Shawn asks:

> this is the most pathetic rubbish I've seen on this list of late, and there
>  has been a lot of it.  Do you truly know so little about [what] Republicans
>  believe in?

At the moment, the current Republican liturgy is:

     o The smallest possible government is the best possible government

     o The road to peace in Jerusalem runs (ran) through Baghdad

     o War is the natural state of mankind

For years now, the first objective has been best thought to be achievable
through massive tax cuts. The Republican mantra has been for years now: "starve
the beast." Unfortunately, such tax cuts for the wealthiest -- who
coincidentally tend to be the Party's primary supporters -- run afoul of the necessary
promises for increased governmental spending for critical programs for specific
problems and groups, leading to the massive budget deficits that have been
characteristic of the last several Republican administrations.

The second objective has been governed principally by the hijacking of the
party by the highly conservative religious right over the last quarter century.
Throughout the 1990's, when the party was out of power, a neoconservative
mindset was formulated around either the right-wing Christian philosophy that the
Jews returning to the land of Israel -- in its entirety -- was one of the
signals necessary for return of Jesus to this Earth, or that of the Jews who saw
their mandate to once again regain control of the land that was promised to
them by God. The Project for a New American Century, whose members are/were
William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, was founded
with this as one of its two central tenets, thus the attack on Iraq was well
formulated as soon as the current administration took power in 2001. The other
proposition was that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, must
return to a stance of strength, eschew diplomacy and project its might into
every corner of the world.

The third objective, which is more of philosophy, is one of the two basic
ideas promulgated by Victor David Hanson (Denys' favorite commentator), a
second-tier intellect who teaches at one of California's premiere universities, Cal
State Fresno. Dick Cheney has been one of Hanson's most ardent admirers and
often quotes from Hanson regarding the idea that war is the natural state of
mankind.

These ideas have evolved to be so completely antithetical to ideals of John
C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, the founders of the modern Republican Party and
who argued for the "better angels of our nature," that I'm sure that neither
would now avow any allegiance to any part of the current party.

Wirt Atmar

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