What happened to the smart Republicans?

I am writing because for the past 18 months I have been wondering what has happened to the Republican Party. I was raised in the military; my father, now deceased, retired as a major general in the U.S. Air Force. He was a Republican, I an independent with conservative leanings. We had great political conversations and usually agreed with each other. He was pro-choice and was disappointed when the party aligned itself solidly with the religious right, but he never disavowed his party. I believe he would be hard pressed not to do so now.

The tone, attitude and actions of the party members who are currently promoting what the party stands for have become difficult for me to watch and listen to, much less support or even believe.

I was 12 years old in 1960 when John Kennedy was elected. Even though I was young, I was aware of and appalled at the language of hatred and fear mongering that was spewing from the mouths of many of my friends’ parents about Kennedy and how the country would become communist if he won. I’m hearing almost verbatim the same verbiage from the right, only now I know much derives from the John Birch Society handbook. I didn’t believe it then; I don’t believe it now.

You can claim as often as you want that our current economic woes are squarely the fault of President Clinton requiring loosening of credit to lower-income individuals, but I am certain that no one in the government demanded any bank or mortgage company to make loans to people without checking their ability to repay, or to package bad loans and sell them to the world, or not to be able to look into the future and see what was going to happen. For heaven’s sake, even I knew it was a bubble and that it couldn’t last! Then we learned that it happened mostly because regulators stopped regulating, and requirements were loosened according to Republican laissez-faire policies.