On 23 Jan 2005 12:57:04 -0800, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:

The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0112-36.htm

/quote

Published on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party
by David W. Orr

Following the election of 2004, much has been made of the weaknesses
of the Democratic Party, even its possible end. But it has escaped the
notice of our blow-dry television pundits and political observers
alike that the Republican Party, in the full blush of triumph in
control of all the branches of government and large sections of the
media, stands on the edge of certain extinction. The reasons grow
daily more evident. Over the past three decades, the moderate,
business-oriented party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight
Eisenhower was captured by its extreme right-wing thereby becoming a
party dominated by ideologues, increasingly divorced from unmovable
facts. But no organization, political party, or nation can long
survive by ignoring realities of ecology, social justice, law,
economics, and true security. Sooner or later, it will step off the
proverbial curb into onrushing traffic of events, forces, and trends
that it refused to see.

The Republican Party has already stepped into the road. The question
is not whether it will survive as presently constituted, but what else
will be destroyed as it collapses in ruin and ignominy, sooner than
later. Beneath the noisy spin of its media echo chamber, the true
platform of the Republican Party, its future epitaph, is founded on
denial. The rules of the Republican Party of George Bush, ***** Cheney,
Karl Rove, Tom Delay, and their brethren are these:

* Deny science when its findings are not agreeable to your base.
Republicans, notably, are on the wrong side of the largest issue in
human history: human driven, rapid climate change. They’ve chosen
instead to live in a Crichton-esque science fiction fantasy in which
real science has no standing and human actions have no tragic,
irreversible, and global ecological consequences. This is not just
boneheaded, it is a form of criminality for which we have, as yet, no
adequate words.
* Deny the looming approach of peak oil extraction thereby
advancing the potential of economic, political, and social chaos when
global oil supply and demand diverge as soon they will.
* Deny the proven potential of superior technologies, design
strategies, and policies that would move the country toward energy
efficiency and a secure energy base of solar and wind power as well as
the reasons of self-interest and economic advantage for doing so.
* Deny the true costs of air and water pollution thereby
undermining the health of Americans.
* Deny the human and economic effects of pandering to the wealthy,
thereby undermining social cohesion and the sense of
fairness?historically, often a prelude to societal breakdown and
revolution.
* Deny any and all mistakes, bad judgment, and corruption, relying
on spin not truth and thereby building a solid reputation for
mendacity and incompetence.
* Deny the limitations of military power to impose order on a
recalcitrant world and thereby condemn the U.S. to a future of
international isolation, conflict, and endless terrorism.
* Deny the great vulnerability of the American infrastructure to
malice, malfeasance, and acts of God, thereby laying the groundwork
for a future of recurring disasters.
* Deny the necessity for civil discourse, honesty, and
transparency in the conduct of public life, thereby holding the
citizenry in contempt and promoting a spirit of meanness.
* Deny without admitting it the democratic values of the country
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and
Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms of
Franklin Roosevelt, thereby undermining democracy at home while
purportedly fighting for it in Iraq.

The Republican Party has chosen to deny social, ecological, cultural,
religious, and economic realities which are unavoidably complicated,
complex, diverse, ironic, and paradoxical. Instead they have chosen to
make their own simplistic, ideological, and chauvinistic fantasy world
that has little affinity for law, science, a free and independent
press, fairness, true security, ecological sustainability, and the
accountability that is requisite for genuine democracy.

That fantasy is on the cusp of becoming a real life nightmare. Having
made the United States a large bulls’ eye for terrorists and
malcontents, it may implode catastrophically taking much else with it.
It may come undone more gradually, but no less catastrophically, as
the economy sinks under the weight of war debt and foolish tax cuts.
It may be overthrown if and when thoughtful conservatives disturbed by
fiscal recklessness and imperial pretensions, all honest persons
offended by mendacity, bombast, criminality, conniving, and diversion,
and all Christians sufficiently alert to notice the discrepancy
between the words and life of the “Prince of Peace” and our foreign
and domestic policies finally shift alignments. It may take longer as
the die of climate change and ecological deterioration is finally cast
and we trigger adverse global changes of which we have been often
warned. Unlikely as it seems, in a different scenario the Republican
nightmare still could be averted by an effective, committed, agile,
and strategic opposition smart enough to recognize the historic
convergence of opportunity, patriotic duty, sheer necessity.

David Orr (David.Orr@oberlin.edu) is a Paul Sears Distinguished
Professor at Oberlin College. Author of The Last Refuge (Island Press,
2004).

--

Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.

Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.

America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP