A long time ago, the Republican was a champion. Republicans stopped the Democrat institution of slavery and empowered states rights in order to give more power to the common man.
In short, the Republican party held the belief that each human being has the innate internal ability to make decent reasonable decisions in order to better their personal good.
My father was a Republican, and he raised me to be one. I like Republicans.
America used to be a huge nation of great awesome Republicans having a great personal freedom party, drinking freedom beer and roasting vote-kebabs over an open election fire. Then somebody picked up their phone and called his buddy who wasn’t invited. That guy was a conservative, but he’s cool, conservatives are a lot like Republicans so everyone would probably like him.
Conservative showed up, and everyone thought he was a little strange, but since his friends invited him, it was cool. Conservative kept away from the black guys for some reason and he talked down to the dumb people, but it was okay because he had some relatively good ideas. Conservative called some of his friends and said, “Come and meet these Republicans. They are pretty cool.”
Then in like the Civil Rights Movement, one of the conservatives called his buddy Fritz, a German conservative. The guy had some really extreme ideas, but as long as you kept him on the conservative agenda, the Republicans wouldn’t mind.
Fritz called Hans, Klaus, Herman Goering and that dude Jerry Falwell from down the street. They made the best bratwurst by far.
At that point Uncle Sam, who owned the house, came over to the conservative’s side of the yard and tried to find out who all the new guys were. They didn’t get on very well. They needed a diplomat.
Ronald Reagan came to office and did a rather bang-up job. Republicans liked him because he had passion, liked small government and bankrupted Soviet Russia. Conservatives liked him for some other reason, probably because he looked so cool in the movies.
Now, in 2008, America stands at the crossroads. John McCain appears to be a Republican, but the conservatives are concerned that he doesn’t hate the same things they do. The conservatives want to ban evolution, mathematics, sex, Muhammad, privacy and free will. They want to restrict the flow of information from government to the press while encouraging military expansion to countries that “need our help,” aka countries where our moral righteousness trumps economic stability. They want to ban abortion while expanding the death penalty to drug dealers.
The Republican Party has a split. The Democrats split a long time ago. The Democratic race is between liberal Clinton and Democrat Obama. Well, technically it’s between Bill Clinton’s third term and the first African-American to make it to the national stage without getting shot, but I like to pretend that people cared about Obama back at the 2004 DNC instead of jumping on the “it worked in ‘Blazing Saddles'” bandwagon, so he’s a heroic Democrat.
Conservatives get their panties in a bunch over John McCain. Unfortunately for them, the tides of war have not whipped America into a hateful, destructive fury with marching lines of boy scouts flashing the ‘scouts honor’ to banners of the Commander in Chief as the Lincoln Memorial floats awash the blood of sacrificed Muslim interracial AIDS babies.
He’s an old white guy, like Huckabee and Nader. I’d like a Huckabee-Nader third party ticket. They could bring on Ron Paul in a cabinet position, let Huckabee write the speeches, Nader save the environment, launch Ted Turner into the Sun and Bill Clinton could even come on board to teach everyone how to turn America back into that lovable womanizing goof as opposed to the current crypto-fascist-hippy-slayer-giant that threatens the stability of our entire universe.
In short, what we need is for one or two log cabin Republicans to walk over to the conservative tent and say, “Hey, I don’t really know how so many of you got in here, but since it’s my house you are going to have to either calm down and stop drinking or leave.” That’s when the biggest, fattest conservative lazily looks up from his haterade, heaves up a great mouthful of vomit and proceeds to burp out the ugly pejorative, “Liberal.”
Liberal, the enemy, as if freedom was a bad thing.
Austin Rucker is a senior English major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
