Parting Comments

Out-of-touch

                                   

As happy as I am about the current presidential voting results I think there is a part of me that identifies with the Republican party. It's not their clean scrubbed sanitized women or their nifty flag lapel pins. No, it has more to do with their sense of fiscal and personal responsibility that appeals to me. And, if you've read any of the several editorials about the current state of the Republican party I think you have heard similar sentiments.

Somehow the party has become woefully reckless in their desperate attempt to stay in office and remain important. Incredibly, instead of trying to take principles of individual responsibility and fiscal accountability forward into modern times, they seem to have attached themselves to one group after another that seems to desperately want to remain attached to a vision of America, the American family, and the pursuit of happiness that not only no longer exists, it never did. So, instead of acknowledging change, accommodating social transition, welcoming diversity, and embracing tolerance, they have allowed themselves to slip into the control of a noisy frustrated minority that wants control. Absolute, all pervasive, deeply personal control.

In both this election and the last the Republicans hoisted a candidate who at least had some genuine qualifications even if they were not perfect. But, in both elections, somehow they felt the need to tap a running mate for their candidate who was absolutely polarizing-- and terrifying-- in their rigid, myopic, intolerant vision for America.

I could give serious consideration to a Republican candidate who acknowledged diversity. I could give series consideration to a Republican candidate who held individual rights as closely as state's rights. I could give serious consideration to a Republican candidate who recognized human beings are multifaceted, that no one system of belief holds reign over all others, that there is more value in looking for the good in people than there is in describing the faults you perceive in others.  As it stands, those candidates are almost universally Democrats in this era.

Note to the Grand Old Party:  Americans, in the majority, don't like to vote for a**holes. Drop your major in social sciences and concentrate on the math. It might do your party, and this country, some good.