Ill nation

Republicans: The party of dirty old men.

An ugly dig, I know. And I also know that all Republicans are not dirty old men. Some, many, most are good, decent people. My dad was a lifelong Republican. He was about the furthest thing from a dirty old man you could ask for. He was a good, kind, decent man.

Just before he passed away in May 2005, he was convinced that the war in Iraq was right because Saddam had been in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and supported terrorists. All the other things his party was doing – stripping environmental laws of their power, stacking the courts, and a myriad of other detrimental things – were being done for good reason. FOX News was tuned in on the kitchen TV in my parents’ home at least 18 hours a day. And he loved Rush.

We disagreed with each other vehemently, and I loved him dearly.

I know he would have been appalled by this latest revelation. He would have, however, separated this issue from all the others, arguing that this one man’s private perversions – and his party’s years-long enabling of them – had nothing to do with the ongoing war, the torture bill, warrantless wiretapping, the Abramoff scandal. He would have been appalled, but he would still have been wrong.

Because this latest horror -- the sexual victimization of children -- is part and parcel of the larger sickness that’s afflicting the party in power in America today. All of these things can be explained away, if you try hard enough, but they’re all symptoms of the insidious mental cancer that has turned the Republican party into the Bible-thumping, morals protesting, warmongering body it is. It’s sick. It's hypocritical. It has infected our very democracy and, if allowed to continue, will kill it.

It’s time to cut it out.