Clay Burell's Library tagged palin →  View Popular

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

But they need those votes!

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So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.

Short break as writer ties blindfold and smokes her last cigarette.

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs.

Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that they've had something to do with the GOP's erosion. And, though the recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified by Emory University's Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates and changes in religious beliefs.

Over at slate.com, conservatives were more critical.

Tucker Carlson apparently wasn't impressed with Palin's - um - verbal skills. On Slate's forum, The Conservative Crackup, he wrote:

After the (Republican) party has settled on what it believes, it ought to go shopping for a leader. I recommend someone who speaks fluent English. This matters, it turns out, and not just for aesthetic reasons. In a democracy, eloquence is a basic condition of leadership. A president has a moral as well as a political obligation to explain his program. His constitutional powers are limited to just a few (war, the veto). His real authority comes from persuasion.

It helps if you can talk.

Kathleen Parker didn't succumb to Palin's "folksy charm":

Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, "He's not one of us." We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out "Redneck Woman" while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.

They saw in Palin a kindred spirit who was fearless in defending bedrock values of family, country, and, yes, belief in a higher authority. What they failed to acknowledge was that Obama and family-churchgoing, well-educated exemplars of community service-were the embodiment of those same values, a Rockwellian portrait rendered with the brushstrokes of our professed core beliefs that all men are created equal-and that through hard work, anyone can become anything in the United States of America.

The Republican base is fast becoming a racial and cultural minority. . . .. Her supporters were willingly blind to her weaknesses. . .

What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge-and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity was a bonding agent with the Republican base.

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party's own educated members.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.

Sarah Palin will never hold national office nor will any Republican at the presidential level for a long time to come. Why? Because America has uneducated jerks in it but is not a nation of uneducated jerks. The Republicans are done, hoisted on the petard of their own "southern strategy."

The Republican Party is only a step away from becoming the fringe of the fringe, identified more with cross-burning weirdoes wearing hoods, folks like the Alaska secessionist party, all those gun owners stocking up on assault weapons before the "Socialist/United Nations/Obama/Muslim" conspiracy comes to fruition, than with anything remotely like a serious national political force.

The Republican Party--and I speak as a former lifelong Republican who, up through the 2000 primary campaign supported John McCain and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations--is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags. These folks include outright crazies (such as Sarah Palin's Assemblies of God pals who are waiting for Spaceship Jesus to rescue them and/or rooting out "witches" from their midst), white racists and a few not-very-bright attention seekers, including Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity etc.

The Religious Right, the racists, the anti-gay hate-mongers are now not only marginalized but thoroughly out of step with even members of their own former constituency. For instance the Gordon College student newspaper (Gordon is an influential Evangelical College north of Boston) endorsed Obama this year. Many young evangelicals voted for the Democrats. James Dobson, Fox News, Limbaugh et al. were utterly powerless to do more than stir up hate. They are losing the next generation of their "base."

Meanwhile many former Republicans--like me--ran to Obama as fast as our legs could carry us and away from our willfully "we're not an elite" moronic former party. Republican commentators such as David Brooks and George Will mourned the loss of the Republican center. Others noted the Republicans have become anti-intellectual. "Anti-intellectual?" They wish! How about simply anti-literate?

More than Palin herself, I'm looking forward to the end of an era in which the aforementioned gomers -- these relatively small pockets of bigots and witch hunters -- have enjoyed undeserved attention and disproportionate sway over American politics and policy.

The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it's the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

It'd be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we'll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin's of the world that there's no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn't it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

But Palin didn't cut the size of government as mayor of Wasilla, and she hasn't done so as Alaska's governor, city and state budget records show. Spending in fast-growing Wasilla increased by 55% during her tenure from 1996-2002, records show. In nearly two years as governor, she has presided over a 31% spending hike by a state government that sought earmarks from Washington even as it reaped billions from higher oil prices and Palin-backed tax increases on oil companies.

Palin parading around like a Project Runway extra will take
far less heat even though the bill she sent the committee makes
Paris Hilton look like a Target shopper. With her $1.2 million in
assets and six-figure salary, Palin could have footed the bill
for whatever extreme makeover she felt was in order.

It's not a victimless crime. That $150,000 comes from funds
that a respected incumbent like New Hampshire Republican Senator
John Sununu -- struggling not to be dragged down by the McCain-
Palin ticket -- desperately needs.

Earlier it came out that Palin had charged the government
for $17,000 in per-diem payments for 300 days she spent in her
own house. Now we find she charged the state for trips that
resemble vacations if not junkets.