By Alan Caruba
June 4, 2007
The firestorm of public outcry against the proposed immigration
bill is testimony enough that the Senate and the House need
to be reminded that selling out the nation is a very bad idea.
There are very good reasons why nations have borders.
The bill is just one more way the Republican Party demonstrated
that it has been steadily abandoning its fundamental principles.
In essence, the Party has stood for sovereignty, the free market,
fiscal prudence, private property, and small government. It
was a party that historically has been reluctant to be drawn
into foreign wars.
In his new book, "The Invasion of the Party Snatchers",
Victor Gold who was a press aide to Barry Goldwater and a speechwriter
in George H.W. Bush's administration, recalled the Republican
rejection of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations treaty in 1919.
Gold reminds us that the party did not see the nation as "peace-keeper
for the planet" because it saw that hubris as "the
road to imperial ruin and war without end."
Regarding George W. Bush's pre-emptive war, Gold noted that, "...as
to committing American troops to battle overseas, until George
H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 1991, no Republican
president since William McKinley in 1898 had initiated a war;
nor, until Richard Nixon in 1969, had any Republican president
opted to carry on a war initiated by a Democratic president."
Gold's book is a scathing look at the depths to which the
present Republican Party has fallen and the way George W. Bush
and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, have come to represent
everything that Republicans have fought against from the days
when Lincoln first led the party.
Gold makes no bones about it. He wants the present GOP to
die so it can be born again to its former principles. The elections
of 2008 are likely to bring out masses of Democrats who feel
rejuvenated by the failures and missteps of the White House
and the GOP. The recently reported falloff of financial support
for the GOP, estimated to be as high as forty percent, might
actually suggest they're doing something wrong.
More than a few Republicans who simply do not want to live
in an America that intrudes into the most private decisions
of people's lives, that throws overboard the Constitutional
protections of privacy, judicial protections, and whose elected
representatives have engaged in an orgy of spending, are desperately
seeking real conservative leadership.
So far, however, the Republican candidate debates have more
nearly resembled "The Weakest Link" than any promise
of a strong commitment to conservative principles.
America has had its political dynasties, the Adams and the
Roosevelt's, but they have been few and I think most Americans
are wary of more Clintons. They are not likely to want any
more Bushes after the last six years of the President's rejection
of everything for which the Republican Party has stood.
The President has been utterly indifferent to the invasion
of millions of Mexicans and others who have illegally crossed
our borders, placing all manner of burdens on native born and
naturalized Americans. He has made it known that he is eager
to sign the proposed immigration "reform" law. This
is a security and sovereignty issue of major proportions and
it is a total sell-out whether it's Democrats or Republicans
voting for it.
As yet little known to the general public, the President has
advocated a "North American Union" that would eliminate
the sovereignty of the United States, melding it with Canada
and Mexico, to be run by bureaucrats along the lines of the
European Union. Its official name is the "Security and
Prosperity Partnership of North America" and it offers
neither. This non-treaty's staff is zealously pursuing this,
squirreled away in the Department of Commerce, far from the
Congressional oversight needed to thwart its "harmonizing" efforts
to change our trade and other regulations.
Bush has also turned to the Dark Green side, endorsing the
utterly bogus "climate change" agenda that involves
reducing "greenhouse gas" emissions. The fact that
95% or more of greenhouse gases consist of water vapor continues
to be unreported and ignored by those who want to destroy the
economies of industrial nations with "cap-and-trade" schemes.
Global warming? It's the Sun. Get over it!
In the area of fiscal prudence, the GOP seems to have lost
its wits. Looking back over his two terms in office, with the
support of the Republican Party the President never vetoed
a single spending bill in six years until the most recent one
that put a timeline on further military engagement in Iraq.
Despite efforts to address the vast default that awaits Social
Security, the GOP added a prescription program to the bloated
Medicare program.
The President's selection of Harriet Myers as a Supreme Court
nominee and then of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General were
suspect in the court of public opinion; the former withdrawing
from consideration, the latter subject to much criticism. His
two Supreme Court choices, Roberts and Alito, however, are
a counter-balance of good judgment.
Gold reflects the widespread feeling that elected Republicans
no longer have any regard for the voters. "I'd just like
to know there were still Republican senators around who didn't
think of the people who elected them as knuckle-walking Pleistocene
morons." This can, of course, be extended to Democrats
as well.
Gold warns that what has been passed off as a new kind of
conservative politics under the aegis of the neo-cons and the
pressures of evangelical groups is "merely a recycled
model of the old Liberal politics that led to the decline and
fall of the Democratic Party in the 1960s."
We are left to wonder how long it will take for those who
regard themselves as Republicans to desert today's GOP, mostly
by refusing to vote for its candidates, while waiting for new
leadership to replace those that have eviscerated it.
© Alan Caruba, May 2007
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