14980

I’m not a Reagan fan, but this speech excerpt provides some pretty stark contrasts with today’s GOP and shows how far they have fallen. Reagan essentially gives a love letter to immigrants from all over the world and talks about how essential they are to America.

14981

I think this is not supposed to be ironic.

14982

I think that even GWB was a fan of immigrants, too.

But the stupid ying and yang of politics currently going on in the USA means that any position taken by open party needs to be vehemently opposed by the other.

14983

A good OpEd by Max Boot on leaving your party.

I was always a moderate Republican and unlike Max voted for plenty of Democrats , plus John Anderson, and Ross Perot.

But Liz, is very conservative, lots of Democratic policies are going to be really hard for her to swallow.
I don’t envy her position.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/12/liz-cheney-rubicon-republican-authoritarianism/

14984

I spoke with Boot a few times when we were both History majors as undergrads back in the late 80s, hanging out in the hallways in the History building. He was a columnist for the Daily Californian and I was a note taker for the student note taking service and we would both wait for the professors with various questions. We were polar opposites politically by the standards of the time but I always found him civil to talk to.

I’m gladdened that he left the GOP, even if it took him a while.

14985

Interesting that you knew him. His books are good.

14986

My impression at the time was that he was a smart guy who had swallowed all the Reagan era propaganda whole. It’s interesting that he eventually moved away from the GOP although from my understanding it wasn’t a wholesale rejection of Reaganism but rather his view that the GOP moved too far right from Reagan. He may still be a fan of Reagan. But at least he’s not a fan of Trump.

14987

Having been around then it is hard to believe how far right the right has moved.

14988

My foreign policy as always been closely aligned with Max’s. I am/was more liberal on social issues though. He is still far to left on Liz Cheney on most everything. Good to know he was pretty nice guy IRL.

14989

Same here. I quit the party in 2000, Newt and other bullshit had eroded my support, and the nomination of GWB was the final straw, but I’m still amazed and how completely off the rails that party has gone.

14990

He goes into his own story in his book “The Corrosion of Conservatism”, which I thought was a very honest sort of personal journey memoir.

14991

He’s still an unapologetic neocon (though he rejects that word) and seems to still believe in forever war and effectively permanent military occupation in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

14992
14993

The Soviet… er, Republican Political Officers at work as usual…

14994

And no one will ever be held accountable for the 100s of thousands of deaths Trump’s administration caused in 2020-21.

14995

I’m pretty okay with that, because it was a rare case of the Trump admin actually reflecting the will of the voters who brought them to office. The massive excess COVID deaths in the US are a national embarassment, for sure, but I can’t pit that on the carrot in chief. That’s what the base desired. More freedumb, more deaths, less feelings of accountability to the greater good!

14996

There’s definitely truth to that but leaders are supposed to lead. And what little “leading” he did do was to resist masks and insist COVID would just go away, it was no big deal, or even a hoax. He pushed those messages constantly.

There still would have been anti-mask people and there still would have been people who didn’t want to lock down. But he really lead the charge on making all that a R vs D fight and I think it’s fair to say he made the situation worse, and that did lead to additional excess deaths.

14997

Many issues have life or death consequences, or consequences for human suffering. I’ve seen estimates that the Medicaid expansion in the ACA has saved ~200,000 lives, which of course means John Roberts and many Republican governors have the deaths of thousands on their hands; Roberts for his choice to edit the ACA and make the expansion optional, and those governors for playing politics by refusing the free government money because it came from the black Kenyan Marxist Muslim.

Surely GOP positions on the welfare state, on guns, on a whole range of issues, have similar life or death consequences.

14998

Absolutely. Modern Republican politics kills.

14999

But it’s only the serfs, so who cares?..