Rolling Stone: The GOP Jihad

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28135828/the_gop_jihad

The GOP Jihad
Leaderless and adrift, far-right Republicans purists are trying to purge the party of its last remaining moderates

TIM DICKINSONPosted May 13, 2009 1:21 PM


Arlen Specter didn't jump ship. He was forced to walk the plank.

On Tax Day, in a move timed to coincide with the nationwide tea-bag protests, outgoing Club for Growth president Pat Toomey announced that he would mount a primary challenge to Specter, a Senate veteran from Pennsylvania best known for securing Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the Supreme Court. His goal wasn't to take Specter's seat for himself; according to top GOP observers, the far-right Toomey had no real chance of winning in a state that saw 200,000 Republicans register as Democrats in the last election. The true objective was to knock Specter — an old-school centrist whom Toomey's rabidly small-government Club had named its "Comrade of the Month" for his vote backing the president's stimulus plan — out of the Republican Party.

The plan worked — though not as expected. On April 29th, Specter sidestepped Toomey's challenge by defecting to the Democratic Party, a move that could give the president a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Explaining the breakup, Specter denounced the end of the "Reagan Big Tent" that had ushered him into office in 1980. Given the GOP's far-right radicalization, he said, he could no longer cater to the embittered dregs of the party he had served for decades: "I was unwilling to subject my 29-year record in the Senate to the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate." In other words, he told Republicans, it's not me — it's you.

As Specter's forced march down the gangplank makes clear, the GOP is in the midst of a reactionary spasm — one that threatens to marginalize the party for a generation to come. Rather than acknowledging the party's failed policies and reaching out to new constituencies, the GOP's dominant faction is retrenching around the anti-government, free-market, fundamentalist strain of Republicanism last championed by Barry Goldwater — who steered the party to one of its most crushing defeats in 1964. The purists are led by a group of GOP veterans who tried to bring down Bill Clinton in 1994 — including Contract With America architect Newt Gingrich, former House majority leader Dick Armey and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. The veterans are allied with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, a Gingrich protégé who has emerged as the youthful face of the Party of No, as well as with stimulus-rejecting Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and right-wing radio heavy Rush Limbaugh, who enforces the new GOP orthodoxy from the most feared bully pulpit in America. Together, they seek not to expand the party but to purge it.

Indeed, the Republican jihad has reached such a fever pitch that, to these ideologues, excommunicating one of the party's most powerful senators and handing the president a potentially unstoppable majority actually marks a positive development for the GOP. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Sanford cheered Specter's departure, calling him "deadly for the Republican brand." Firing up his listeners, Limbaugh hailed the defection for "weeding out people who aren't really Republicans," adding that he only regretted Specter didn't take John McCain with him.

Moderates in the party were appalled by the loss of Specter — but seem powerless to stop the ideological cleansing. Sen. Olympia Snowe — the Senate's last moderate Republican, along with Susan Collins of Maine — rebuked the purists for betraying the Republican coalition. "I believe in the traditional tenets of the Republican Party: strong national defense, fiscal responsibility, individual opportunity," Snowe said. "I haven't abandoned those principles. The Republican Party has abandoned those principles." Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went even further. "We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough," he said. "If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test, then we are going to keep losing."

It appears to me that we citizens are responding to this issue in a non-partisan way. Which should work out a lot better in the long run. We must demand campaign law changes as the single biggest improvement possible.

K&R

the GOPigs make me happier and happier ..................

That they are so afraid of that they've invented them from thin air. Jeebus x-gay Crist..... They don't need to repeat Poli-Sci 403, they need Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo! Don't friggin' lie, and then just sell the hell out of the lie if you get caught - not everybody is as stupid as you, and you'll get p/owned! Why, them sons 'a Coulters...Learn em' that bullying,domination, and manipulation are NOT kindness, normal, or justified means to an end.