Put your country above your party
Two generations ago, many Democrats were so incensed at the events of the 1960s that they joined the GOP. With today’s Republican excesses steadily worsening, sentient voters are beginning to reject GOP groupthink. Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post just posted a column entitled “Put Your Country Above Your Party” that explains the reasoning of conservatives who are fleeing the GOP:
The party went from being dominated by practical moderates, like the first Bush, to ideological and fundamentalist zealots, like the second Bush. In the interim, President Clinton gave us balanced budgets, welfare reform and a war in Kosovo so brilliantly conducted we did not lose a single soldier and completely achieved our objective.In the face of the evidence that Bill Clinton had accomplished everything I had wanted out of government and that the second Bush was headed in a disastrous direction in foreign and fiscal policy, I could have stayed the course and kept arguing for my party. But I decided to do the rational thing, to do the patriotic thing instead – change course.
The unprincipled hypocrisy of the current Republican leadership has long been a favorite target of mine, so it is especially nice to see conservatives joining the reality-based community.