The GOP…
Just like these poor elephants, killed off for what could be taken from them, not allowing them to live for what valuable contributions could be given by them– and to them…

Not so long ago, the GOP and the right wing, thinking particularly of those filled with brains and humor, like Wm. F. Buckley whose work I’ve followed since he first came to speak at Notre Dame in the early 1960s … but also many statesmen in both these habitats over the years… well, the Grand Old Party had that… a grandness in many of its members. Today, if one listens only to those interviewed by MSM, especially on television and radio, there seems far more grandiosity rather than grandness. Far, far more grandstanding than standing for the pragmatic heroic values that have, since time out of mind, inspired people to follow a leader.

Internecine fighting, killing off one’s own has become a definite tactic within the GOP. One no longer has to wait for the other party to take out the flensing knife. The public back-stabbing goes on and on, and daily, within the GOP family.

There appears to be an inability or unwillingness to differentiate within the party between true friend with vision, and exploiter with ingrown vision. Poaching, clipping wings, not speaking out when one should, letting less than a handful of ‘famous’ people speak far far too much as though the GOP is only made up of the same ten talking heads and no more. Part of that is media’s fault for lazy invites, and re-re-re-inviting the same names for years now, instead of investing real time in seeking out fresh voices.

New and reasoned voices are out there, no doubt pawing the ground for the opportunity to be on Meet the Press… but somehow, the same old shoulders keep cramming through the doorways of opportunity, preventing anyone else from coming through. It’s an oddity, perhaps, that animals who have experienced famine, do the same. The eldest and often least fit, nonetheless throw their weight against the young in order to take the elder’s larger –and unfair share– of whatever food there is.

Too, there’s been massive self-destruction of GOP habitat, in part, through inability to bridge with other species that are crucial to GOP survival.

GOP is more than just threatened. More than endangered.

Just like all the other elephants in the world who are often killed off by humans who lived amongst those very elephants, humans who knew each matriarch, each bull and calf in the herds all their lives… but nevertheless when money and power were waved in front of the humans, they took the road more traveled. And, with devastating consequences.

Can the party be brought back into the pragmatic and heroic range of ideas again?

Well, in Sri Lanka, they have a protected orphanage for elephants. Perhaps something like that. A protected environs in the GOP or tangential to the GOP and the Democratic Party, where new ideas can take hold and develop– not by the young who seem only over-eager clones of those older ones who had ideas that petered out pathetically, but ideas that are invigorating, possible, and actionable by ordinary people. Ideas that are evergreen.

It might help too to recall that elephants are filled with philios, that is, they move together, find food together, range far and wide together, are cooperative, and are known as one of the most nurturing species on earth.

Unless you beat them up, daily. Unless you treat them as though they are never ‘pure’ enough, never obedient enough. Then they, who are in their bones such gentle and loyal creatures, turn on those who have harmed them. And those who they turn on, turn right back on the creatures over and over again too.

And on and on goes the rageful killing off of all creatures who do not toe the line, any who dare to demand a different attitude and direction… they are subsumed and punished, for the line to toe is too often made up by the very few for the many, and without consult or consideration.

And when such constraint of new ideas goes on by silencing them, when such slaughter and character assasination within a party continues, extinction of that party, is not all that far down the road.

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CODA
A case in point, see Polimom here referencing RNC chairman Steele setting another poison out to kill off those with fresh ideas who are attracted to the GOP.