When Did The GOP Become The Unpatriotic Party?

I just started reading Rick Pearlstein's new book, The Invisible Bridge: That Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. In the first chapter, he talks about who "America the Innocent" is "always searching for totems of a unity it can never quite achieve-- even, or even especially, when its crises of disunity are most pressing: it is one of the structuring stories of our nation." This leads to a look at the national orgy of self-congratulatory ecstasy and patriotic spectacle over "Operation Homecoming," the release of the last American prisoners of war held in Vietnam.

Pearlstein documents this kind of insipid glop for a few pages and then mentions that not all Americans were buying in. Long before an Australian neo-fascist ideologue and billionaire turned the New York Post into a crude scandal rag and an integral part of the Republican Party echo chamber, it was a respected liberal daily. Columnist Pete Hamill "pointed out that the vast majority of the prisoners were bomber pilots, and thus were 'prisoners because they had committed unlawful acts'-- killing civilians in an undeclared war."

My natural instinct about the release of POW Bowe Bergdahl was to be happy for him and his family and to wonder if the U.S. had implanted tracking devices in the bodies of the 5 Taliban prisoners they had exchanged for him. I wondered if we'd ever find out. And then the Hate America Brigade at Fox News and the Republican Party went to work muddying the waters. Towards the end of the video above, from Maddow's Monday show, there is the broader question Fox and the GOP don't want to deal with: why can't Obama just use the same powers he used to make the exchange to finally shut down the American gulag in Cuba? Fox News and Jason Chavitz may not want to deal with it, but Jason Leopold sure did.

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