I'm Becoming A Republican

[MarkN]

Why I'm joining the GOP; Leaving the left for fun and profit
BY Jeff Gillenkirk
Sunday, May 29, 2005

After a lifetime voting for and working for Democratic candidates
and independents, I'mfinally going to make the switch and become a
Republican.

The reasons are many, not the least of which is age. I turned 55
recently and, having lived more than half my life, I can't afford to
worry anymore about the other guy. It's time for me.

As a Republican, I can now proudly -- indeed, defiantly -- pledge to
never again vote for anyone who raises taxes for any reason. To hell
with roads, bridges, schools, police and fire protection, Medicare,
Social Security and regulation of the airwaves.

President Bush has promised to give me more tax cuts even though our
federal government owes trillions of dollars to its creditors. But
that's someone else's problem, not mine. Republicans are about the here
and now, and I'm here now.

As a Republican, I can favor exploiting the environment for everything
she's got. No need to worry about quaint notions like posterity and
natural legacy. There are plenty of resources left for everyone, and if
we don't use them, someone else will.

I want a party that doesn't worry about things before we have
to. Republicans refuse to get hog-tied by theories such as global
warming, ozone depletion, fished-out oceans and disappearing wetlands.
The real problems -- if there are any -- aren't forecast to take
holdfor at least 50 years. So what do I care? I'll be dead.

As a Republican, I can swagger and clamor for war -- inIraq,
Afghanistan, Colombia, wherever -- even though I've never fought in one
or even been in the military. I can claim that we're fighting
for Democracy, ignoring reports of torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air
Base and Guantanamo Bay, and a spreading gulag of secret detention
centers around the world.

Freedom, as every American should know after spending $300 billion for
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, isn't free.

As a Republican, I can insist on strict moral values when it comes to
sex and ignore the growing moral chasms in business, politics,
sports, journalism and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.

A society that loses control of its sexual urges faces unwanted
pregnancies, socially transmitted disease, broken
families. Those overzealous about wealth, however, produce only a
higher GDP, lifelong security for their family and more minimum wage
jobs for the lower classes. What's wrong with that?

As a Republican, I can favor strict punishment of criminals, except
for those who happen to be my friends or neighbors. Isn't that the
very definition of community -- looking out for friends and family?

I will be pro-death penalty and anti-abortion, pro-child but
anti-child care, for education but against funding of public schools.
As a Republican, I'll have a better chance of getting to spout
my opinions in the media, which for some reason seems convinced that
since Bush was re-elected with the smallest electoral margin of any
sitting president in history, liberals are passe.

As a Republican, I'll say goodbye to "old Jesus" and hello to "new
Jesus. " Sure Christ started out as a liberal Jew, and look where that
got him. Compassion, love and diatribes against the rich only encourage
the weak and punish the most successful among us. The
Jesus that Republicans worship is a muscular, decisive, pro-war
crusader hard at work cleansing the world of evildoers, not, God
forbid, turning the other cheek.

My decision to become a Republican didn't come easily. For years I
clung to the idea that the foundation of a democratic society was our
implied social contract, each of us committing some level of personal
sacrifice to the common good of all.

I regarded taxes as dues we pay for better roads and schools,
safe inspection of meat and dairy products, maintenance of parks and
protection of wilderness areas. I see now that looking out for the
common good resulted in shortchanging the most important
element in this formula -- me.

Let Democrats continue promising the "greatest good for the
greatest number." Republicans clearly have my number -- No. 1.

I'm sure a lot of my friends reading this will ask me, "How can you
sleep?" My answer will be, "Who's got time? I'm busy earning money."
While they're bellyaching about rising deficits, the outsourcing of
jobs and casualties in Iraq, I'll be marveling at the march of freedom
in the Middle East, upticks in the GDP and the president's plan to link
SocialSecurity to the magic of the marketplace.

As a Republican, I simply won't listen to bad news anymore. Bad news
doesn't get me or my family anywhere. If you don't have anything good
to say about somebody, don't say anything at all -- unless it happens
to be about a Democrat, of course.

©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
================================================== ==

Hah! I'll just bet y'all thought I meant me, didn'tcha? Silly Vault Dwellers!

[Angus McFeargus]

Originally posted by MarkN:

Hah! I'll just bet y'all thought I meant me, didn'tcha? Silly Vault Dwellers! Well I did have a brief spark of hope, but it turned out to be the same ol' same ol'. av_rolleyes.gif

[MarkN]

Well, that's ok, John, but I'm not about ready to cross over to the Dark Side anytime soon anyway. graemlins/av_cheesygrin.gif

[Angus McFeargus]

Originally posted by MarkN:
Well, that's ok, John, but I'm not about ready to cross over to the Dark Side anytime soon anyway. graemlins/av_cheesygrin.gif Well that's only because you underestimate the POWER of the...HEY WAIT A MINUTE we aren't the dark side, you are! You tricked me!

[anthonyX]

No sterotypes in that av_razz.gif

I agree why keep raising taxes? Like Arnie says it not about the taxes it is about managing what we have and living with in our means (going to here this phrase over and over till Nov!)

