On Dinosaurs, Republicans and other Extinct Species:

In the beginning…

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
-Barry Goldwater

The modern conservative movement crawled from the primordial ooze of Goldwater’s 1964 Republican convention speech and spread it’s progeny across the American political landscape faster than Dale Earnhardt at Talledega. It was the Mesozoic era of Big Government Reptiles, but there was a new T Rex in town and he was hungry.

Armed with reductive, razor-sharp statements and an agenda of low taxes, less regulation and the belief that the only true function of govt. is defense, that movement became a full-fledged juggernaut that tore through election cycles like Rush Limbaugh hitting the buffet at Western Sizzler.

Under Nixon’s banner of the Silent Majority, conservative political operatives found their earliest successes by adopting the fear-mongering strategies of the John Birchers and Joe McCarthy, running roughshod over cowering liberals and their squishy inclusive politics. Just imagine a pickup truck flying a confederate flag spinning doughnuts in the lawn during a wine and cheese garden party in the Hamptons: tweedy-types running in terror, aspic flying, and you get the picture.

The conservatives couldn’t win by revealing their ACTUAL strategy, which was to use the diversionary tactics of God, Guns and Gays to hide the fact that they were about to fundamentally restructure the tax code and regulatory environment in a way that guaranteed a return to the Gilded Age: those halcyon days when there was virtually no middle class and the workers were at the mercy of Robber Baron industrialists. When children worked in mills and mines and there was no social security or minimum wage or medicare and it was a survival of the richest. Ah! The good old days!

Better yet, they found they could enlist Bubba’s help in returning his family to servitude by scaring the hell out of him! Hey, let’s tell him his American Legion Hall and elementary school is about to be over-run with blacks, socialists, Yippies, queers, feminists, union commie lovers and pot heads that have the audacity to demand equal treatment under the law. (“My God Marge, the exterminator tells me we have an infestation of Hippies in the woodwork!”) Not only that sir, but they’ve come for your daughter!

Ah, the sweet smell of fear in the morning! Smells like Victory! From Nixon’s Southern Strategy all the way up to 9/11, fear is what’s brung us here. It’s been the GOP’s chief export for over 40 years, and the export business has been very, very, good.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

But hey, GOP, c’mere. I got a little secret to whisper in your ear.

It’s over.

Yep. You heard me. It’s really over. You can retire the brass knuckles, fright wig and Lee Atwater playbook and try to find a hole to hide in where the International Criminal Court can’t find you when they come with their war crimes subpoena.

It was an interesting experiment, but ultimately your Utopia failed because, like communism, it didn’t flex under pressure. People have finally started to wise up and peek behind the curtain and see that all that smoke and flame was just a sad show created by a tired old white guy who stayed in power by terrorizing the munchkins.

We tried it all, didn’t we? But for old times sake, let’s review some recent highlights (cue the wobbly screen):

- Trickle-down economic theory that stratified wealth distribution in America back to pre-FDR levels. In 2004, the Federal reserve reported that the wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation's net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.
- Pre-emptive war, unilateralism, and sanctioning of torture, leading to pariah status in the community of civilized nations, not to mention violating our core American values.
- Abolishing habeas corpus and the rule of law upon which all modern democracies are founded.
- Return to laissez-faire deregulation of the financial sector that has brought on a global recession (possibly a depression-jury’s still out)
- Destruction of labor laws, unions and much of the social safety net that helped create the middle class in the first place.
- Favoring Fundamentalist Religious teachings in the public schools over science, thereby making our children less competitive in the new global economy (and less intelligent).
- Demanding abstinence-only sex education both at home and abroad, which has, quite ironically, led to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions, not to mention the spread of disease.

As practiced by Goldwater’s followers, extremism in the defense of liberty led to the degradation of the very liberty that it sought to uphold. It would be ironic were it not so tragic.

Shall I go on? I think you get the picture. But I just wanted to you to understand why we’re taking the keys from you now. You’re obviously too incompetent to drive and you’ve done quite enough damage already. You can reapply for your license in a few years. But you better hit the books in the meantime, because the test has changed and things don’t look so good for you right now.

Objects on the map may appear smaller

Just look at that political map that you’ve been treating like a game of RISK all these years. Your beloved party is now extinct on the West coast and the Northeast, and you’re quickly losing the Southwest, Midwest and, hard to believe, the Mid-Atlantic and coastal South.

In a few more election cycles, the GOP will have shrunken down to encompass only the Bubba South and a handful of suburban country clubs and survivalist compounds packed to the basement rafters with King James Bibles, rifles and cans of Spam, surrounded by an ever-deepening Blue map.

When Grover Norquist said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He had it exactly right if you substitute “GOP” for “GVMT.”

