In Which I Ask For All To Do What Is Right For The Country And Not My Side

I should be working on mid-terms, or at least be in bed sleeping to prepare to work on midterms, but this has been bounding around in my head and I can not let it go.


So I am sure that many of you were following the goings on at CPAC last week. There was the 13 year old wunderkind, and Ann Coulter, and Mitt Romeny, and Newt Gingrich. I hope that others saw the video that included the shot of a book table there that included a book entitled "America's Half-blood Prince" about President Obama (get it....he's a half breed har-har). These things alone would be enough to make my stomach turn, and yet I still delight in seeing the Conservative movement really show who they are once a year.

But for me, the real cherry, the glimce through the glass clearly if you will, comes from not only Rush Limbaugh's speech, but also its after-math. For a taste of what he had to say, just click below (I won't blame you if you don't):

And at the time I thought, "Wow, there he goes again" and roll my eyes. And on Saturday night, Micheal Steele, the new head of the RNC, spoke out against Rush calling him an "entertainer" and his comments "incendiary and ugly." (video below)

Now, less than three hours after Rush attacked Chairman Steele on his show, Steele has caved and issued an apology, saying:

"I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people ... want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he's not."

You know,this is good for my side. The more that the Republican Party implodes and lets itself be held hostage, as the Church has, to the loudest voice, and not the wisest or even the most populous, the farther down the trail to irrelevance they will travel. And that is good for my side. It means we will win. It might even mean that eventually the Democratic Party would be so dominate that it splits and there is a legitimate voice on the Left in this country, and not just a coalition party of the Center-Left. So, I should be enjoying this. Heavens knows, there are many out there that are. And I can not blame them for their giddiness.

But I can't partake in it. I am too sad. See, our country works best (as much as I don't want to admit it) when there is a healthy opposition party. There wasn't for most of GWB's eight years, and we see where we are in a war that we shouldn't be, in debt that we didn't have to be, and with one of our great American cities, in fact maybe THE great American city, drowned in a sludge of indifference and incompetence.

So I am sad. I am sad for my country that one of it's great political parties, the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike, is held hostage by an ignorant blow-hard best known for his drug addiction. If you read this and you are a Republican, please, please, please, call your local, state, and national party officials and let them know that a principled party has no room for demagogues like Rush, and all the others at CPAC.


I am not asking you to give up your principles, only asking that you fully live into them, for the good of us all.