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Don’t You Dare Call Me A Liberal

As US elections approach, and the presidential race enters its final two weeks, even the oldest friendships are getting strained by intense politics.

For example, two of my oldest friends in California, who are ardent, pro-McCain Republicans, are accusing me of becoming a liberal Democrat. In America, ‘liberal’ means left-wing.

They say I’ve been picking on poor President George W. Bush and lack patriotism for not supporting his wars of ‘liberation’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. They hate Obama because he will raise their taxes.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my times, but never a leftwing Democrat. As a lifelong Republican, I would more likely to become a Hari Krishna than a liberal! Actually, I call myself rogue Republican.

I’ve always been a moderate, conservative Eisenhower Republican who believes in small government, low taxes, saving, hard work, individual freedoms, and avoiding overseas adventures. When Eisenhower was president, America was respected and admired around the non-Communist world.

I respect Republican candidate Sen. John McCain and believe he would make a fine president. But he showed terrible judgment in picking Sarah Palin as Vice President, and by surrounding himself with extreme, pro-Israeli neoconservative advisors like Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Randy Scheunemann, Elliot Abrahams and other far rightists who played a major role in creating the frightful foreign affairs mess the US now faces. They have made America hated around the globe.

Equally bad, today’s Republicans are no longer a party of the democratic center. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush and Dick Cheney packed their administration with extreme neoconservatives who drove the nation and Republican Party so far right it flirted at times with fascism.

When I hear ‘Republican’ these days, the words that come to my mind are: arrogance, ignorance, and just plain dumbness. And now, add economic disaster caused by Enron-style fraud and allowing crooks to run the nation’s finances.

Two of today’s most regressive political movements, far right American Christian conservatives and supporters of Israel’s far right expansionist parties, joined forces to become the bedrock of the Bush presidency. Today, 44-50 per cent of Republican voters call themselves born-again Christian fundamentalists who believe every word of the Bible is true. Their most urgent foreign policy goal is to recreate Biblical Israel so their Messiah can return and destroy the planet.

That is no longer my party. The Grand Old Republican Party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan has been hijacked by America’s rural heartland and the Southern Bible Belt. The Republican Party no longer speaks for educated, worldly city-dwelling Americans. As a native New Yorker, I feel culturally closer to Europe or even the Gulf states than to America’s Midwest or deep South.

McCain’s choice of an evangelical Christian ultra conservative, Governor Sarah Palin, a woman of stunning vulgarity and ignorance, is testimony to the dumbing down of the party and its transformation into a populist religious movement.

I haven’t changed my politics and remain firmly in the centre. But the Republican Party has lurched so far to the right that the old centre looks like the left to many Republicans.

Barack Obama is wrong to propose raising taxes but he is no Socialist, as Palin charges. Nationalising the nation’s banks is socialist. Urging world domination is National Socialist.

Republicans disgraced the nation by all the lies about Iraq, endorsing torture, assassinations, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons, kidnapping, kangaroo courts, spying on US citizens and undermining America’s Constitution. Too many cowardly Democrats joined this lynch mob. Such vile behaviour made me ashamed to call myself an American.

Republicans now speak for many rich fat cats and some of the least educated, most backwards, most prejudiced Americans.

McCain and Palin have shamelessly stoked anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-foreign hatred and fear among them during this campaign. So, too, did Hilary Clinton. It’s also dismaying that blacks will vote en masse for Obama because of his colour.

Gen. Colin Powell did the right thing by breaking with John McCain, denouncing racism and Islamophobia, and warning of the party’s lurch to the far right.

America desperately needs a reborn, moderate Republican Party freed from narrow-minded religious ideology and ruralism that will return the nation to its former democratic values and decency. This was the United States the world used to respect.

Eric S Margolis is a veteran American journalist and contributing foreign editor of The Toronto Sun