John Cole over at Balloon Juice has stopped drinking the Kool Aid.....I've always thought he was more thoughtful than your average RW Blogger, I guess even he knows when to throw in the towel. Heavy on the comments, but surprisingly lacking of posters who want to accuse him of loving terrorists....
"I just thought I would go on record stating that the last few weeks and months have really sucked for me. I spent my whole life in the GOP- starting in 1984 with county meetings, going to Teenage Republican camp (my friends called it Hitler Youth Camp, proving that Nazi/Republican quips are no new development), and spending the better part the fall of 1984 going door to door for John Raese in his race against Rockefeller (Raese, as you know, lost). Now, 22 years later, I find myself not only refusing to support Raese against Robert Byrd (the man who for years has embarassed me with his pork), but I have come to the conclusion that the Republicans are so corrupt, so dishonest, so beholden to special interests and fanatical lobbying groups that Byrd not only looks to be the better option, but the entire Democratic party looks better.
I don’t know when things went south with this party (literally and figuratively- and I am sure commenters here will tell me the party has always been this bad- I disagree with that, and so do others), but for me, Terri Schiavo was the real eye-opener. Sure, the Prescription Drug Plan was hideous and still gets my blood pressure pumping, and the awful bankruptcy bill was equally bad, and there were other things that should have clued me in, but really, it was Schiavo that made me realize this party was not as advertized. And it is frustrating as hell.
What makes this even more frustrating is that not only do I feel like I have been duped, but I established a lot of friends in the right wing of the blogging community- and now I read their pages and I can’t believe what I am reading, even though I know that five years ago I probably would have been saying the same or similar things. I know many of them as people- and not just GOP parrots- having spent time working on collaborative projects with them, serving on the editorial board at Red State, appearing on radio shows with them- you name it. I have, at one point in time, defended many of them from what I perceived to be unfair attacks. So I know that by and large they are not bad people (Dan Riehl is an unmitigated asshole, however). Yet I read their pages now, and through my eyes, it looks like they are so divorced from reality it makes me question what, if anything, I ever believed in."
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more here:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=7551