Colin Powell, by suggesting that the GOP as elements in it that are less than racially tolerant, gets castigated as a lunatic and serious not-a-Republican by folks at Fox News, the Tea Party, and other zanies.
How long will the GOP last if it keeps lurching further and further to the right, and rejecting anyone that doesn't loyally pad along behind? (h/t +Wendy Cockcroft)
Reshared post from +Pamela Zuppo
The right’s Colin Powell freakout
A FreedomWorks lady kicks him out of his own party after he criticizes Republicans' dark vein of intolerance.
The folks at FreedomWorks, last seen in the media being marched out of their own offices by an armed guard, only to march back in after a plutocrat benefactor paid an $8 million ransom to Dick Armey, found a black Republican to kick out of his own party Tuesday: Gen. Colin Powell.
Happy birthday, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.!
Stacy Washington doesn’t seem to have brought along an armed guard to help her escort Powell out of his party. But apparently motivated by his majestic denunciation of his party’s four-year freakout over President Obama on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Washington intoned on the front page of the FreedomWorks site Tuesday: “It’s with considerable dismay that I pronounce him to be, well — no longer a Republican!” Why? He “holds far too many positions that place him squarely in the Democratic Party’s base to seriously be considered a Republican.”
The usual suspects on the right went nuts. Fox’s The Five called Powell “unhinged.” Laura Ingraham called him a “weapon of mass destruction,” and Fox’s Megyn Kelly remarked “Whoa, with friends like that in the Republican Party, who needs enemies?” But at least Kelly let him stay in his own party; FreedomWorks’ Washington won’t allow it. His ultimate sin: “castigating the party using the very tired but effective cudgel of race. Tossing the race card is the purview of liberals,” she says, so that makes Powell a liberal.
At this point, the Republican Party doesn’t deserve someone like Powell. It’s pathetic how alone he is in calling out his friends on either their racism, or their tolerance for it. I’ve written many times: Birtherism wouldn’t have become a potent force if people like John Boehner or Mitt Romney had spoken out against it. _Instead Boehner insisted it wasn’t his job to tell people what to think, and Romney made jokes about nobody needing to see his birth certificate, while embracing the carnival barker Donald Trump.
But Powell has spent his life as a Republican and he’s entitled to remain one, to fight for the soul of his party from inside of it. None of the grifters or poseurs at FreedomWorks is entitled to read Powell out of it.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/the_rights_colin_powell_freakout/
These fucking teeeBags are hilariously such idiots.
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But… but… he's black!
The US needs a conservative party.
Coz there are no conservatives left in the Republican party.
If by "conservative" you mean Eisenhower / Rockafeller / Ford / Nixon conservatives … you are correct. Hell, George H. W. Bush probably couldn't get nominated today. Probably not Reagan, either.
+Dave Hill Certainly not Reagan, what with his Gun Control past.
Precisely correct, +Andreas Geisler. Liberalism is about fulfilling an ideology, which is supposed to lead in new directions. Conservatism is about pragmatism, which often means leaning towards past proven techniques. If anyone is supposed to be sans-dogma, it's conservatives. And hence, real conservatives are now Democrats.
+Gary Roth or Unpersons, as +Dave Hill points out.
I think there is a group loosely called Eisenhower's Republicans, but they're probably on the tea party hit list.