@izzythepush,
izzythepush's source wrote:Individually these could be lapses of memory, slips of the tongue. But together they are emblematic of a brazen philistinism and reckless defamation that has dominated the American right in recent times. What we've witnessed in these debates are not gaffes, but the inevitable result of a descent into rhetorical hyperventilation. For the past three years making bizarre, false, inflammatory statements was not regarded as an obstacle to being taken seriously within the party but a prerequisite for it.
What is even more appalling is that this is the party of Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest orators (arbuably the greatest) in American history, even when making
ex tempore remarks. It is also the party of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who, in the year after graduating Harvard and while attending law school at Columbia University, published
The Naval War of 1812--which not only remains the best, most concise work on the subject, but which so impressed the Admiralty, that when, in the 1890s, they commissioned a history of the Royal Navy, they soliticited Mr. Roosevelt to write the article on the American War. This is the party of Herbert Hoover, who, although made the goat for the Great Depression, was one of the most capable men ever to hold the office of President. He was a professional mining engineer before taking up relief work during the 1914-18 war, at one point distributing more than two million tons of food relief to more than nine million victims of the war over a two year period.
And what do we see today? Apart from the gaffes mentioned in the quoted article, we have Herman Caine, who can't frame an answer to a simple question about Libya. We have Newt Gingrich, with some pretentions to scholarship, who has written that the founders not only did not intend to separate church and state, but intended that organized religion must have place in government--upon what basis i cannot imagine, and i'm certainly not going to waste money on a book of his.
The Republican party has certainly fallen on hard times.
