Submitted to us by FR reader Andrew Russo of Monterey County…

Whither the GOP?

Barack Obama’s election and the concurrent loss of additional Republican seats in the House and Senate are the direct and inevitable result of the destruction George W. Bush and his merry band of neo-conservatives wreaked upon a once proud and principled political party.

George W. Bush – like his father before him, but to a much greater and more dangerous degree — repudiated the traditional small government philosophy that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and led to the Republican sweep in the 1994 congressional elections.

By handing over control of his administration to the “neo-conservatives” (who are not conservatives at all, but ex-Trotskyites and Social Democrats) Bush embarked on a domestic policy course that Obama can only dream of mimicking.  Under Bush, the United States went from budgetary surpluses to an annual deficit approaching $1 trillion. The national debt more than doubled. The banking and mortgage lending industries have been effectively nationalized. And, the largest entitlement program since LBJ was foisted on generations yet unborn, the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In addition, the neocons led Bush down the path of the most irresponsible foreign policy since the Vietnam War. Eschewing traditional Republican suspicion of foreign adventurism and global policing, Bush embraced wholeheartedly the Wilsonian vision of American interventionism around the world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are slated to cost us over $5 trillion and the cost of maintaining a world empire of over 700 military bases abroad and hundreds of thousands of troops from Bavaria to Seoul is simply unsustainable from a financial standpoint.

The Republican Party after eight years of the Bush-neocon regime is now a smoldering ruin of a party that lacks any credible or coherent philosophy of governing other than recommending War as the main instrument of national policy and – as exemplified by the Wall Street and automaker bailouts – introducinga form of corporate fascism to America. Unless the GOP does a thorough house-cleaning by purging the parasitic neocons from its ranks and begins studying anew the words and wisdom of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater, it is destined to go the way of the Whigs and deservedly so.

Andrew Russo is President of Farm Team Consulting, a California-based Republican political consulting firm. He can be reached here.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.