Accio, nerds!
I’ve had the increasingly nagging suspicion that an important subset of Republicans have set in motion a Phoenix-like strategy against the party’s leading faces. This creeping suspicion of mine centers on the chasm in the Republican party that has widened in recent years, unceremoniously ranging its members into two distinct camps: those appreciative of critical thinking and enlightened thought and those suspicious of anything smacking of enlightenment or the more forgiving and loving elements of Christianity.
An Obama victory in the upcoming US presidential election would very likely result in bitter recriminations from each side against the other, with the baser elements of the base charging abandonment (rightfully so), while the enlightened justify their actions due to their party having slowly morphed into something partially (if not wholly) unrecognizable.
This morning, Huffington Post led me to an article at the Telegraph.co.uk that touched on growing Republican fears of an intra-party civil war. In Tim Shipman’s Telegraph article, Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to President Bush, dismissed Republicans critical of La Palin as little more than “cocktail party conservatives,” and had this to say about the flag bearers of the party’s enlightened sect:
There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?
And by God is he right. Unfortunately, where we disagree is not on who will be dead to whom, as undoubtedly each will be to the other and all to me, but on who will be in charge of the Republican Party and its “litmus test”. (Down with the ship, eh Jim?)
The cultural conservatism that has split the Republican party into its two camps is one that has morphed from some form of personal responsibility into one’s confirmation of redneck bona fides or the hothatred of all things “unchristian.” (Sweet dancing Moses, don’t they realize that hatred isn’t much of a Christian value? What? Oh. Never mind.)
Have the enlightened Machiavellian branch of the Republican party set out to sabotage the party as currently constituted? Is their hope to see the extremist now in control thoroughly discredited and the Republican party reduced to ashes? From these ashes do they seek to have the party reborn and in their control? Yeah. Seems like it.
