Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Saturday, November 15, 2008 10:53:48 AM
Several years ago, some of the senior Republicans started retiring. Not the ones we wanted to retire, like Pete Domenici and Arlen Specter (who, like his name foreshadows, haunts our efforts to this day), but men like Dick Armey and Jesse Helms. Dick Armey was one of our few idea men, and Jesse Helms was a fearless defender of conservative and American interests. (During the Clinton administration, Jesse Helms's in-box was where Bill Clinton's bad foreign policy ideas went to die.) I told Tony that the Republicans had just lost a good deal of their brains (as opposed to their minds, which came soon thereafter), and much of their spine as well. The Republicans were still a viable ideas-and-principles party at that point, but soon after losing these leaders and others they began to decay into the pork-and-perks party we lament today.
The loss of backbone became immediately obvious when the Republicans let their superb House Majority Leader, Tom Delay, be dragged down on false charges (see this article by
Ann Coulter, who was one of the few with enough guts to defend Delay at the time). As Ann herself might say, if the Republicans couldn't be at least as brave as she, they were in big trouble.
And they were.