I was talking with my 82 year old mother in law about the state of the nation trying to figure out what happened here with politicians putting their own personal gain ahead of the good of the country and she says the problem is what has happened to the Republican Party, they’ve gone off a cliff. She and I are both former Republicans and I knew she was right.
Forget saying this is no longer the party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. This isn’t the party of George Bush Senior and Bob Dole. When I was active in the GOP some chose to support gun rights but they did not go around pointing guns at journalists like a Republican legislator from Arizona did recently.
We did not support candidates who wanted their state to secede from America but still wanted to run for president. That was what the Civil War was about and we were the ones who saved the Union back then.
We reached out to the gay community in the spirit of the Open Tent. We did not believe that gays could be “cured” by reading the Bible as Michelle Bachman’s husband believes. If a small country was invaded and they were an ally then we drew a line in the sand and defended them. We did not invade countries without just cause.
We wanted taxes low but we did not believe that the rich needed lower taxes than the rest of us and if you needed to raise revenue then you had to raise taxes as two former Republican presidents believed. We believed in science and education. We wanted to help business not blindly take our marching orders from them.
Well I asked my mother in law what we could do about it and she said there is nothing you can do about it, we will just get through this as we have in the past. And she is right, those with reason will take charge again and right the ship of state but until that day you just have to wonder what the hell happened to the GOP and the nation.