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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnother GOP operative quits the GOP because of the corruption: his explanation
Link to tweet
His entire Twitter thread
1. I'm out, too. After more than 40 years, I'm leaving the Republican Party. <thread -- I'm afraid it's a long one. Sorry.>
2. I started my professional life as a conservative Republican, moving from a entry-level job at @NRO just after college to Washington to work on the Hill. I've worked on campaigns for Republican politicians in four states, and in government for...
3...Republican elected officials from four different states, in both houses of Congress and the Capitol here in Madison. For both political and personal reasons I did mostly business and nonprofit work in more recent years, retaining my political identity as a Republican...
4...along with a lifelong belief that I knew better than the Party's leaders what was good for the country. My formative experience was as Senate staff in the Reagan years; the modern Republicans I most admired were legislators like Bob Dole and Richard Lugar, who understood...
5...the importance of American institutions -- the Senate above all -- and American leadership in the world. And of course the men (in their time it was mostly men) who had made the best of the Republican tradition in American politics -- Lincoln first, Theodore Roosevelt...
6...Lacey, Pinchot, Stimson, Lovett, Eisenhower and Reagan -- had great meaning for me, and still do. But their day is over, and their party is dead.
7. I commend recent thoughtful essays by @MaxBoot and @RadioFreeTom on their own respective decisions to leave the GOP. My reasoning is a little different though not entirely inconsistent with theirs. The language of electoral politics is one I understand and appreciate...
8...but as a means to an end, nothing more. The end is government, and government is responsibility: for the whole country, its interests around the world, and its future. There is nothing more important. Failure in government is a serious matter; abandonment of responsibility
9...is unforgivable. I've seen a mostly successful Presidency, and an effective Congress; I know what they look like. More recently I've seen what failure looks like: wars carelessly undertaken and not won in spite of enormous expenditure of lives and resources,...
10...a Congress unable to timely pass routine legislation and spending bills, massive tax cuts passed to provide campaign donors a return on their investment, the financial services industry left deliberately to regulate itself until it nearly blew up the global economy,...
11...and triggered a devastating recession, the worst in 80 years. Then followed abandonment of responsibility. In the face of this cruel recession, that cost millions of Americans their jobs and hundreds of thousands their homes,...
12...the Republican leadership in Congress resolved to do...nothing. There was a Democrat in the White House, and a Negro one at that -- the seething resentment of Barack Obama's race was something he never wanted to acknowledge; I didn't either, but there it was.
13. Eight years followed of Republicans in Congress appropriating the name & heritage of their party to beg for money before the richest people in the country, keep Congress & all of government from functioning, hoping that the minority of Americans who vote would reward them...
14...for abandoning their responsibility. Which they mostly did, to their discredit, right through the 2016 election, when through a fluke of the Electoral College Donald Trump became President.
15. C2K: Corruption, Criminality and the Kremlin. There are Republicans who revel in these principles of the Trump administration, and Republicans who are merely terrified of the President, but what is quite clear is that each of these principles has a devoted constituency...
16...in Trump's party. In a Republican Party grown dependent for support of its enormous campaign infrastructure on concentrated private wealth, Corruption was already well established before Trump even got to Washington and started using the Presidency to enrich himself.
17. The single most corrupt act during the whole sordid Trump era to date was last year's tax bill, written as its predecessors in 2001 and 2003 had been to reward donors of large sums to Republican candidates. This bill was mostly written in Congress.
18. Criminality by Trump personally was helpfully detailed by the New York Times just a few days ago: the man is a massive tax cheat. A steady stream of Trump associates and supporters have gone before Robert Mueller's team of investigators, and thence to prison.
19. It's as if the President of the United States were the center of a criminal conspiracy. As If. As to the Kremlin, let's be perfectly clear: Republicans in Congress are determined that Russia's intervention on Trump's behalf should not count against his Presidency.
20. Trump's sponsorship by the heirs of Stalin's secret police has inspired no rebellion among any Republican elected official. All Republicans in both houses of Congress are fine with it. I think we ought to take American patriotism a little more seriously than they do.
21. I would do Trump himself an injustice were I to leave C2K as the whole of his contribution to American government. His rank, stinking, putrid ignorance could be bottled and exhibited at the Smithsonian for the next thousand years as an unequalled specimen of its kind.
22. Trump is more indolent than some corpses. He despises black people, loathes Hispanics, thinks Muslims not contributing to his skeezy hotel business are terrorists, and incorporates all his backward prejudices into government policy. Trump hurts people, and enjoys it.
23. To the extent Trump can be said to govern at all, he governs only for his supporters -- the chumps who go to his campaign rallies, the white-right, the flatterers who appeal to him on TV day and night, and of course -- always -- the donors.
24. What is there left of Lincoln in today's Republican Party? Of Theodore Roosevelt? Nothing. The party of Trump is the party of the Charlottesville white-right mob, the party of concentrated wealth, and perhaps most of all the party that rejects responsibility.
