Sarah Palin's Latest Crazy Move: Are Republicans a Danger to the Republic?

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted July 6, 2009.

"I’m not putting Alaska through that -- I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That’s not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old ‘politics as usual.’ I promised that four years ago -- and I meant it. It’s not what is best for Alaska. I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is unconventional and not so comfortable."

So instead of completing the job that the people of Alaska hired her to do -- be their governor -- Palin announced her decision to quit by the end of July. Amazingly, there’s still hope in some Republican circles that Palin will use her free time to mount a campaign for the White House in 2012. (Kristol said Palin may have been "crazy like a fox.")

And given the GOP’s continued media clout and its sophisticated attack capabilities, it surely is not out of the question that the Republicans might regain the White House in the not-too-distant future with another high-risk candidate, possibly even Palin herself.

Democratic Comparisons

While the Republicans send up light-weights like Bush and Palin, the Democrats generally select candidates with strong credentials in governance.

By comparison to Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Palin in 2008, the Democrats correspondingly put up Al Gore, John Kerry and Joe Biden. While those three men surely have their shortcomings, they all are highly qualified and deeply experienced individuals.

Even a Democratic newcomer like Barack Obama demonstrated a first-rate intellect and impressive organizational skills as a candidate.

Yet, the idea that the Democrats are the "responsible ones" and the Republicans are the "crazies" is disconcerting for someone like me who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a Republican household with Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative on my nightstand.

Then, the Republicans were the party of Rotary Club businessmen who met payrolls, balanced budgets, led community charities and -- while supporting necessary government investments in roads, schools and other public works -- held a reasonable skepticism about Washington’s ability to solve all the nation’s problems.

Though there were imbalanced and dangerous GOP leaders then, too, like Sen. Joe McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon, the most powerful Republicans were generally solid characters like President Dwight Eisenhower and Sen. Everett Dirksen. Only over the past three decades has anti-intellectual anti-empiricism transformed the GOP into a modern-day know-nothing party that disdains facts and reason.

Ronald Reagan, with his loose relationship with reality, was an early version of this new Republican, but George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have taken Reagan’s tendencies to new heights. Over the past eight years, Bush and his neocon advisers treated information as something to be twisted and falsified, all the better to mislead a gullible public.

For Republicans, dogma regularly overrode reason. The GOP response to the federal debt and the growing gap between America’s rich and the rest of us has been to advocate tax cuts and more tax cuts, to let the wealthy consolidate an equity imbalance not seen since the pre-Depression days of the 1920s.

In the face of the record deficits spurred by Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the party simultaneously embraced the neocon agenda of expanding America's global empire and settling international problems through the costly option of military force.

Despite the resulting harm to the nation’s economic health and to the stretched-thin U.S. military, the Republicans have refused to rethink either their tax cuts or their overseas military commitments. Instead they have opted for a political strategy of attacking anyone and any proposal that seeks even a mildly different approach.

See more stories tagged with: democrats, republicans, gop, obama, kerry, mccain, gore, biden, neocon, alaska, reagan, sarah palin, governor, palin resigns, dwight eisenhower, sen. everett dirksen

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

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