Admit it – you were all about Gerald Ford. Hey,
that’s fine. Nice guy. And if you were never a
Republican, surely you had friends who were.
Chris Currey, “an old, free market, religious
Republican businessman,” was the same way. His first vote was for
Eisenhower.
But as he writes here,
something’s changed:
. . . I voted for
Nixon and for Reagan. Although I did not like the deficit spending of
the Reagan administration, I blamed it on and rationalized it by the
necessities of fighting the Cold War. I liked Reagan — who
didn’t? Even my Democrat and liberal friends liked and respected
him. I voted for Clinton, twice. I thought he was the best
Republican president since Ike. No, I did not make a mistake. Bill
Clinton was closer ideologically to Eisenhower and Nixon than Bush I and II
could ever be. I thought that Clinton practiced and articulated true
Republican ideology in his fiscal discipline, job creation, smart tax cuts, and
foreign policy better than anyone since Ike.
Then something happened in the 1990s. The
leaders of the GOP grew belligerent. They became too religious, almost
zealots. They became intolerant. They began searching for purity in
Republican thought and doctrine. Ideology blinded them. I continued
to vote Republican, but with a certain unease. Deep down I knew that a
schism happened between the modern Republican Party and the one I grew up
with. During the fight over the impeachment of President Clinton, the
ugly face of the Republican Party was brought to the surface. Empty
rhetoric, ideological intolerance, vengeance, and religious zealotry became the
common currency. Suddenly, if you are pro-choice, you could not be a
Republican. If you are for smart and sensible taxes to balance out the
budget, you could not be a Republican. If you are pro-civil rights,
you could not be a Republican. . . .
☞ It’s worth reading
the whole piece.
“How did we go from William F. Buckley to Glenn
Beck?” he asks.
How, indeed.
CHOCOLATE
Peter Kaczowka: “Eat LOTS of
chocolate. Per Wikipedia,
the world’s longest-lived person, Jeanne Louise Calment, lived on a diet
of olive oil, red wine and chocolate, living 122 years and 164 days. There’s
no need to eat cocoa powder, Lindt makes a delicious 90%
pure chocolate bar. Calment ate nearly 5 oz of chocolate a day, more than
an entire Lindt 90% bar which weighs 3.5 oz and has 550 calories. Calment
was not eating ‘a little chocolate every day,’ as you advise;
chocolate was a substantial part of her diet of unsaturated fats.”