Why this lifelong Republican left the GOP

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/28/1114...
2008 Presidential Elections. The year my closed mind opened. The year the national party decided they knew better than the rank and file of the party. The year that began the ultimate betrayal of party values. The year the GOP braintrust decided to pick a virtual unknown and proven intellectually void candidate for Vice President. 2008 was the year I cast my first vote for a Democratic Candidate for office, President Barack Obama.
I sat watching the news and thought "Who"? What's a Sarah Palin? Then she spoke. I saw pictures of her hunting from a helicopter. Then the Couric interview, "What newspapers do you read?" Then her foreign policy, "I can see Russia from my house". And the conservative machine and its cult like followers began supporting this absolutely unqualified person. I couldn't lower my intelligence or abandon my personal ethics to the level of accepting a Sarah Palin for anything other than a party cheerleader. They wanted to put this person one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Let's go back in time. December 2003 my father was coming to the end of a battle with lung cancer. By Christmas the disease and the medications took their toll. I stopped to see him one day just after New Year 2004, my father a lifelong employee for a major defense contractor who knew times were good when the US was at war, said to me "You have to make sure Bush gets reelected". Just a couple of days later dad slipped into a coma and peacefully passed away.
I considered what he said to be his last request. When I voted in November, against my better judgement I voted for GWB a second time. My disenchantment with my party had already begun thanks to the questionable invasion of Iraq bolstered by the reports of false intelligence from a "Chicken Hawk" Bush administration. Add to that the Cheney-Haliburton stories and American kids dying in the desert and the disillusionment kept growing.
2008 brought the long overdue crash of the economy that spanked America and the world just before the election. Republicans, who have forever decried government regulation refuse to admit their hands off approach to banks, Wall Street, loans and credit had anything to do with the predicament America found itself in. We taxpayers began bailing out the economy that by the way, crashed under George W. Bush. The bailout continued under new President Obama. Saved was the American Banking System. Saved was the American Auto Industry. Avoided was a second Great Depression. Basic stability was brought to the American economy by President Obama and a Democratic Congress, despite the Republicans.
Enter America's new terrorist organization, the Tea Party. An offensive group of self appointed conservatives who took the right wing over the edge and scared republican politicians into leaving moderate positions and not working together with the other side for a better America. The Tea Party politician is an American citizens nightmare. They are obstructionist hard liners looking to set back progress and civil rights a hundred years. Their stands on immigration, minorities, government programs and lying about the birth and religious background of the president, show the racist beliefs they hold dear. But as they scream about welfare for the poor, nothing but the sound of crickets when it comes to corporate welfare.

Part 2
In 2011 my state GOP had local town committees look at the way in which republican candidates for office were selected. For decades candidates were selected at a caucus in the town in which I live. One night the Republican Town Committee met in a meeting that was barely advertised and eliminated the selection caucus. Instead the town committee would pick the candidates to be voted on by the party faithful at election. The state GOP response to complaints was "Well why would you want to serve on a committee if not to pick candidates you wanted". Thus, the local GOP disenfranchised its own party faithful. It took away the party faithfuls voice, it took away the right to vote.
That action by my own party was my final straw. Just 8 months earlier in September of 2010 my daughter called me on the phone to tell me her husband, my son in law was killed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan. My son in law died protecting the rights of Americans. He died fighting for American ideals. America is not Republican or Democratic, Independent or Libertarian. Our way of life, our ideals, our freedoms fought and died for by men and women of courage for the last 236 years.
My local Republican Town Committee soiled and sullied the memories of the brave men and women who have fought and died for our country and continue fighting an dying for us today. Just weeks after their hidden vote this group of self appointed, self annointed, arrogant legends in their own minds had the unmitigated gall to honor those whose memory they spat on when they took away their own party members right to vote.
I saw problems before 2008, but then I saw devastation in the selection of someone as unqualified as Sarah Palin to run for Vice President. Her selection was a slap in the face to educated, intelligent Americans of every party. The fact that Sarah Palin was picked over current GOP Candidate Mitt Romney speaks volumes about his qualifications (but that's another story). The taking away of voting rights from members of the republican party was encouraged within the party at the state GOP level and most likely at the national level.
We now see disenfranchisement of voters is a campaign strategy countrywide by the GOP and its state committees. Any group that takes away the rights of its own members obviously has no problem taking away the rights of the other side too.

