GOP Purges Another

Chris Currey, a pragmatic conservative, details his GOP chagrin on FrumForum.  

Highlight:

Then something happened in the 1990s. The leaders of the GOP grew belligerent. They became too religious, almost zealots. They became intolerant. They began searching for purity in Republican thought and doctrine. Ideology blinded them. I continued to vote Republican, but with a certain unease. Deep down I knew that a schism happened between the modern Republican Party and the one I grew up with. During the fight over the impeachment of President Clinton, the ugly face of the Republican Party was brought to the surface. Empty rhetoric, ideological intolerance, vengeance, and religious zealotry became the common currency. Suddenly, if you are pro-choice, you could not be a Republican. If you are for smart and sensible taxes to balance out the budget, you could not be a Republican. If you are pro-civil rights, you could not be a Republican.

It started with minorities: they left the party. Then women; they divorced the GOP and sent it to sleep on the couch. Then, the young folks; they left and are leaving the Republican Party in droves. Then, someone stood up and told my niece and my grandchild that they are not fully Americans — just second class Americans because they are homosexual. They wished hell and damnation upon my loved ones just because they are different. Are we led by priests or are we led by rational politicians? Now, we have became the party of the Old Straight White Folks. We should rename the Republican Party the OSWF rather than the GOP.

Recently, since the election of Barack Obama, common sense has left the Republican Party completely. We are in the era of craziness. As David Frum has written, a deal was there to be made over the healthcare bill. Instead, this ideological purity blinded the GOP. As LBJ said it, instead of being inside the tent pissing out, we choose to be outside the tent, pissing against the wind. And we got splashed by our own nonsense.

Frum, ctd.

Bartlett with a rather telling anecdote re: the Frum firing. 

I don't know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

Purity tests at their ugliest...  

(via Sullivan)

Frum - One sensible voice on the right, ctd.

To the shock of, well, pretty much nobody, David Frum was pushed out of his post at the AEI on Wednesday.   Remember kids, if you come to the Republican table with sensible and realistic ideas and can see your party for exactly what they are, you can expect to be berated by the talking heads, the WSJ and ultimately shown the door. 

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday.

The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history."

Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute," he wrote, "and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship." AEI did not comment immediately.

In a brief interview, Frum said "there was no suggestion by AEI" that his sharp criticism of the GOP's health-care strategy was the reason for his dismissal. He declined to say what Brooks had told him.
"They invited me to remain associated with AEI on a non-salaried basis," Frum said, and he declined.

Frum - One Sensible Voice on the Right

David Frum follows up on his Waterloo column from yesterday and adds some credible ideas for the GOP going forward:

• Shifting the tax on high-end earners to another source of revenue; ie. carbon tax 
• Stop defending Employer-based care and embrace individual choice 
• Reduce regulation on the exchanges to promote more flexibility for the insurers to create affordable plans
• Move to end the small-business fines for payrolls of  > $500K, to promote competition among employers

These things, he says, are better alternatives to campaigning solely on the repeal of the measure as a whole.   He then goes on - brilliantly, I might add - to reprimand the conservative establishment for the vitriol and anger that has warped and negated any rational debate and discourse for the last 14 months: 

That platform is ambitious enough -- but also workable, enactable and likely to appeal to voters. After 18 months of overheated rhetoric, it's time at last for Republicans to get real.
I've been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes, it mobilizes supporters -- but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.
Now the overheated talk is about to get worse. Over the past 48 hours, I've heard conservatives compare the House bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 -- a decisive step on the path to the Civil War. Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.

Maybe there's hope after all.