The great political philosopher Ernest Hemingway put it this way: "Too many folks don't have the sense to leave a party when the gin runs out.. They just hang around."

Latinos will be the dominant minority group in less than 12 years and the GOP is hell-bent on pissing them off as much as they can. And we’re talking a group that is family-values oriented and staunchly Christian (which should be among the GOP’s core constituency). Oh yeah, but I forgot, they’re flu-carrying Papists that want to take our minimum wage jobs from us.

With friends like these…

What is needed right now is a re-assessment of the “Get Right or Get Out” mentality if the GOP hopes to stay viable in a changing political environment.

What do we have instead? A wild-eyed feeding frenzy to devour the few remaining moderates that the party desperately needs to win over independent voters. RNC head Michael Steele and the (ironically-named) Club for Growth just guaranteed Arlen Specter’s defection to the Dems by supporting a right-wing primary challenger that was polling way ahead of Specter, but would have most likely lost to a Dem. in the general election.

Either way, the seat was likely to turn from Red to Blue, but by God, you were going to make Specter pay for voting for the stimulus bill! Well, Specter’s pretty shrewd and now y’all are screwed and the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. See how it works? If you hadn’t run off Sen. Lincoln Chaffee in the last mid-terms, you could have gotten a lot of Republican judges confirmed in the last couple of years, but I guess purity is valued over power these days. It’s all part of the GOP’s new “pup tent” strategy.

I’m guessing Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and even John McCain might be next on the Club for Growth hit list. One part of me says “Hey, great, it’s your funeral.” But the other part says “Wait a minute - it’s only through the free competition of ideas in the marketplace of democracy that true innovation is achieved.”

The idea of one party rule is not good for a vibrant democracy. Unless we have intelligent, viable Republicans keeping up their end of the political spectrum, then there is no check on power and the progressives could over-reach just as the Newt Gingrich/Tom Delay/Bush coalition did from 1994-2008.

Progressives can be stubbornly naïve and victims of the echo chamber just as the Right-wingers were. We often think that the nation is ready for changes that it really isn’t prepared for yet (think “busing” and “New Coke.”) I think of political progress as the country dance where you go three steps up, two steps back, but you’re still slowly moving forward.

Time keeps on slipping into the future

But make no mistake; history is on our side. Conservatives fought civil rights for blacks for many years, but now we have our first African-American President. Like it or not, there will be national gay marriage and I’m betting it’ll be sooner than we expect. For the first time ever, A Washington Post/ABC poll shows more people favoring gay marriage (49%) than oppose it (46%). It’s a fundamental civil right and people are beginning to come around to accepting that. History is on the side of progressives, but it never happens as fast as we want and forcing change too early often bites us at the ballot box because we open ourselves to exploitation by the fear mongers.

There are plenty of real criticisms of Obama and the Dems that can be argued in the public forum right now, but what do we get instead? Birth certificate questions? Air Force One wasting jet fuel on Earth day? Something about a teleprompter that I still don’t understand? Bitching about a prime time news conference? People who are receiving TAX CUTS throwing around tea bags to protest raising the upper tax rate to Bush I levels (39%)?

Really? Is that the best you’ve got? Because it’s not playing in Peoria folks! Not when we are confronted by some of the biggest challenges in our nation's history. People need positive action and they want to see their government doing something about this uncertain future. So how are are Republican brethren reacting to our President's bold initiatives?

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is threatening to secede from the union and a third of GOP voters in Georgia favor secession. Didn’t we try that once? Best I remember it didn’t work out so well for those of us who make our home down South. (Then again, I’d LOVE to give Texas back to Mexico, so long as we can keep Austin, San Antonio and Willie Nelson.)

With the Glen Becks, Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys controlling the Republican Party’s image now in the face of a power vacuum on the right, it’s going to take awhile to get the party viable again. Then we have minority Senate leader Droopy Dog (Mitch McConnell) and minority House leader Dr. “NO!” (John Boehner) making their periodic gloomy appearances that seemed to be designed to make the president even MORE popular.

But thank GOD for Rep. Michelle “Democrats cause Swine Flu” Bachman of Minnesota and Gov. Sarah “Carribou Barbie” Palin of Alaska. They are the gift that keeps on giving. To quote Stephen Colbert (whom most conservatives don’t realize is doing satire): “Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!”

So, GOP, you want to beat Obama in 4 years? Than get rid of the anger now. There’s only two ways to win. Either pray for complete catastrophe to strike in the form of an economic meltdown or terrorist attack (why do you hate America?), or find a candidate that will out-shine Obama’s personality and calm demeanor (good luck!). Those are the only two options: Catastrophe or Charisma. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long vacation in the wilderness.

Pack a lunch and a warm sweater. Write often. Say ‘Hi’ to your Mama and them.