Disillusion on the Right:
A Letter to my Uncle

A thought about our conversation tonight: You made a reference to "you Republicans."

Some time ago I came to the conclusion that the difference between the two major parties is that the Democrats want to drive us off the cliff at 100 m.p.h., the Republicans want to do it at 55.

The Republican Party is not the same party that I have known and been a part of for most of my adult life. Actually, that's not quite accurate. It began before that. When I was 11 years old (the fall of 1960) I got a cardboard box and my mother looped a few yards of twine through it to hold it around my neck and she drove me to the GOP headquarters where I asked for a supply of brochures I could pass out on a downtown streetcorner. I did that every Saturday for several weeks before the election. This was entirely my idea.

But the Republican Party then bears little resemblance to the group calling itself the Republican Party today. Don't take my word for it. Read the GOP Platform of 1964: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php?platindex=R1964.

Compare it to the platform of 2004: http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf

The GOP has been captured by the neoconservatives, who aren't conservative in any way, shape or form. A typical example is Michael Gerson, until recently George W. Bush's chief speechwriter. He says he's a "big government conservative." That's like saying you are a nurturing child molester.

And that's the guy Bush trusted to craft his speeches.

Alison and I have given the maximum contribution to Ron Paul. He believes in free markets and no foreign entanglements. I don't have any illusions he can get the nomination, much less win, except by God's grace, but he's influencing millions of people (he's won every poll after every GOP debate -- he won 33% of the audience last night, vs. 15% for Giuliani). That's base-building for the next Ron Paul.

BTW, the media puts his consistent poll winnings down by claiming his supporters skew the polls. Last night Hannity parroted the same line, seeking to bury the poll results: "Looks like Ron Paul's people are furiously dialing in again, ha-ha-ha." But think about that -- is he and others saying that Ron Paul is organized so much better than the other candidates? That the other candidates' organizations somehow forgot to try to influence the polls?

As a maximum contributor to Ron Paul, I can tell you that I have received no e-mailings, phone calls or anything else about doing anything to influence the debate results. I get e-mails from the campaign almost daily, but they haven't even asked me to vote for him in the debate polls -- truth be told, they didn't even send out an e-mailing about the debate!

I think the current president is the worst president in my lifetime. I now reluctantly (and you have no idea how it sickens me to say this) think it would have been better for America if Gore or even Kerry had won. Don't get me wrong: I detest both of them. But I now believe they would not have done nearly as much long-term damage to our country as Bush. Bush's domestic policies have severely weakened our civil liberties, in all likelihood permanently. His foreign policies have inflamed the Islamic terrorists' desire to attack us (those who disagree with that need to read the Koran). And the fact that Bush is a Republican makes conservatives eunuchs. (A fact I learned when Nixon was elected; the best way to neutralize conservatives is to elect a "moderate" Republican president.)

Carter and Clinton were weak and ineffectual, but I'll take weak and ineffectual any day over Bush, who has spent more than any president in history, thinks the mission of the U.S. is to force "democracy" on every country in the world (except those he's too afraid to confront), invades Iraq, which posed no threat whatever to the U.S. (and he gave, what, 10 different reasons at various times to justify the invasion, all of them proven to be spurious) and pushes through the most tyrannical assault on civil liberties (the "Patriot Act") ever seen in this nationy.

And in case you think I have come to these conclusions recently, I always opposed the invasion of Iraq, from day one. Virtually all my Republican friends opposed me, sometimes bitterly. That's when I realized that I had not left the Republican Party, but it had left me.

A few weeks after we invaded Iraq, Alison and I had dinner in Washington with an old friend, a veteran Republican operative. I will never forget the conversation. He said, "I think George W. Bush will be remembered in history as the next Ronald Reagan." I replied, "I disagree. I do think he will be compared to a president, but not Reagan. It's LBJ." The guy was stunned. I remember the expression on his face even now. His jaw dropped. I explained that I believed Iraq will be Bush's Vietnam.

I knew that because of many reasons, including the fact that you cannot wage war against an idea ("terrorism"), you need a concrete opponent, and there was and is no evidence that Saddam was it. Another reason is the fact that the current TV and computer game-addicted generation of Americans have an attention span for war lasting a few months, maybe a year or so at best. After that they will get bored, then angry and want to end it.

What I didn't know then was that W. would be the biggest spender in history -- making his comparison with LBJ all the more accurate.

The Iraq War violates the traditional American policy of nonintervention that characterized our nation through most of the first 125 years of its existence. In the words of President John Quincy Adams, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

It doesn't matter what you or I believe -- whether you believe we should do it or not, the reality is that the United States taxpayers cannot come close to paying for us to be the world's policeman -- much less the world's dictator of democracy, as Bush wants us to be.

The U.S. has over 320,000 troops in no less than 150 countries and territories. The United States is also the world’s biggest arms exporter, accounting for about half of all global arms exports.

We make the Roman Empire look like the Keystone Cops.

"The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not ‘attack America,’ as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy." —U. of California Prof. Chalmers Johnson, author of the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

If you read history, you know that between the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and the late 1940s Islam was not a threat to anybody. After 1683 it faded everywhere, even in the Middle East, and did not have a resurgence until our increasingly interventionist foreign policy following WW II, horribly accelerated by the neocon policies of George W. Bush.

The 9/11 attacks were the beginning of a worldwide revolt against this policy to establish and maintain a U.S. global empire. Only a return to our traditional Jeffersonian foreign policy of peace, commerce, friendship and no entangling alliances can turn this around.

After a GOP debate, Rudy Giuliani said that the terrorists hate us for our “freedom and values,” our “freedom of religion” and “freedom for women.” I would love to ask him, “So why haven’t they attacked Switzerland? They have all those freedoms. Could it be because Switzerland doesn’t try to be the world’s policeman, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy?”