scott made a few telling comments.

From WUSF news:

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t agree with President Obama about everything. But I’ve gotten to know him, I’ve worked with him, and the choice is crystal clear. When he took office, the economic crisis had already put my state of Florida on the edge of disaster. The foreclosure crisis was consuming homeowners, the tourists we depend on couldn’t afford to visit and our vital construction industry had come to a standstill. President Obama saw what I saw: a catastrophe in the making. And he took action.  

And another portion of Crist’s speech, from the Huffington Post:

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn’t leave the Republican party; it left me. Then again, as my friend Jeb Bush recently noted, Reagan himself would have been too moderate and too reasonable for today’s GOP.

That’s just one man, a life-long Reagan republican, who endorsed John McCain in 2008. What a difference a few years can make.

A conservative federal judge, Richard Posner, made the following statement about his beliefs regarding the GOP and no doubt his position hasn’t changed:

Judge Richard Posner, a conservative on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, has long been one of the nation’s most respected and admired legal thinkers on the right. But in an interview with NPR, he expressed exasperation at the modern Republican Party, and confessed that he has become “less conservative” as a result.

Posner expressed admiration for President Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, two pillars of conservatism. But over the past 10 years, Posner said, “there’s been a real deterioration in conservative thinking. And that has to lead people to re-examine and modify their thinking.”

“I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy,” he said.

Goofy.  That’s what he said “goofy.”

David Frum, former member of George W. Bush’s administration and staunch Republican, has spoken at length about the disturbing trends he sees becoming the norm for the new GOP. This is a portion of an article Frum wrote for New York Magazine:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

Wow.  I wonder what he would have to say today about, as John McCain called them, the “wacko-birds” in the GOP.  Take, for example, Louie Gohmert of Texas, who ran against the speaker on the first day of the 2015 congress.  He said that if he didn’t win the consequences to the United States would be “dire,” like an apocalypse.

Frum also wrote an op-ed for CNN that agreed with an article published by two scientists, entitled, in part, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” The two scientists state the following:

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

“When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

David Frum agrees. What does this mean for the GOP majority? It means that their own people, powerful people, are seeing them for what they really are; far-right zealots who have no interest in dealing with any of America’s problems. Even former First Lady, Barbara Bush said in a speech at Southern Methodist University, “I hate the fact that people think ‘compromise’ is a dirty word.” While Mrs. Bush is a staunch Republican her comment cannot be ignored.

So, what can we do? Well, it’s impossible to change someone whose ideals are based in faith, not logic. The issue for most of the rational thinking folks in the good ole’ USA is that even the faith the far-right espouses is wrong. They misinterpret the bible and the Constitution, and the Republicans who understand they are watching the demise of their own party are called Republicans In Name Only, or “RINOs:”

What do you think? Can the Republican party save itself from the wacko birds and the zealots? Or is it too little, too late?  After all it’s been three years and things certainly haven’t gotten any better.  On the contrary they’ve gotten crazier and now there’s even more of them.  The bottom line is when the Republicans think the Republicans are all fucked up, the Congress is fucked up, and that’s never a good sign for us regular folk.

About Post Author

Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.

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