(A prefatory, parenthetical acknowledgement: the Democratic Party is no panoply of virtuosity. The only, and most important difference is it has never sought to be perceived as holier than anyone else, or elected to office because it was.)

I am so sick of the B.S. that is wrapped up in Vince Lombardi’s mantra that “Winning is the ONLY thing;” a disgusting attempt to legitimize what my mother tried to teach my sisters and me: “The ends do not justify the means.” (By the way, that the ends do justify the means was how Lenin and Stalin every one of their followers attempted to justify the murder of tens of millions.)

But “winning is everything” has been both the casus belli and the modus operandi of the GOP beginning with Ronald Reagan and his “Southern strategy.” Reagan took his 1964 stand against the signing of the Civil Rights laws and opened his 1980 campaign for the presidency in Nashtoba, Mississippi: “Government is not the solution, government is the problem;” certainly as welcome a sound as “Dixie” to an all white throng where 16 years earlier three civil rights volunteers had been brutally murdered. (“Mississippi Burning”)

Which reminds me, there is nothing necessarily prudent or socially beneficial or especially moral or at all Christian about conservativism.  (Jesus told the young man who asked how he might follow him to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor. Next time you pass by a church parking lot on Sunday and see a Cadillac or an SUV, think Larry Craig and what has been the GOP since 1968: hypocrites whose primary focus has been on damning others for behaviors that part and parcel of the frailties, vagaries, and wonderfully splendid complexities that attach to the human condition.)  

Additionally, although I am an atheist, the image of Jesus confronting two groups, one group composed of folks who are busy water-boarding and chilling and sleep depriving incarcerated folks and the other group composed of same-gender men and women holding hands and hugging and kissing each other, and condemning the latter while endorsing the former is an image I just cannot grasp. Regardless of motivation, one is hate and the other is love and I cannot recall a single passage in the New Testament that supports hatred. Two anecdotes come immediately to mind. One is the parable of the good Samaritan; an illustration that is a reaction against bigotry. The other is the story of the adulteress, condemned to death by stoning; an illustration of our mutual humanness and the beneficence of love and forgiveness.

Now to the conservative mantra of Smaller Government? Deregulation? The market as a self-regulating device?

Think Michael Milken, the junk-bond king. Think the S & L crisis and the billions and billions of US taxpayer bailout to market-driven, private entities that went belly-up. Think Reagan’s recessions of ’83 and ‘87 — the two deepest and longest and most costly since the Great Depression. Think Enron. Think Global Crossing. Think Tyco. Think Arthur Anderson accounting. Think concentration via merger-after-merger of our news and media, and how entire regions were prevented from hearing the Dixie Chicks because the GOP-backing conglomerates objected to Natalie Maines’ remarks, how she felt George Bush was an “embarrassment to Texas.” Think West Virginia and Utah and Nevada coal mine collapses and slaps on the wrists of the owners by a federal agency headed by an ex-lobbyist for the owners. Think Exxon Valdez. Think Freddie Mac and Sally Mae and the looming financial and stock market crisis that is the consequence of a hands-off regulatory philosophy. 

Think George Bush and his reference to bin Laden and “wanted dead or alive” and then later how Mr. Bush wasn’t “much concerned about” him but that, quite knowingly relative to the truth of Iraq and WMD, the specter of a “mushroom cloud” being the smoking gun and confected from whole cloth evidence forced the question “What more evidence do we need?’ moved the focus from Afghanistan because there weren’t any good targets there to where there were targets surrounded in a countryside filled with folks just waiting with flowers to toss in the paths of our young men and women and how the GOP and its oh-so-moral patriots excoriated everyone with a different take on the sham were cut-and-runners who hated America and wanted to see us defeated because all our troops wanted was to “finish the mission” and it’s all exactly Larry Craigish writ expansive from sea to shining sea.

The “most important things” the GOP senate could possibly undertake under Majority Leader Frist was to pass a bill that the president would rush from his Crawford vacation to sign to save the life of Terri Shiavo. Except the other most important thing the Republican senate could do was to author an amendment to the Constitution that would defend the state of holy matrimony by shunting off to 3d-rate citizenship status those who didn’t fit the definition of 1^st-class citizenship as construed by all those oh so sanctimonious “family-values” thugs.

“I am not gay! I have never been gay!”

Maybe not, Mr. Craig. But neither was Max Cleland, who lost three limbs serving in Vietnam, soft on defense. But that’s how beneath contempt low Republicans have sunk since the days of Ed Brooke and Ev Dirksen, before winning became the only thing and how one won didn’t matter. And I miss them as dearly as much as I now loathe a political party and a philosophy that since 1965 and the birth of the “Southern Strategy” has been bereft of any good or decent element. Personally Mr. Craig I don’t give a damn what your sexual orientation is. I don’t give a damn what anyone’s is. (Nor would I bet Jesus gives a damn either, or that He much thinks you and your slimy ilk speak for Him. My bet is that He probably wishes you and your kind would just shut the hell up, and concentrate on getting your own tragically despoiled lives in order.) But I do give a damn about the real distinctions between integrity and hypocrisy, between love and hate, between charity and greed.

Mr. Craig . . . you, as the icon of the GOP, as the thumbnail caricature of Christian fundamentalism and of conservativism and of everything and everyone associated with the Republican Party, compose the very last straw.  

Winning is not the only thing. Vince Lombardi, like Lenin and Stalin, could not have been more wrong.  

— Ed Tubbs