Oh, yes, the qualifications of Barack Obama to be president were much geater than Sarah Paln's qualifiatons to be vice president. Would u be so gracious to explain why you would be driven to not vote for the Republican candidate because his vice presidential choice was not as qualified as the Democrat presidential candidate? Just exactly what were Barack Obama's quaifications? What was the tipping qualifications of the Illinois senator over the Alaska governor? This ought to be interesting!!!

Community organizer and not vey good at that.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/...

Dick Cheney: Picking Sarah Palin for VP Was ‘A Mistake’

Dick Cheney has some advice for Mitt Romney on choosing a running mate: Don’t pick another Sarah Palin.

In his first interview since receiving a heart transplant in March, Cheney told ABC News, that John McCain’s decision to pick Palin as his running mate in 2008 was “a mistake”— one that it is important from Romney not to repeat.

It’s subject on which Cheney has some unique experience. He helped Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush lead their vice presidential searches and, of course, served as vice president for eight years. He’s also privately offered some advice to both Romney and Beth Myers, who is leading Romney’s search for a runningmate, on the process.

Cheney would not comment on what he told Romney and Myers, but he was harsh in his assessment of McCain’s decision to pick Palin.

“That one,” Cheney said,“I don’t think was well handled.”

“The test to get on that small list has to be,‘Is this person capable of being president of the United States?’”

Cheney believes Sarah Palin failed that test.

(BTW) Mitten Romney was on this list and Palin was chosen over him.

Cheney has and had no say over who McCain picked. Here is basically the reason McCain chose Palin. In the presidential election of 2008 it was 3 socialists and one Republican. Three guesses who the one Republican was and the first two don't count. Anyone who hasn't figured out by now Obama, Biden and McCain are all three socialists, something is wrong with their brain. Palin is the only believer of the three in the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES and not socialism. Consequently, Cheney's criticism of Palin reveals to me he, Dick Cheney, is also sold out to socialism in socialism's battle to takeover CONSTITUTIIONAL America and turn her into a socialist nation, which I must truthfully say America is far down the socialist highway. I don't believe Romney will pick another Palin because it is my conviction he, like most of the Republican hierarchy, are the flipside of the ASP coin. For those who don't know, ASP is the America Socialist Party called by the antiquated 20th century acronym, the democrat party by you supporters of socialism. Have your usual socialist day and I'll have my usual Celtic day. Celtic=Wonderful. In a takeoff of the Lee Greenswood song, Proud to be an American, I'm Proud to be a Scotsman!!! Hold fast, CONSTITUTIONALISTS.

The author of that article is a stone cold liar. He never was a republican, much less a lifelong one. Just another leftist den masquerading as a "lifelong republican". The closer we get to an election, the more the left ramp up these phony "lifelong republican leaves the gop" stories.

Leftist dem

false wrote:

The closer we get to an election, the more the left ramp up these phony "lifelong republican leaves the gop" stories.

This is all they have "left" , Obama sure has NOTHING positive to run for re-election on.

8.3 Percent Unemployment

Almost doubled the national debt

Class warfare and demonizing his opponent is this thugs only hope and of course "hoping" the useful idiots will fall for his B/S smoke & mirrors again.

Release the tax returns

I agree, let us see the tax returns, also didn't any of you see the the Romney advisor on FOX news say, if the woman that had cancer would have had health care if she lived in Mass? One of the few truths told by either side and the republicans want her fired because it hurts their, anti health care for all Americians agenda.(The truth will find you out.) I want to see the republicans run from that. That by its self should be enough to win the election for Obama. I have seen everyone that ever ran for president flip flop some but Romney is the front runner by a long way.