One always should be loathe to generalize, right? I'm mean - it's completely unfair to paste an entire political party with a label.
After all, Republicans have won all sorts of elections that way - hell, they even changed the political lexicon (when was the last time you've heard a Democrat refer to themselves as a "liberal"?). So it's wrong.
Therefore I want to be very careful here about a conclusion that I've drawn, and one that I don't think can be escaped. The Republican party is morally bankrupt. Not necessarily individual candidates, but institutionally, culturally, it most certainly is.
This is not about the ideology of conservative policy. There is a certain logic to arguing hawkish foreign policy or the theories of smaller government and lower taxes with well-meaning conservatives who believe these things - that's what democracy is.
Well, we hear lots about this one - the Republican party today would have no room for a Bob Dole or a Howard Baker, or even a Ronald Reagan. OK, but why? Because those three gentlemen - as much as their policy ideas were flawed and I disagreed: They had a moral compass - at least one for egotistical politicians. And the Republican party - institutionally - was a party that understood that their president broke the law, and therefore he had to resign before he was certainly impeached and convicted. It was a party that compromised with the opposition to get things done, and while not exactly intellectual in its public approach to campaigns, it didn't do what it does now.
Your political party is morally bankrupt, when it accepts institutional racism in order to hold onto a core group of voters. Democrats get a strong majority of minority votes, but not because they have divided the electorate. They get them because Republicans have spent the past 30 plus years playing the white electorate against them to gain electoral advantage.
It's so bad now, that with the election of an African-American president - twice - they actually have a clearly planned and thought out strategy that backs the crazy racist people (like the birthers) with a wink and a nod, all the while denying their own racism. It goes something like this: "Of course, I believe the President is an American citizen, but that's just my opinion and other people may think differently."
How about a party that has a clear and well-planned national strategy against democracy, because they have less voters than the other party? Last time I checked, universal suffrage is the law of the land, and infringing on it is illegal. And yet, state after state, all the way up to the conservative judges on the supreme court, the plan is obvious: Find ways to stop the wrong people from voting (and when I say the wrong people, I mean voters with Democratic tendancies). And so, voting rights becomes an election strategy. And then you don't have to think about widening your appeal or making your party better - you just stop people from voting. Morally bankrupt.
And then there's this 8 year obsession with doing absolutely nothing in order to delegitimize the Obama presidency. Never mind the fact that this makes no political sense. The Republican strategy is to make the government to absolutely nothing. To bring the action of the federal government to a standstill. So everything is pretty much imperiled, from infrastructure to national defense. People get hurt. And the country does not move forward - it doesn't grow like it should. On purpose. For politics alone. Morally corrupt.
And then there's how they lie. Again, lying is nothing new for politicians, and plenty do it on all sides. But there is no veneer, no filter. They keep telling the same lie, over and over - no matter how ridiculous - in the hopes that the truth will just go away. Anybody remember the pro-Romney polling versus the rest of the polling universe in 2012? And then there's - I don't know - the war in Iraq?
I'm not saying that there aren't corrupt Democrats (how's that prison cell doing, Rod Blagojavich?). And there certainly are corrupt Republican (before the year ends we may well have Bob McDonnell, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Chris Christie all in - and in some cases out - of the courtroom).
But that's the corruption of individual power. We see that all the time. This is something different and altogether new in American politics. The Republican party is institutionally and morally bankrupt. And it's time they got the boot in a big way.