And another one gone, and another one gone

Another one bites the dust

Hey, I'm gonna get you too

Another one bites the dust

As has been said on this blog many, many more times than once, in the Age of Dubya one can either be a Good Republican or a Good American but one can no longer be both.

Well Frank Schaeffer -- a self-described “Christian", "writer", "military parent" and "registered Republican “ -- reached his own, personal “I’ve finally, finally had enough of these fucking vermin” moment of clarity this morning.

(h/t to Andrew Sullivan for panning this out of the stream, however much it doesn’t let him off the hook for being willfully ignorant about who was really driving the GOP Clown Car for the last twenty year, but more about Mr. Sullivan later.)

For now, this from the Dallas Morning News.

Frank Schaeffer: I should be supporting Allen. Instead, I'm leaving the party.

07:52 AM CST on Wednesday, November 1, 2006

I'm a Christian, a writer, a military parent and a registered Republican.
On all those counts, I was disgusted by an e-mail I just received that's being circulated by campaign supporters of Republican George Allen, who's trying to retain his Senate seat in Virginia.

The message goes like this: "First, it was the Catholic priests, then it was Mark Foley, and now Jim Webb, whose sleazy novels discuss sex between very young teenagers. ... Hmmm, sounds like a perverted pedophile to me! Pass the word that we do not need any more pedophiles in office."Democrat James Webb is a war hero and former Marine, wounded in Vietnam and winner of the Navy Cross. He was writing about class and military issues long before me and has articulated the issue of how the elites have dropped the ball on military service in his classic novel Fields of Fire. By the way, that's a book Tom Wolfe calls "the greatest of the Vietnam novels."

Mr. Webb's son is a Marine in Iraq. That's an uncommon fact in this era in which most political leaders' children act as if it is only right and proper that it's someone else's war to fight.

Mr. Webb also happens to be running against a desperate opponent supported by people who circulated the stupid e-mail, something that reminds me of a 2000 smear campaign aimed at another war hero, John McCain.

I never served in the military. It was my son's unexpected volunteering that connects me to the military family and to my country. And I've been voting Republican for years. My late father – Dr. Francis Schaeffer – was an evangelical theologian, friend to Jerry Falwell and White House guest of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and the first President Bush.

I have nice handwritten letters from various members of the Bush family, including Barbara, thanking me for my books on military service. So I have every reason to stay in the Republicans' good graces. (It's nice to be complimented on television by the First Lady.)

But enough is enough. I've had it with Republican smears.

The Webb e-mail is the embodiment of the cynical Republican strategists, some of whom must know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Was Agatha Christie a murderer because she wrote about murder?

According to the Allen camp's logic, God would be a pedophile, too. After all, we Christians believe God inspired the Bible. And God-the-author chose to include the "sleazy" story about Lot offering to send out his young virgin daughters to be raped by the men of Sodom.

…
My wife and I have reached the tipping point. We plan to go to town hall to dump our Republican voter registration and reregister as independents. I don't care anymore what party someone is in. These days, what I care about is what they're made of.

Wartime demands leaders with character and moral authority. The political party smearing Mr. Webb proves it has neither.

So a sincere hat's off to Mr. Schaeffer who, being a freshly recovering Republican, of course realizes that anything other than unswerving fealty to the diktats of the Dear Leader and his Party of God -- regardless of how judiciously your remarks have been chosen, or how sincerely you believe that to save the nation you love we must change course -- earns you nothing but instant, dismissive contempt from the GOP.

And that there is no way in. No way to make them listen to reason.

If you speak up respectfully, they will dismiss you as weak.

If you speak up firmly, you will be dismissed as traitorous.

If, at last, you speak up loudly, you will be dismissed as "angry".

They are just fucking evil and brain dead and regardless of your previous love or loyalty or integrity, in the blink of Karl Rove’s eye you will be magically transformed into a traitor.

In an instant you suddenly know what it is like to be sure that somewhere out there a Swiftboat with your name on it is being readied.

You know what it's like to have a target painted on your back by your former lodge brothers. Because you, Mr. Schaeffer, are in much worse shape than people like me. People like me have been mocked and slandered and shit on by the Right for twenty years, but you my friend have become that most vile and unspeakable of enemies: The Apostate.

Just. Like. That.

And in that moment you perhaps realize how utterly alien they are and always have been. Like a switch being thrown, they can be pivoted en masse 180 degrees and ordered to attack without conscience or reserve those who were their brothers in arms 10 seconds before.

Who were your friends before you committed the unforgivable sin of asking hard questions.

And then, perhaps, you get a genuine chill down your spine when you begin to fully understand the implications of what it really means to say, without hyperbole, that there is nothing – literally nothing – the GOP will not do to hang on to power.

Because when men without “character and moral authority” will unhesitatingly slander and defame a good man, why wouldn’t they tap your phones without a warrant? After all, doesn’t questioning the regime in any way mean that you are objectively pro-terrorist and anti-American?

Isn’t that, at the end of the day, exactly the Republican Party Line?

So why exactly wouldn’t they spy on a terrorist sympathizer like you?

To protect our Christian Values, why exactly wouldn’t they toss you in jail forever?

Why exactly wouldn’t they ship you away from your family and friends to be tortured until you “confess”?

So do now sorta get now why so many of us awful, subversive Lefties were horrified that the GOP would methodically shred the bedrock civil rights and legal protections of American citizens?

Why we were especially furious and sickened that millions of “Good, Christian Americans” would stand up and fucking cheer as our most precious legacy -- those basic freedoms for which our fathers and grandfathers fought and died -- were gleefully put to the torch?

So go down to the town hall and reregister as an Independent. Good on you! But please remember that, as “a Jew is anyone Hitler says is a Jew”, a Liberal Traitor is anyone Limbaugh and Coulter says is a Liberal Traitor.

So welcome to Liberalville, traitor!

Glad to have you aboard.