Reagan's Daughter: Dad Would Be Appalled By GOP Presidential Candidates

I often complain about the foul insane asylum the Republican Party has become and the deranged clown car line up that the party has offered up in the way of would be 2016 presidential nominees.  I know that others share this lament - a number of LGBT bloggers friends where once Republicans years ago and have fled the GOP like me - but is really special when the daughter of Ronald Reagan, claimed icon of the GOP base makes it clear that she shares this view.  Sweeter yet, she says that her mother, former First Lady Nancy Reagan, supports marriage equality.  Take that Tony Perkins!  But I digress. Michelangelo Signorile has a piece at Huffington Post that dicusses a recent interview with Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's daughter.  Here are highlights:

Patti Davis, daughter of former President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan, blasted the current GOP's field of 2016 presidential candidates, and claimed her father would be similarly "appalled."

In an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress, Davis said her father, who was shot in an attempted assassination by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981, would not be able to imagine today’s gun violence. Davis also noted that in stark contrast to current GOP presidential candidates and most Republican leaders, her mother, Nancy Reagan, was “very happy” about the Supreme Court’s historic decision on marriage equality.

A long-time liberal who disagreed with her father’s views during his presidency, Davis became estranged from the former president, but the two reconciled in later years, an experience she recounted in her 2004 memoir, The Long Goodbye.

Responding to a question about Sen. Ted Cruz often positively invoking her father’s name on the campaign trail and during debates, Davis said, “It may be this week he’s doing it more than the others. But they all kind of do it. But yet, they are so not like him. My father would be so appalled at what’s going on. He would be so appalled at these candidates. I don’t think he would be a Republican. And if another Ronald Reagan came along right now, I don’t think the Republican Party would accept him.”

Her mother, Davis said, responded favorably to the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and also appears to have a dim view of the current presidential candidates.  “She was very happy about that decision,” Davis said of Nancy Reagan.

Davis also imagined her father’s views about the GOP resistance to gun legislation today and the current climate of gun violence, given Reagan's support of laws restricting guns. . . . . Reagan also supported the ban on assault weapons, passed in 1994, and which Congress and President George W. Bush allowed to expire in 2004. “I don’t think he’d ever be able to conceive what’s going on now,” Davis observed, “the amount of gun violence or weaponry.”

Many have said - and I agree - that Reagan could not secure the GOP nomination today if he were living for the simple fact that he was not sufficiently extreme or deranged. I disagreed with some of his positions (many, in fact), but compared to Ted Cruz, Reagan was a near liberal.  The GOP has become something truly ugly and as regular readers know, I believe the descent into insanity began when the Christofascist were welcomed into the party.

Patti Davis to Candidates: Stop Invoking Reagan

It is interesting to see Patti Davis telling the GOP candidates to stop comparing themselves to her father, not that I blame her for doing so. While I am not going to go off on a discussion of Ronald Reagan, I will note that even when he took conservative positions, he never had the level of meanness and nastiness that has come to embody today's GOP where the party's base is dominated by the Christianists and hates and despises anyone not like themselves, be they black, Hispanic, gay or non-Christian. But I digress. Here are some highlights from Patti Davis's column (http://www.newsweek.com/id/82384):

On Friday's “Today Show”, Mitt Romney again brandished my father's name, and claimed that, just as Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, Romney can effectively govern and manage foreign policy in this horribly troubled world. This, of course, was preceded by Romney's televised speech about his religion and his personal faith—something my father would never have dreamed of doing because his faith was, well, personal.

To prove his virility, Huckabee has been photographed in those ridiculous hunting clothes holding a large rifle and several dead pheasants. Lest we forget about God, Huckabee's campaign offered up a special Christmas advertisement—complete with the now famous “floating cross” behind him—something Huckabee has said was simply a bookcase. Yes, with the books removed and lit with a golden glow that looked like the Star of Bethlehem had been summoned for duty in a political ad.

So, apparently, we are being told that a competent, trustworthy president is someone who brandishes his religion like a neon sign, loads a gun and goes out hunting for beautiful winged creatures, and tries to imitate a past president (who, by the way, never shot a bird or felt the need to imitate anybody.) I don't think I'm alone in my reaction to all of this when I say, "Do you think we're stupid?" If we want religious evangelism, we can turn on one of those cable channels. If we want leadership, we don't ask, "Now who has killed the most birds?" And most importantly, when we are thinking about trust and confidence, we don't look for someone who is trying to mimic anyone else.

Can't we just leave the ducks, the rabbits, the deer alone, and focus on a world that is aching with strife, that is weighed down by wars and conflicts, not to mention disease and hunger in vast stretches of Africa? Can't we go back to respecting the privacy of religious faith and stop using God as a campaign tool? And can't we please, please, please admit that imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; it's just an indication that the imitator is going through a serious identity crisis.