Republikanische Partei - Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party

Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...108

Table of Contents

For my mother and father

The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil. The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that havent and hadnt any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy.

TENNESEE WILLIAMS,
SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, ACT 1

Take, Lord Jesus Christ, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will.

SAINT IGNATIUS LOYOLA,
THE PRAYER OF ABANDONMENT

INTRODUCTION

ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM

Home run! Home run! Home run! Home run!

A phalanx of young men in red baseball caps and polo shirts ran up and down the aisles of St. Paul, Minnesotas Excel Center pumping their fists and chanting boisterously.

Home run! Home run! Home run!

The chant quickly spread throughout the crowd.

Suddenly, the floor of the 2008 Republican National Convention is in rapture, having just heard vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin taunt Barack Obama as an unqualified elitist, assail the liberal media, and bill herself as an average hockey mom. The man at the top of the ticket, John McCain, would speak the following night, but Palin, a charismatic culture warrior, was the spark that ignited the party base.

When the chant finally died down, three country music stars stepped to the stage to perform a patriotic musical mash-up. John Rich and Gretchen Wilson stared deeply into one anothers eyes, singing the national anthem, while Cowboy Troy, an African American singer known as the king of hick-hop, stood off to the side, reciting lines from the pledge of allegiance. Gales of spontaneous cheers rose from the crowd when Cowboy Troy proclaimed, One nation under God. From my position to the immediate left of the stage, standing next to the Pennsylvania delegation, Cowboy Troy was the only African American I could see among a sea of gray hair and white faces. After the pledge of allegiance, as Rich broke into Raisin McCain, a honky-tonk campaign anthem that extols McCain goin down in Vietnam town, a handsome middle-aged black man in a suit brushed by me, heading rapidly toward the arena exit. He was Lynn Swann, the Hall of Fame National Football League wide receiver and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania in 2006.

Mr. Swann, where are the rest of the black people? I asked him.

He paused, shrugged his shoulders, and kept walking. Then, before disappearing into the crowd, he turned and blurted out, We need to do more.

Earlier that day, I milled around the convention floor and walked the arena hallways, chatting with party leaders and delegates. These are the real people, Louisiana GOP chairman Roger Villere told me, echoing an emerging theme of the McCain-Palin campaign. This is real America. When I asked Villere the whereabouts of his states junior senator, David Vitter, he said he did not know. And when I asked about Vitters confession to hiring several high-priced prostitutes, Villere shot back, David is a moral man, a great senator, and we support him totally. Vitter, still a religious right favorite, was planning to run for reelection in 2010.

Near the press box, I ran into Ralph Reed, a Christian right operative once hailed by Time magazine as Gods Right Hand. Reed had harbored presidential ambitions, but his campaign for Georgia lieutenant governor ended in humiliating defeat when his role was disclosed in lobbyist Jack Abramoffs scheme to trick evangelical leaders into pressuring the Bush administrations Department of Interior to shut down Indian casinos that Abramoffs clients considered business competitors. I asked Reed whether he still had a political future. What do you mean? I never left politics! he chirped, beaming at me with a pearly smile. Reed and Abramoffs former friend and ally, ex- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, hosted a private party that evening for Republican bigwigs. DeLay, who stood accused by the Texas attorney general of money laundering, had charged McCain with betraying the conservative movement. (One of the DeLay partys high-profile attendees, Representative John Mica, head-butted an ABC cameraman when a reporter asked him if he was happy to see his disgraced friend.)

Then I made my way to the far corner of the convention floor to mingle with the Idaho delegation. I asked delegates where the states outgoing senior senator, Larry Craig, was. Craig, rated the third most conservative senator in Congress, had barely eluded criminal charges after soliciting sex with an undercover cop in an airport bathroom stall. Wed rather not go back and revisit all that, Governor Jim Risch, running to replace Craig, told me. Im really here to talk about our partys plan for keeping the tax rate low.

From the Idaho delegation, I pushed through a gaggle of reporters and cameramen surrounding the Alaska delegation to meet some of Palins constituents. When I approached a young man, the only delegate from the state who appeared to be under the age of fifty, he snapped, Youre not going to ask about Bristol, are you? referring to Palins pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter, who sat nearby with her fianc, eighteen-year-old self-proclaimed fuckin redneck Levi Johnston. I asked about Palins support for laws banning abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or when the mothers life is in danger. Theres no reason to kill a baby, whether you consider him unborn or born, the delegate replied. Another delegate, a middle-aged woman, explained to me how her husband took their two daughters on dates to talk about keeping themselves pure until marriage. (Two days later, the same woman, dressed in a construction workers outfit like one of the Village People, bellowed on the convention floor in favor of offshore drilling: Drill, baby, drill!)

This was a portrait of the Republican Party fully in the grip of its right wing: almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly evangelical, fixated on abortion, homosexuality, and abstinence education; resentful and angry; and unable to discuss how and why it had become this way. Noticeably absent from the convention were moderate Republicans. Senator Lincoln Chafee, legatee of the moderate Republican tradition in Rhode Island, was defeated in the 2006 midterms, and he was endorsing Obama. The last Republican House member from New England, Representative Chris Shays of Connecticut, would lose his seat in two months. None of the great Republican families of the past, from the Rockefellers to the Eisenhowers, were there either. Both of Ronald Reagans natural children, Ron and Patti, endorsed Obama. President Dwight Eisenhowers granddaughter, Susan, addressed the Democratic National Convention in Denver just moments before Barack Obama appeared to accept his partys nomination.

How did a party once known for its big tent philosophy become a one-ring circus? How did a Republican Party that had dominated American politics for over twenty-five years become so marginalized?

During the 1952 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee and former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe Dwight D. Eisenhower silently observed the attacks on the patriotism of a man he knew was a great American, General George C. Marshall, then serving as secretary of state. His assailant was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, as opportunistic and sloppy as he was vicious. Eisenhower seethed while McCarthy smeared Marshall as a man steeped in falsehood, who supposedly harbored at least fifty-seven active Communists within the State Department. Eisenhower loathed everything about McCarthy, regarding him as a dangerous and petty demagogue, but he shrank from attacking him or defending Marshall, fearing that McCarthys influence among the Republican Party right-wing base might upset his campaign.

Next page

1234567...108

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party»

Look at similar books to Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Ronald T. Libby

Purging the Republican Party: Tea Party Campaigns and Elections

Republican Party Convention

Proceedings of the Convention of the Republican Party of Louisiana

Stuart Stevens

It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

Charlie Crist

The Partys Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat

Meghan McCain

Bad Republican: A Memoir

Jackie Calmes

Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court

Stern

Republican like me: a lifelong Democrats journey across the aisle

Kabaservice

Rule and ruin: the downfall of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party

Max Blumenthal

Republican Gomorrah

Douglas L. Koopman

Hostile takeover: the House Republican Party, 1980-1995

Theodore J. Lowi

The End of the Republican Era (Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture Series , Vol 5)

Max Blumenthal

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party

Discussion, reviews of the book Republican Gomorrah: inside the movement that shattered the party and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.