John Cole is an honest man, and he deserves the credit of it. He's been writing a series of no doubt personally painful essays on the Terri Schiavo controversy, and coming to terms with his own role as what he calls an "enabler" of the odious theocrats who have utterly hijacked his party.

It took me a while to realize it, to realize what I had helped to create, what I had enabled, but I have not been laboring for conservatism. It's Big Government, Morality Edition, with a healthy dose of Corporate Cronyism, and they are just as troubling as the statists on the left. ...

We were warned about the growing power of the theocrats, and we ignored those warning us. Hell- I derided them and chided them- at every opportunity. The day of reckoning is here, and it is going to be of Bibilical proportions. And I only hope that many of the Republicans in Congress, who like me were playing with fire and brimstone, begin to recognize it.

Unlike at least one of the commenters on this post, I would never even think of suggesting that the solution for John Cole is to come over to the Democratic party. I don't want him anywhere near it. I want him in a sane, responsible Republican party, one of the thoughtful people whose deep philosophical errors I will enjoy debating, as equal members with me of a polity in which civil and intellectually free dispute is the norm. I just hope we haven't already entirely and permanently lost our hold on that polity.

posted by michael  8:12:42 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Honoring the memory. Remember the great days of the civil rights era, when Martin Luther King used the power of office and a state militia to stage an anti-judicial coup that ended segregation?

Yeah, neither do I. Bill Bennett does, though:

It is time ... for Governor Bush to execute the law and protect [Terri Schiavo's] rights, and, in turn, he should take responsibility for his actions. Using the state police powers, Governor Bush can order the feeding tube reinserted. His defense will be that he and a majority of the Florida legislature believe the Florida Constitution requires nothing less. Some will argue that Governor Bush will be violating the law. We think he will not be violating the law, but if he is judged to have done so, it will be in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., who answered to a higher law than a judge's opinion.

And you know, I'd like to leave off with a funny remark here, but I can't find it in me. Once upon a time, in the late '60s, William Bennett was a racial liberal who so prized Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail that he taught it as a provocation to classes at the University of Southern Mississippi. Today his sense of justice, not to mention responsibility to history, is so far attenuated that he can exploit the occasion of that letter to justify what would amount to a fascist putsch.

One ought to be sad for Bennett, I suppose. But I wouldn't mind it if his tongue should rot from his mouth the next time he so much as thinks of uttering Martin Luther King's name.

posted by michael  9:18:57 AM  
tell me about it []