Another Take On Why The Republicans Must Be Defeated This Year

Radley Balko writes in a column for, of all possible outlets, Fox News:

I grew up in a particularly conservative part of the already conservative state of Indiana. I voted for Bob Dole in 1996 and George Bush in 2000, generally because — though I'm not a conservative (I'm a libertarian) — I'd always thought the GOP was the party of limited government. By 2002, I was less sure of that. And by 2004, I was so fed up with the party that I did what I thought I'd never do — vote for an unabashed leftist for president.

Since then, "fed up" has soured to "given up." The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending — even on items not related to war or national security — has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

This isn't to say that Barack Obama would be any better... Continue reading.

I'd love to see Sean Hannity go apoplectic upon reading Balko's remarks on FoxNews.com. Of course, it's barely more likely that such a pedantic and partisan philistine as Hannity would be able to comprehend Balko's points than it is that his knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fans would be able to define all of the words in this paragraph.

For the sake of the country as a whole, the decent common-sense conservatives who make up the Republican Party's silent majority need to kick the loud and proud know-nothings to the curb. As I've said before, a willingness to appeal to the very worst in human nature merely to win an election automatically disqualifies one from being worthy of wielding political power. This is why I'm so deeply disappointed in John McCain and so forcefully contemptuous of Sarah Palin. Real conservatives can, should, and must do much better.