Republicans should be repulsed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-my-party/2018/07/19/4827d7a8-8b7c-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f6415f8cbf06
By Joe Scarborough
July 19 at 6:29 PM
The morning after my first congressional reelection campaign, I was driving around Pensacola, Fla., collecting signs from supporters’ yards. It was an opportunity to spend time with my dad, who I had always suspected favored my brother over me. But I was confident that the previous night’s victory would make him proud. As we began driving through my neighborhood, the car radio was reporting election results: “And freshman Republican congressman Joe Scarborough breezed to reelection with an impressive 73 percent of the vote.” Turning toward my father in anticipation of some welcome adulation and praise, I found him instead glaring at the radio.
“Who the hell were the other 27 percent?” he bellowed.
Twenty years later, I am asking my father’s question of the party I once represented in Congress. For if it is true that only 40 percent of Republicans believe the United States should remain in NATO, as recent polling indicates, then who exactly are the other 60 percent?
Were they sleepwalking through history while our North Atlantic allies stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States during that long, twilight struggle against Communist Russia? Have they forgotten that during that Cold War, nothing less than the planet’s survival hung in the balance? Or that it was the North Atlantic alliance that pushed back tirelessly against Kremlin thugs who were trying to undermine the Western democracies? Or that American presidents from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush shared NATO’s mission to free 100 million Eastern Europeans from the cruel grip of a regime that enslaved an entire continent and killed tens of millions of its own people?
Are today’s Republicans now so tribal as to blindly endorse a foreign policy warped by President Trump’s obvious allegiance to a former KGB chief who controls Russia through repression, bribery and political assassination and who has called the collapse of that evil empire the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”?
Exactly who are these people, and what have they done with my party? And how could any American support Trump’s tragically weak performance at Helsinki?
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Ain't politics fun.
