10 Past Republicans Who Would Never Make It in Today's Insane GOP

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/10-past-republicans-who-would-never-make-it-todays-insane-gop



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1. Richard Nixon

The word “liberal” was seldom used in connection with Richard Nixon in the late 1960s or early '70s. Nixon was a paranoid Cold War anti-communist and uptight moralist who helped push the U.S. Supreme Court to the right, railed against pornography and defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election of 1968 by helping to usher in the GOP’s “Southern strategy” (which was designed to win over racist Southern whites who had left the Democratic Party because of the civil rights movement and LBJ’s Great Society). Nevertheless, there are many things about Nixon that would make him persona non grata in the GOP of 2013.

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2. Earl Warren

To the Christian Right, the Warren Court of 1953-1969 went out of its way to erode family values in the United States. But Chief Justice Earl Warren was not a Democrat. He was a Republican ex-governor of California who was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by a Republican president: Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Warren Court handed down a lot of decisions that social conservatives detest, including the 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut (a right-to-privacy decision that struck down a Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples), 1969’s Stanley v. Georgia decision (which said that mere possession of explicit porn is not a crime even if it is obscene) and the landmark 1957 ruling in Roth v. the United States. Roth established a whole new definition of obscenity that made it much more difficult to get an obscenity conviction for sexually explicit material. Christian Right activist Phyllis Schlafly, a major critic of the Roth decision, has complained that “the flood of pornography started with the Warren Court.”

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3. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Liz Cheney and many other neocons love to paint President Obama as a pacifist who is soft on national defense. This is ludicrous in light of the fact that Obama gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 and ordered 17,000 more troops deployed in Afghanistan in 2009. But to neocons, the military-industrial complex can never be large enough or aggressive enough.

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4. Barry Goldwater

When Barry Goldwater ran for president against Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, he suffered a landslide defeat: Johnson won 486 electoral votes, Goldwater a mere 52. A key factor in Goldwater’s defeat was the Johnson campaign’s ability to paint Goldwater as a warmonger who would get the U.S. into a nuclear war (which is ironic in light of how greatly LBJ escalated the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War). But even though Goldwater was considered an arch-conservative in the 1950s and '60s, he became quite critical of the GOP’s direction in the 1980s and '90s—and a key factor was his disdain for the Christian Right.

[AgainsttheCrown]

1. Nixon!?

He was beholden to the political conventional wisdom of the day (much like Obama is today). The left was much stronger then and Nixon feared them.

Nixon would be a rabid right winger today. Hell Fox News was his idea.

At least Reagan's not on there....the rest I agree with.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. Someone has a shaky grasp of history

Gerald Ford: "impossible for him to win a primary today"...or in 1972; he wasn't on the ticket as VP and what the general opinion of him was can be summed up by LBJ's comment that "Jerry Ford is a hell of a nice guy, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet".