Something has gone seriously

haywire with the Republican Party.

Once, it was the party of pragmatic

Main Street businessmen in

steel-rimmed spectacles who decried

profligacy and waste,

were devoted to their communities 

and supported the sort of 

prosperity that raises all ships.

They were goodhearted people who vanquished the gnarlier

elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters,

the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist

Antiforeigner element.

The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American

Hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to

vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate,

produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue

the French colonial army in  Vietnam, and gave us a 

period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) 

American arts and letters flourished and higher 

education burgeoned - and there was a

degree of plain decency in the country. 

Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's.

Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel 

a Christian obligation toward the poor. In the years 

between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated 

southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and 

sneered at the idea of public service and became 

the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against 

the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of 

pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by 

their sheer chutzpah, such as  the misty-eyed 

flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George 

McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass 

and made training films in Long Beach.

 The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger 

pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who 

rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship 

is another term for date rape," says Grover Norquist, 

the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don't want to abolish 

government. I simply want to reduce it to the size 

where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it 

in the bathtub."

The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified 

into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and 

corporate shills, faith-based economists, 

fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of 

convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat 

boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, 

nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, 

sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, 

Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil 

Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, 

little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's 

evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull 

and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of 

information and of secular institutions, whose 

philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts 

trying to walk.

Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world 

thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous. Rich ironies 

abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! 

Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous 

gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! 

Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write 

legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! 

Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight!

O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise 

and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier 

than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure 

sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for 

reelection on a platform of tragedy - the 

single greatest failure of national defense in 

our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 

men with box cutters put this nation into a 

tailspin, a failure the details of which the 

White House fought to keep secret even as it 

ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, 

thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, 

hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that 

will render government impotent, even as we 

engage in a war against a small country that 

was undertaken for the president's personal 

satisfaction but sold to the American public 

on the basis of brazen  misinformation, a war 

whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous 

transfer of wealth taking place in this country, 

flowing upward, and the deception is working 

beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the 

hands of the few is the Death knell of democracy. 

No republic in the history of humanity has 

Survived this The election of 2004 will say 

something about what happens to ours. The omens 

are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged 

with fear - fear, the greatest political strategy 

ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a 

drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to 

keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. 

And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint 

bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the 

Constitution,  eviscerate federal regulatory 

agencies, bring public education to a standstill, 

stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks 

on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election 

year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme 

Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming 

back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a 

turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, 

it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism 

shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions 

of the man who was purportedly in charge of national 

security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying 

along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway 

local, hustling toward their office on the 90th 

floor, the morning paper under their arms, I 

think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how 

he hopes to exploit those people with a little 

economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, 

cruise to victory in November and proceed to 

get some serious nation-changing done in his 

second term. 

This year, as in the past, Republicans will 

portray us Democrats as embittered academics, 

desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies 

and communards, people who talk to telephone 

poles, the party of the Deadheads.

They will wave enormous flags and wow over 

and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage 

of the World Trade Center and bodies being 

carried out and they will lie about their 

economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm. 

The Union is what needs defending this year. 

Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for 

the Southern Baptists is not the same as what 

Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus 

Republicanii has humbugged us to death on 

terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school 

prayer and flag burning and claimed the right 

to know what books we read and to dump their 

sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut 

the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the 

constitution on behalf of intolerance and 

promote the corporate takeover of the public 

airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes 

them. This is a great country, and it wasn't 

made so by angry people. We have a sacred 

duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren 

in better shape than however we found it.

We have a long way to go and we're not 

getting any younger.