[Wingnut]

Blah blah blah ..... people for some reason keep acting like there is a real difference between the two parties.

[calvin]

It is these assumed generalizations and stereotypes that keep both parties from working together, and further dividing Americans themselves into venomous factions that distrust and often downright detest each other. Rather than seeing each other as Americans, who all only want what is best for their country and the world, they see each other as enemies to be defeated.

So thank you, San Francisco Chronicle, for only furthering the discord in our nation.

[Angus McFeargus]

Originally posted by calvin:
It is these assumed generalizations and stereotypes that keep both parties from working together, and further dividing Americans themselves into venomous factions that distrust and often downright detest each other. MarkN, let it be known that you are venemous and I distrust and detest you! av_biggrin.gif

[OmegaBob]

Originally posted by MarkN:
President Bush has promised to give me more tax cuts even though our federal government owes trillions of dollars to its creditors.If we (the US) owe money to our "creditors" then why oh why should be forgive Third World debt (ala G8 and LAME Live 8)????

I say we freakin foreclose on those deadbeat countries! I also say we foreclose on any country that still owe us $$ from their World War II debt! Its been 50+ years! Pay up losers or be evicted!

Freakin deadbeat losers! Get a job!

[MarkN]

Originally posted by John Austin:
MarkN, let it be known that you are venemous and I distrust and detest you! av_biggrin.gif Wha-at? Oh, sure, fine then! Be that way! No cookie for you! graemlins/av_cheesygrin.gif

[Mad Monk]

America, f*ck yeah!

[anthonyX]

It is these assumed generalizations and stereotypes that keep both parties from working together, and further dividing Americans themselves into venomous factions that distrust and often downright detest each other. Rather than seeing each other as Americans, who all only want what is best for their country and the world, they see each other as enemies to be defeated. Some of my best friends are democrats av_biggrin.gif I actually used to be more of a democrat until I went to college and got a real job. Since then I have turn 180 to more of a conservative. I actually think I am a libertarian but there is no great leadership in that party. I love the platform for the most part. What turned me is how disillusioned I became when I realize that my money that I work hard for and pay to Uncle Sam is being used so unwisely. I get tired of carrying other people's "lack of effort". Not to mention that the more you succeed in life the more you are expected to pay. It is like being penalized for all the hard work you go through. And I hate the fact that the answer to every problem is to pay more taxes. California is such a freaking socialist state. They ***** and whine in Sacramento about the budget and deficit but as soon as anyone tries to curtail the spending and eliminating of program there is a massive state-wide advertising on how they are taking away our essential programs. Once I make my fortune I will be gone of this state!! Maybe go to Alaska or Idaho av_razz.gif

[Angus McFeargus]

Originally posted by MarkN:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by John Austin:
MarkN, let it be known that you are venemous and I distrust and detest you! av_biggrin.gif Wha-at? Oh, sure, fine then! Be that way! No cookie for you! graemlins/av_cheesygrin.gif </font>[/QUOTE]Don't want your venom cookie anyway! graemlins/av_cheesygrin.gif

[FLA]

There is a bum on the corner of the street I work on. I see him frequently going behind our building and "huddling" with another man. I walked back into his favorite spot and seen a crack pipe.

We are also constructing new offices on a floor and the contracter doing the work decided to take pity on the bum. Giving him $12/h to sweep the floor. The bum said no. He makes more money on the corner, getting welfare, social security, disability, etc than he does working.

I love all those gov't services, they come in so very handy for those poor living on the streets. Those who are struggling, yet still refuse to take a free $12/h job doing basically nothing.

Thank you Democrats. I love the nation you created, where even bums get more out of life than most who work.

[calvin]

Originally posted by FLA:
There is a bum on the corner of the street I work on. I see him frequently going behind our building and "huddling" with another man. I walked back into his favorite spot and seen a crack pipe.

We are also constructing new offices on a floor and the contracter doing the work decided to take pity on the bum. Giving him $12/h to sweep the floor. The bum said no. He makes more money on the corner, getting welfare, social security, disability, etc than he does working.

I love all those gov't services, they come in so very handy for those poor living on the streets. Those who are struggling, yet still refuse to take a free $12/h job doing basically nothing.

Thank you Democrats. I love the nation you created, where even bums get more out of life than most who work. $12/hr!!! graemlins/av_ohmy.gif

I make $6.40/hr at my job! Jesus christ!

[DanS]

The San Francisco Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL) also brought us this one:

Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity

Keith Thompson
Sunday, May 22, 2005

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction. DanS

[Chris.Ram]

Be a Libertarian, we are Republicans that have better sex. We also believe in guns and free will. Let the people who refuse to work suffer with the thought of "stay off my property".

As for the recent court decision....you can have my land if you can get the gun out of my hand!

http://lp.org/

[calvin]

Originally posted by Chris.Ram:
Be a Libertarian, we are Republicans that have better sex. We also believe in guns and free will. Let the people who refuse to work suffer with the thought of "stay off my property".

As for the recent court decision....you can have my land if you can get the gun out of my hand!

http://lp.org/ av_smile.gif