Quote of the Day: Charles Pierce on the GOP - Today's Confereacy Party

This blog has noted many times the sickening racism that lingers just below the surface of today's Republican Party.  Yes, the GOP is wracked by hate filled religious extremism.  But worse yet in my mind is the racism and abject in ability of most of today's GOP base to recognize the common humanity of all Americans that don't look just like themselves.  The inability to see that others less fortunate have hopes and dreams, value in their lives and the same rights to equality under the civil laws chills my blood.   It is horrible and disgusting.  It's truly not American.  Yet the Republican Party of today can't see it and instead sees racial minorities, gays, non-Christians, and non-native born individuals as somehow less than human.  In a column Charles Pierce hits home at this moral vacuum at the heart of the GOP and spoiled children of wealth and privilege like Mitt and Ann Romney and Paul Ryan.  Here are some column highlights:  

There is no question in my mind anymore that the Republican Party has reconfigured itself as a Confederate party. Not because it is so largely white, though it is. Not because it is largely Southern, though it is that, too. And not because it fights so hard for vestigial accoutrements like the Confederate battle flag. The Republican Party is a Confederate party, I think, because that is its view of what the government of the United States should be. It is written quite clearly in the party's platform that the Republicans adopted last week in Tampa.

We are not a union of states. That argument lost in Philadelphia in 1789. The Constitution is a covenant between We, the People, not We, the States. The national government is every bit the "instrument of our self-government" as any state is. Nevertheless, the Republican Party has gone full Tenther. Now a lot of it is couched in arguments against the tyranny of EPA regulations and the jackboots of the individual health-care mandate, but there is no question that the driving force of this theory of government is resistance to full African-American citizenship just the way it was in 1860, in 1879, in 1957, and in 1965. And the most obvious manifestation of that resistance today is the staggering welter of voter-suppression laws that have emerged in the years since the president was elected. Almost all of them are being defended on Tenther grounds; Texas is directly challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[T]he Republican Party condemned "the current Administration's assaults on State governments in matters ranging from voter ID laws to immigration." The "assault" in question involves the Department of Justice's entirely legal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a law freely passed in constitutional fashion by a free Congress as the representatives of the people in 1965. This is pure Tenther gibberish, and the people who wrote the Republican platform would have flunked civics back when we still taught it.)

The Republicans get positively giddy quoting Ronald Reagan to the effect that, "Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction," as though this were in some way profound. People like Virginia Fields and Henry Marsh know that freedom is never more than a couple of seconds from extinction because, unlike Reagan and the people who so glibly quote him, their freedoms have real enemies, and those enemies have not changed.  .  .  .  .   The attempt to undo African-American citizenship is the one battle from that war that has gone on and on and on,  .  .  .

Frankly, give what the Republican Party has become, it sickens me that I ever was a GOP activist.