How Reagan became a liberal

Frank Rich has a scary column called The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama that raises the issue of how violent and vigilante the Republican party has become.

McCain campaign recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

This wing of the party of course feels like there's no recourse but hatred and violence because they have learned over the past 20 years to take their cause as a moral mission -- the rise of the better people vs the lazy and shiftless masses -- the patriots of the dollar bill -- the carriers of the true cross, namely that government is the enemy always and everywhere.

Liberals will always be at a disadvantage because at the core of liberalism is the openness to new ideas and the willingness to consider the other's point of view. When you already know the absolute truth, there is no need to consider any other ideas, or even to tolerate those who hold them.

They chant Ronald Reagan's name as a mantra, but his politics would be too liberal today for most of this group.