Kathleen Parker: Good Morning, Democrats. Goodbye, GOP of Trump.

Tent city for child prisoners.

I left the Republican Party going on two decades ago when I could no longer abide the party's conflation of right wing Christianity with the civil laws. Hand in hand with that phenomenon was the seeping hatred of others that the Christofascists and evangelicals brought with them as the infiltrated and then ultimately hijacked local city and county committees. Slowly but surely, the GOP became a moral cesspool even as the professional Christian crowd intertwined with the Party proclaimed their religiosity - a religiosity that focused on denigrating and harming gays and opposing abortion.  The rest of Christ message had been flushed down the toilet.  Enter Donald Trump on the political scene and the hate that has simmered under the surface of the GOP agenda has now burst into flame.  Many are belatedly taking the step that I did years ago and deciding they simply can not longer be a Republican - at least not if they want to retain a shred of morality and decency.  In a column in the Washington Post, [former?] conservative columnist Kathleen Parker looks at the need to decide between morality and decency or remaining a Republican.  Here are column excerpts:

Cracking down on illegal immigration was never going to be pleasant, but this?

It’s worse than you think. The travesty of separating children from their undocumented, migrant parents was less about cracking down as a policy than about President Trump’s bet-winning. If Niccolo Machiavelli hadn’t been born, Trump would have hired someone to write “The Prince” — or his more likely title, “The King” — explaining why his merciless means justify the ends of his majestic self-ardor.

Reports from hell, which we’ve finally located at the U.S.-Mexico border, have confirmed that [Trump] this president will do anything to get his way. We’ve seen the image of the 2-year-old crying while her mother is frisked by a Border Patrol agent. We’ve read of the father who, separated from his wife and 3-year-old last month, apparently killed himself while in custody.

What, one wonders, would it take to convince Trump that he’s wrong? That this policy of separation must stop yesterday? The trauma suffered by many of the nearly 2,000 children being held in government detention centers — especially by the very young ones — is excruciating to consider. Indeed, ­two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s tactic of trying to force Democrats to essentially “pay for the wall.” Who knew there were so many Mexicans in the U.S. Congress?

Now, just a few months from the midterm elections, Trump wants that wall more than he once wanted Stormy Daniels’s phone number. He wants it so much, babies can cry and little boys can curl into fetal balls for all he cares. He wants it so badly that traumatizing children is acceptable to him.

This isn’t supposition, it’s data. To the rich boy from Queens, you gotta be tough to make it in this world. To the King of the Swamp, you can’t let those people run over you: Give them back their 3-year-old son, and next they’ll want a free Harvard education.

Trump’s political calculation wasn’t just way over the top, it was sick. And, yes, these tactics qualify as mental torture similar to forcing a POW to listen to the screams of a comrade as a means of extracting information or inducing submission.

The irony is also sick, but in a good way, as karma goes. Republicans have been in such a dither over illegal immigrants — lest they become Democrats — they’ve created a scenario in which virtually no one of Latino descent would now consider supporting a GOP candidate.

Good morning, Democrats. Good night, GOP of Trump.

Notwithstanding the objections of a few Republicans — and lately more, given the political omens — it’s over. What’s obvious and belated is that most congressional Republicans were silent until their political futures seemed at risk. You have to wonder what it’s like to look in the mirror and see the face of someone who was essentially willing to condone the psychological torture of little children for political gain. Nauseating, I should think. But Republican dissenters have learned that to confront their dear leader is to face expungement by the one-third of Americans who support Trumpand who, coincidentally, also support separating children from their parents. 

Election Day will tell, and the outcome will reveal who we really are.