Comments on Timothy Egan's current column.

Jimmy from Texas:

The GOP's cynical promotion of ignorance and slander is a national
disgrace.

I take no pleasure in saying this.

My involvement with conservative politics dates back to 1964, when I
was a teenage volunteer for the Goldwater campaign. A few years later,
my yellow-dog Democrat parents took me along when my mother was a
delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention. They hoped I would witness
the process in all its populist glory and be converted from my wayward
Republican ways. What I witnessed instead was the Chicago convention
riots and the establishment muscling Hubert Humphrey into the
nomination. This confirmed to me that I had been on the right track.
My parents were deeply disillusioned themselves.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the meantime, but I
stayed with the conservative cause until fairly recently. In
retrospect, I had been growing uncomfortable with what passed for
conservatism for many years. I opposed the Clinton impeachment, for
example, regarding it as a frivolous witch-hunt.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that the rot really started in
1980, when the Reagan campaign made a conscious effort to recruit the
nascent religious right as a GOP voting bloc. This involved the kind
of compromise that everyone condemns but that all politicians
practice.

As with so many things that turn out badly, it seemed like a good idea
at the time. It would scarcely have seemed possible that a bunch of
Bible beating nuts could actually take over the party of Teddy
Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, and Barry Goldwater. They could help us
at the polls, though, and with grassroots activism (a traditional
weakness of the GOP), so compromise we did.

Our creation has devoured us now, and Republican conservatism as I
knew it has not so much changed as ceased to exist. This process has
accelerated with astonishing speed since the 2008 election, with the
nuts now fully in charge and the adults either marginalized or driven
completely out of the party.

I persisted as long as I did because I thought the nuts would fall
flat on their faces and the rest of us could re-build the movement
along rational lines. That is impossible now, we are past the point of
no return.