Victor Gold - Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP

Copyright 2008 by Victor Gold

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gold, Victor

Invasion of the party-snatchers : how the neo-cons and theo-cons destroyed the GOP / Victor Gold.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4022-0841-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- ) 2. ConservatismUnited States. I. Title.

JK2356.G65 2007

324.2734dc22

2007016418

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

LSI 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

To Lyn Nofziger and Paul Wagner
VIVA! OL!

READER'S ADVISORY

Neo-Cons: Abbreviation for Neo-Conservatives; aka Kristolites, after their ideological mentor, Irving Kristol. A quarter-century-old political movement made up of a willing coalition of disillusioned Kennedy-Johnson Democrats, smarter-than-thou Eastern intellectuals, and unregenerate Wilsonian imperialists.

Theo-Cons: Abbreviation for Theocrat-Conservatives; aka True Believers, Holy Rollers. A quarter-century-old political movement made up of a sanctimonious coalition of disillusioned Jimmy Carter Democrats, holier-than-thou televangelists, and unregenerate anti-Darwinians.

GOP: Abbreviation for Grand Old Party; aka the Republican Party (see also Elephant). A major American political movement once characterized by secular conservative policies favoring decentralized federal government, free-market economics, fiscal restraint, and a restrictive view of presidential power to commit American lives and resources to foreign military ventures. Born Ripon, WI, 1856; died Washington, D.C., circa 20012006 (though a party by that name, principally operated by Neo-Cons and Theo-Cons, continues to appear on the ballots of fifty states and the District of Columbia).

The great danger in the new conservative movement is that instead of broadening its base, the movement might tear itself and the GOP apart.

BARRY GOLDWATER, 1988

(AS USUAL, TWENTY YEARS AHEAD OF HIS TIME)

Chapter 1

WHERE DO ELEPHANTS
GO TO DIE?

Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

JOHN F. KENNEDY, ON REFUSING TO NOMINATE

A DEMOCRAT HE DISLIKED TO A JUDGESHIP (1961)

N OVEMBER 7, 2006 (5 minutes to midnight): You know something has gone wrong in your political universe when the party you've worked and voted with for over forty years is getting blown out in a national election and you feel good about it.

Election Night Flashbacks:

November 2, 1994:Twelve years before, I'd been at an election night party at Dick and Lynne Cheney's home inMcLean, Virginia, cheering the Republican landslide that swept a corrupt, self-aggrandizing Democratic majority out of power on Capitol Hill. Some called it the Gingrich revolution, though the new Speaker of the House had nothing to do with a GOP sweep that included George W. Bush's unexpected victory over Ann Richards in Texas and George Pataki's upset win over Mario Cuomo in New York.

November 7, 2000:Six years later, I'd celebrated the news that a cascade of ballots coming out of south Florida had carried the state and the election for the Bush-Cheney ticket. Premature cheering as it developed, but Al Gore's concession speech a month later cleared the way for the first Republican takeover of both the White House and the Congress in nearly half a century.

Separately and together, those were the election night returns conservative Republicans had been waiting for since the Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964: Big Government Liberalism repudiated, Republicans in control at both ends of Pennsylvania avenue, from Congress to the White House.

Yet, there I was on election night 2006, an aging Goldwater conservative who felt not only good but also gratified that all this was unraveling state by state and district by district. A Democratic landslide was sweeping a corrupt, self-aggrandizing Republican congressional majority out of power and, hard as they tried, the disingenuous party hacks spouting the White House line on Fox News couldn't explain it away. What came to mind watching these Beltway blowhards was an old Joe South lyric from the 1970s: These are not my people.

Indeed, there was little I saw or heard from any of the Republican leaders and spokesmen after the 2006 midterm elections that reflected the party I'd joined as a young activist forty years before. What I saw instead was a party of pork-barrel ear-markers like Dennis Hastert, of political hatchet men like Karl Rove, and of Bible-thumping hypocrites like Tom DeLay, all giving oleaginous cover to a profligate Congress that ran up eye-popping deficits and an insulated White House run by a self-righteous Texan and his arrogant inner circle of sycophants and cronies.

In short, everything in government that repelled me about the Democratic party of Lyndon Johnson when I left it to join a nascent conservative movement in Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign of 1964. And the thought ran through my mind, What would Barry say if he were alive?

Barry Goldwater: A straight-talking, freethinking maverick from Arizona, the political godfather of modern American conservatism. But wait

For those Generation-X , -Y, and -Z activists whose knowledge of political history is limited to what they hear on talk radio and scan on the Internet, a proper conservative introduction is in order. Here's what one of Barry's harshest critics four decades back more recently said of him:

No democracy can survive if it is wormy with lies and evasions. That is why we must cherish those people who have the guts to speak the truth: mavericks, whistle-blowers, disturbersof the public peace. And it's why, in spite of my own continuing (though chastened) liberal faith, I miss Barry Goldwater. More than ever.

PETE HAMILL, LOS ANGELES TIMES, AUGUST 16, 2004

Lies and evasions: No two words could better describe the modus operandi of the Bush-Cheney administration and today's Republican party, masquerading as conservative in the Goldwater tradition.

Pause again to define conservative as young activists who joined the 1964 Goldwater campaign understood the term:

• In foreign policy, though he broke with the isolationism of preWorld War II Republicans, Goldwater rejected the Wilsonian notionnow advanced by the Neo-Cons and their evangelical alliesthat America has a God-given mission to shape the world in its image.
• In domestic policy, though a champion of free-market economics, Goldwater was a Western conservationist who rejected the laissez-faire notionnow advanced by the Halliburton arm of the Bush-Cheney White Housethat what's good for corporate profits is necessarily good for the country.
• In cultural policy, though a Middle American moralist, Goldwater rejected the notionnow advanced by the faith-based branch of the Bush White Housethat Big Brother in Washington has not only the right but the moral obligation to intrude into private relationships. (Every good Christian, Barry once told an audience of reporters, ought to give Jerry Falwell a swift kick in the ass.)