'The Republicans Have to Go'

Cassidy Mullen works in Washington, D.C., coaches crew and is an astute observer of the passing political scene. He’s also KikoKimba’s son. He blogs at Cassidy's Blog.

There is a scene in the movie “Gone With the Wind,” where various Southerners are debating the merits of a war with the North when Rhett steps in and points out that the South can’t win the war, not with the North’s economic and industrial superiority. And when the war goes bad, I bet a lot of people were saying to themselves, “Damn, I wish we had listened to that guy.”

Today, that doesn’t happen with me. I’ve been against the war from the beginning. Yet as events in Iraq spiral rapidly toward chaos/civil war/anarchy/whatever, I’m still looked at as the idiot. I’m the weepy liberal whose policies have doomed America and the West. Of course, I wasn’t the one who started this war, but I guess that makes too much sense. No, for some reason, I messed up. It’s as if you have a neighbor who chops wood with sandals on and then accidentally cops a toe off. Yet he makes fun of you for chopping wood in work boots. Just bizarre.

Yet the one way that this war has changed me is that it has proven to me something that I have long suspected: the Republican Party must go.

That’s right. I’m saying it. They’ve done nothing for this country over the last five years but f*ck it all up more than it was already f*cked up. They got us into this war by painting anyone who was opposed to it as a coward and unpatriotic. They still defend the war as the right thing to do even though it had caused possibly irreparable harm to this country. They march lockstep with maybe the worst administration in history. Their only goal is to stay in power. Not to reshape the Middle East or to improve the nation’s economy. No, their goal is to stay in power . . . whatever it takes.

This may seem a bit radical from someone who is well, not that radical. But, truthfully, who else would have gotten us into the war. And don’t say the Democrats would have caved to the terrorists or signed some freakin’ treaty with them. Al Gore would have hunted Bin Laden to the ends of the earth, and not decided to take a trip to Iraq and spent every bit of political capital on it. He would have known that Iraq is not worth the recourses it has costs us to this point or in the future. Sure, it may have bought them some votes, but the Democrats are smart enough to realize that the war would have been a no-no.

Sure, the Dems bicker amongst themselves. But every party should do that. That, to me, makes them healthier than Republicans. When everyone says the same thing and follows the same orders there is nothing original; no good ideas. For instance, universal health care is the Social Security of the future, and just as before it is a Democratic idea. To Republicans, the freedom of the market is more important than your health. The president can’t stop his vacation a few days early for Katrina, but he can rush back to Washington to sign emergency legislation to block the death of a woman who had been in a vegetative state for over a decade.

Yeah, I am rambling. But that seems the only way I can get this off my chest. But it took a war like Iraq to make me realize that the Republicans have to go. Before, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, now there is nothing left to give. I’m sorry to say that it took a war to do that to me.