The Stupid Party

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for highlighting this piece by Jeffrey Hart over at The Daily Beast.

Jeffrey Hart is professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth College. He wrote for the National Review for more than three decades, where he was senior editor. He wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, when governor of California, and for Richard Nixon. He's got serious conservative bonafides going back 40 years or more.

Here's the essential crux of his piece:

Does any reasonable person not believe that gays and lesbians deserve respect
and equality? Not today’s Republican Party. Expert translators from Arabic have been dismissed for being gay. And applicants for the post of certified public accountants in the Iraq Green Zone have been asked about their view of Roe v. Wade.

Both Obama and McCain supported federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. An embryo is a cluster of cells the size of the period at the end of this sentence. It takes a strange mentality to equate that with a seriously ill human being. (Bush, August 2001: “It’s wrong to destroy life in order to save life.”)

But science never sleeps, and embryonic stem cell work has been going on around the world in advanced nations, as well as in state or privately funded laboratories here. Harvard is planning a new billion-dollar science campus, with a major cell-research laboratory. Promising advances of various kinds are being explored world-wide.

So here we are in 2008. With its indispensable Southern and, more widely, evangelical base, the Republican Party has become the stupid party.

[...]

In its embrace of the religious right under George W. Bush, the Republican Party became the stupid party. And committing suicide along with it has been the conservative movement. The party united around god, guns and [hating] gays is finished.

Hart also called Obama "the real conservative in 2008," and "the new Reagan."

Dear readers, the Obama victory this week renders the Republican Party of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, and Sarah Palin a farce of a political movement. They are not conservative (largest expansion of government in history since 2001, largest budget deficits in history, $10.5 trillion in debt). They are religious radicals, neo-fascists, and -- thank God -- an ever-shrinking minority in the United States of America.