25. So I'm out, and for good. I will be an Independent. I will oppose Republican candidates for public office, and support Democrats whenever possible. We're in a dark period in America, and the road to something better does not go through, or near, the Republican Party.[end}
hatrack
(59,587 posts).
brush
(53,794 posts)Nobody uses that term anymore and haven't for decades.
the moment I saw that I stopped reading
Cognitive_Resonance
(1,546 posts)brush
(53,794 posts)"African American" of "black" would most likely be used by an American English speaker.
Something's fishy. Bot that's just me.
grantcart
(53,061 posts)qazplm135
(7,447 posts)to channel the racism of his former peers, not his own.
brush
(53,794 posts)Doesn't seem like an American English speaker at all.
I am not the only person in this thread who read it that way.
brush
(53,794 posts)qazplm135
(7,447 posts)or talking about racists sardonically. Which is what is happening here.
brush
(53,794 posts)they use negro too, particularly the type of people he likely knew in the republican party over the years.
brush
(53,794 posts)qazplm135
(7,447 posts)it differently from you.
One would think would at least give you pause, but apparently not.
brush
(53,794 posts)They aren't nicey-nicey and use an antiquated term that no one has used for decades.
arthritisR_US
(7,288 posts)why he used that word. I think he was starkly highlighting just how many decades his former party has regressed to.
Squinch
(50,956 posts)horses have gotten out and run to the next state.
He had at least a decade to speak out about the things his tweet describes. What was he waiting for? It must have been OK with him for a very long time for him to have waited till now to speak out about it.
They all brought this about. So thanks to them for joining us as we try to pick up the pieces of what they have wrought, but I sincerely hope they don't think this absolves them.
NCjack
(10,279 posts)of their stalls, and spooked them out of the barn. And now he offers to "help" by registering IND. That is, he just wants to sit on his Repuke ass while the DEMs work hard to pull out all the roots of the corruption that they planted.
BadgerMom
(2,771 posts)theyll be thrilled to criticize rather than aid.
onecaliberal
(32,865 posts)Va Lefty
(6,252 posts)Why is that not enough?
FakeNoose
(32,654 posts)... but I think his point is that Trump is the final straw.
We at DU are all saying, why did it ever have to get to this? It was so obvious that this would end badly, even 35 years ago when Reagan's group were doing their dirty work. A lot of what this guy says echoes the same thing David Brock said in his book (minus the diatribe against Trump.)
The conservative right-wingers in this country have been making this happen for many years. They just don't like the fact that traitor Trump is where they were headed the whole time. I wonder how many others are going to walk away now? I believe a lot more will just quietly refrain from voting on November 6th, and not tell anybody. The "smart" ones are finally realizing that Republicans can't do government. They can't do responsible adulthood either.
Niagara
(7,631 posts)YessirAtsaFact
(2,064 posts)He doesnt make excuses for OrangeTurd, he condemns him.
He also acknowledges the repugnant goons are corrupt to the core.
An enemy has changed sides and Ill take it.
demmiblue
(36,865 posts)EleanorR
(2,393 posts)But they are a cowardly lot, aren't they. This little trickle of them finally coming forward to renounce their putin installed leader.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Took him a while to figure it out.
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)reason he is out. I am sick to death hearing about civility being the main culprit missing in politics today.
He does get it: a Congress unable to timely pass routine legislation and spending bills, massive tax cuts passed to provide campaign donors a return on their investment, the financial services industry left deliberately to regulate itself until it nearly blew up the global economy,...
N_E_1 for Tennis
(9,747 posts)I posted yesterday, its too long most probably didnt read kinda cant blame them the against civility crowd small.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211258541
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)Its not that he then prizes incivility in and of itself. Rather, Habermas worries that a public sphere shackled by excessive regard for the norms of deliberation and rational debate loses its essential function
N_E_1 for Tennis
(9,747 posts)starting with The Vietnam War. Those protests were not civil in any way, shape or form. We burned flags, our draft cards patriotic clothing, anything to get attention. There was yelling and screaming beyond anything Ive seen in recent years. Then we won, the war stopped.
I put quote marks on won because the after effects of that war and the protests can still be felt today. At least the murder of our young soldiers came to an end.
That is the big protest there are other subjects but that is a good example.
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)Its funny, when I hear the central complaint by tv pundits regarding the lack of civility, that is a red flag for me.
Trumps policies will kill the planet, lets talk about that and not the damn smoke and mirrors he throws up every day.
Iggo
(47,558 posts)Heartstrings
(7,349 posts)GOTV!!!!!
Wednesdays
(17,383 posts)Better late than never, I suppose.
Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)OnDoutside
(19,962 posts)Good for him.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)But I will say that the act of contrition isn't complete until you've done penance and made reparations to the people you hurt.
duforsure
(11,885 posts)They know its closing in on him and are running from being tied to him in any way , and keep from becoming corrupted like many others now have had happen to them , and used against them by him. They know he's a criminal and its about to expose them all . More will be leaving.
SunSeeker
(51,574 posts)That's it in a nutshell.
NewJeffCT
(56,828 posts)I hope you can get a few local friends to leave with you and vote (D) this November and beyond.
1cheapbeemr
(82 posts)I like that a lot.