The National Review’s Jay Nordlinger has pretty much made a career out of being a right-wing prick. But when a little prick meets a colossal prick, it seems, the little prick takes a hike.
Actually, Jay takes his farewell to the GOP in a pretty impressive, not at all pricky, farewell titled #ExGOP, explaining exactly why he can’t be a member of a party that is going to nominate Donald Trump:
“[O]vershadowing everything, there is the issue of character. Trump mocks the handicapped — physically mocks them — for the enjoyment of his audience. He insults women on the basis of their looks. He brags of the women he has bedded, including “seemingly very happily married” ones. He mocks the religions of others. (Distinctly un-American.) He implied that Ted Cruz’s father had a link to the Kennedy assassination. And on and on.
“By nominating him, the Republican party has disfigured itself, morally. Democrats won’t like to hear this, but for all those years, I thought the Republican party had the high ground, morally. I feel that this ground has collapsed beneath me. That is one of the painful aspects of this moment.”
I could point out (and I will) that the Republican Party, with Jay’s enthusiastic assistance, has been disfiguring itself morally for the past 24 years, ever since Bill Clinton committed the unpardonable sin of getting himself elected president in 1992. Ever since that time, the GOP has waged unscrupulous, “ruin, then rule” partisan warfare against the Democratic Party. The disastrous, unacknowledged failures of the Bush presidency set the scene for the GOP to turn its scorched-earth tactics against itself. Jay is honest about what the party has become, but isn’t interested in the story of how it got there.
One more thing: Jay inevitably quotes St. Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “I didn’t leave my party. My party left me!” In fact, Jay’s party did leave him, but in Ronnie’s case it was the other way around. Following the 1948 presidential election, an exultant Reagan wrote to a friend, “With a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, we’ll have national health care for sure!” By 1961, Ronnie was saying that Medicare would destroy freedom in America. Yes, Ronald Reagan left his party and then lied his ass off about it for decades. A typical Republican? Well, you be the judge.
