Conservative Babylon

Actually, we do like Ike, at least in retrospect… although we’d have voted for Adlai Stevenson, had we been alive.

“Many moons ago, I worked for a Republican U.S. senator from Illinois, Charles Percy, who represented everything that was good about his party. He was a man of devout faith, a pragmatist and a capitalist. He was not, however, a zealot. During his years in the Senate, Percy supported tighter gun control, housing subsidies for the poor, and opposed two of Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees. In 1973, Percy called for an independent prosecutor to investigate Watergate. The novelist Richard Ford, coined a phrase ‘decent Chuck Percy Republicans,’ referring to Republicans who were consensus builders and did what was right for their country rather than always doing what was politically expedient.

“Republicans today are a different breed. They take issue with any positions they see as smacking of socialism even if — as in the case of the individual mandate — the idea was originally theirs. …

“And if one of them were to say something like the following? ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.’ They would be branded a socialist and condemned for being dangerously naive and unpatriotic. Which is interesting, because the quote above is from Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

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