General Powell

General Powell's endorsement covered a number of events which I was not sure he would mention. He did, so, to his credit. All the nasty, racist remarks and pictures that form the consciousness of a certain segment of the country which forms the base of the Republican Party were laid out for all to see, and they were properly condemned. Once again, I state that this party has left us. The Republican Party is not the party of Barry Goldwater and Russell Kirk and William Buckley. There is a mythic narrative of the small town and its virtues and goodness. Even though one may hold up the small town story as an ideal, one must still remember that it is just that, an ideal, not necessarily a present day reality. When the Republican began their decidedly strange talk recently about small towns and the "real" state of Virginia, it was obvious they had lost touch with reality, and now considered the ideal of the small town to actually be small towns scattered about the country: as if every small town somehow were miraculously a model of civic virtue!...perhaps all due to its virtuous smallness!!?? The heat of the campaign may excuse this, and we may consider this not insanity, but heated enthusiasm. The real tragedy is that now the philosophy of the Republican Party is formulated by small minds; somehow "small town" has migrated into and become synonymous to "small mind", and we have the Falwells and the Haggees and the Parsleys of the country formulating Republican strategy; the party of Lincoln and anti-slavery becomes an empty shell whose only creativity is to dance Curious George dolls with Obama hats down the streets of Pennsylvania. McCain and Palin have no philosophy. Their message changes every day. Two weeks ago, it was Joe Six Pack, now it is Joe the Plumber. The Republican Party's philosophy sounds rather as if it were written by Edgar Guest, and a mean-spirited Guest, at that. There will be nothing left of them. After the crash, Haggee will pick up the pieces. If not Haggee, some other small mind blown large by too much stump preaching of the Bible. It will emerge a party of the very elderly, the cranks and paranoids, and those cute and chubby racists we see leering at us on the news.