AN EDITED VERSION OF THIS POST NOW APPEARS ONLINE IN LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND IS SCHEDULED TO APPEAR IN THE HARD COPY TOMORROW
("Will Trump Force Principled Conservatives to Start Their Own Party? I Hope So.")
Mr. Friedman is living in that alternate universe where "principled conservatives" still reside. In this world, they have long gone the way of the dodo bird.
Donald Trump was the result, not the cause, of the disintegration of the Republican moral code. From the Southern Strategy as of the time of the fight for passage of the Civil Rights Act to Barry Goldwater's overt racism, from Richard Nixon's dirty tricks to Ronald Reagan's Welfare Queens, from Newt Gingrich's mandate to treat Democrats as the enemy to George Bush's invented weapons of mass destruction, from Mitch McConnell's directive to make Barack Obama a one term President to his pretzel twisting logic to steal a seat on the Supreme Court, the six decade trajectory of this party has been only in one direction.
Donald Trump was merely an accumulation of all the ills the Republican party has long suffered.
It is past time we waited for a different kind of Republican. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not real Mr. Friedman. Neither is the kind of Republican you imagine.
8 comments:
A sad history.
JP
I choked on my coffee when I read his line about Murkowski and Romney. Principled? Hardly. And while there were judges who did the right thing after the election, please read (or reread) the article on the 200+ conservative judges that our children will have to live with
PB
Well said. Given all the evil that the Republican party has stood for, it is a fearful thing for us to imagine the path ahead.--RE
Well said.
FCL
Kudos.
Helen
Started the day with coffee and an RSN letter to the Times
PM
First day of 2021 and there you are in print in the NYT
NL
Congratulations on starting the New Year in the NYT
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