The 21st Century Republicans

In a tweet yesterday, one Dave Pacheco said this:

Sarah Palin is running for President in 2012, just like the Mayans predicted.

That really does sum things up perfectly.

Well, it’s not really that a Sarah Palin bid for PotUS actually signifies the end of times (though perhaps, truly, her success in that endeavour would). It’s that she has a lot of support. And that GWB had a lot of support, in his day. And that insane morons like Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback and James Inhofe and Michele Bachmann and Pat Robertson have a lot of support.

It’s all we can do to remember, at this point, that Abraham Lincoln was the first President of the United States who was associated with the Republican Party, formed in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, progressives looking to move society forward. It’s hard to remember that Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were Republicans.

Because what we have now, at least at the forefront of the party, are fringe lunatics who say “freedom” while they work to limit freedom; who support the First Amendment by restricting free speech, free assembly, and a free press while imposing their own ultra-Christian values in the name of religious freedom; who try to dictate everyone’s lives without considering how little they would like it if theirs were dictated by others.

Their predecessors, 50, 100, and 150 years ago, sought to free people, to live their own lives, to be as they wanted to be. They sought to keep us healthy and free, to protect us from what would interfere with real freedom.

Now we deal with rooms full of nut cases who restrict civil rights as sham protection against imagined threats, who oppose and ridicule science and research, and who impose religious doctrine, not caring who agrees with them or who doesn’t. We have political leaders who label their opponents “un-American”, who actually believe that people are possessed by demons, who think homosexuals should be killed, who would have foreigners deported, and who favour faith healing and biblical creation, denying the science of evolution and global climate change.

WTF is wrong with these people and those who support them? You’d think this was 1710, not 2010. Abraham Lincoln would be glad not to be alive to see this.