By Lonna Gooden VanHorn, November 14, 2005
In "Where Have the Honorable Republicans Been?" Andrew Bard Schmookler mourns the fact that Republicans who many Democrats have regarded as worthy of respect have not spoken out about this administration that is ruining their party, as well as destroying America. He listed John McCain, Howard Baker, and Warren Rudman among those "honorable Republicans."
In "We're Not in Lake Woebegone Any More," Garrison Keillor wrote:
"Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican."
Like Schmookler, I do not hate all Republicans. To the list of decent Republican leaders he named, I would add Chuck Hagel, Ron Paul, and Jim Leach, among others. And like Keillor, in my research over the past few years Dwight D. Eisenhower has become one of my heroes, for a number of reasons. Below I have condensed an article in which I quoted what he and other war heroes had said and compared it to what Bush/co said.
I have many of these quotations in large print on my "book on wheels."
These quotes and the fact that under Ike the richest among us were taxed at 90% and corporations at 52% and against Republican pressure he refused to support lowering those rates are why I consider Ike a hero.
In his farewell address Ike warned that the interests of the military-industrial complex would come to determine policy. The rage a decent man like him - a man who cared about his soldiers -- would feel against a president and vice-president who stood to gain politically and/or financially from a war they fear-mongered and misled the country into largely to benefit their former companies and corporate campaign contributors would know no bounds!! I believe Ike would have considered Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld among the "domestic enemies" he had sworn as a soldier to protect this country against!"
Read his words and weep!!
General and President Eisenhower:
"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I don't believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked to me about such a thing."
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
"May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
"There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone."
"Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it."
and
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
