Thursday, December 4, 2008

Here Comes Newt

Or, where did the GOP go?


The future of the Republican Party is shaping up in the shadows of the calamitous MCain and Palin campaign. Even before barrack Obama has been inaugurated, the remaining forces in the GOP are vying for power and attempting to define direction. Unfortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, they’ve taken McCain’s defeat as not having been too much of a thing but too little.

Even as we speak, George Bush is crafting “a right of conscience rule” which would give anyone the right to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable. The Hippocratic Oath would become a wishy-washy, worthless expression whilst doctors and nurses refuse to care for patients based on their own beliefs. Pharmacists, caretakers and even janitors could object to working or participating in any way in anything they personally might find objectionable even if they do not understand the facts or are not in a position to grasp the full meaning of a particular issue.

Sarah Palin is shifting to the right with her ramped up rhetoric that panders to the right wing, religious nutcases but that was almost to be expected.

But now here comes Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, that purported icon of forward thinking politicians. Newt has aligned himself with a new movement called The National Committee for Faith and Family. You all know where this is going right?

Gingrich, who almost certainly will run for the Presidency in 2012, appears in a trailer for a so-called documentary in which he says:

"There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest than the relentless effort to drive God out of America's public square,"

Oh really?

One of the movements main characters is David Barton who in the nineties, when Gingrich was trying to bankrupt the government in order to cripple the Clinton Presidency – remember – GOP before God and country, was allied with Christian Identity, a white supremacist group.

As Michelle Goldberg notes in The New Republic, visitors to Gingrich’s website are asked to sign a petition maligning the fact that there are too few references to God in the Capitol’s visitor centre.

This is where the GOP is headed and that is probably good, because with any luck, it’ll dig its own grave there.

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