Time magazine kicks the Republican party because they are down, and it is easy.

These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who — except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum — have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax initiative.


But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about "the other side" could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.



You know I am usually predisposed to be sympathetic toward the underdog, to want to protect those who seem helpless, and to join those who are suffering. But I just don't like the Republican party! I was fairly middle of the road before Bush came along and made me a fervent Democrat, but I have no sympathy left for this bunch of manipulative, lying, two-faced hypocrites! None!

And I cannot imagine what they could do in the next few years to change my opinion.

I will say this however. If the Democrats start feeling their oats and decide to flaunt the law or run roughshod over our civil rights, they will lose my support so fast it will make their balding heads spin. And then I will just have to be an independent again.