El Somnambulo is more likely to show up at Easter services (he’s Jewish) than to tune into ‘Conservative Talk Radio’. However, when a ‘conservative talk radio’ host, John Batchelor, goes all Howard Beale on the GOP and pronounces it dead, the Beast Who Slumbers collapses into a paroxysm of pleasure (not that that is an unusual response for the hot-blooded El Somnambulo). So, with no further delay allow ‘bulo to present his favorite selection from the Bible Batchelor’s vitriolic farewell to the GOP:
What about the Republican Party right now? Isn’t it on radio and TV claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and American power? Bypassing the stupidity of these claims, I am on radio, on what is called right-wing radio, and it is easy for me to see that my loudest colleagues, who compulsively repeat the cant of Conservatism for Dummies, are not sincere students of the Republican Party but rather barkers, hookers, establishmentarian jesters, cultists, and, in the worst instance, just thatch-headed whiners. Fox News is a parade of wet-eared Republican office holders, yet there is usually just one each allowed of the categories the Democrats own in multitudes: a Jewish-American, an Asian-American, an African-American, a Hispanic-American. Then there is the beauty pageant of fast-talking, rude Fox blondes—if they are not all the same woman in mood swings—who stridently mock the Democrats, yet have almost nothing to say about the Republicans, as if the party was a disappointing ex or mother’s latest beau.
Now, because this is being penned by a right-wing radio host, his reasons why the Republican Party died 76 years ago are as unintentionally hilarious as you might expect, making the obituary all the less poignant:
What about Ike and Richard Nixon and the worshipped California cowboy manqué Ronald Reagan? Not one of them cared a toothpick for the Republican Party of their time and each struggled mightily to remake it. Ike was indifferent to partisanship: His beating of the splenetic Robert Taft in 1952 for the nomination was the success of a conqueror over a sharpie. Nixon was a troubled, spiteful Quaker who despised the Republican Party as the “Eastern Establishment,” and who governed as a liberal Democrat with the apostasy of wage and price controls, the EPA, and embassies to the mass-murdering Mao and the hollow Brezhnev. Reagan was a right-wing Democrat from homespun Illinois who, after years of failing in Hollywood and then charming California, swamped Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale with the passionate votes of the Democratic Party. I have long suspected that the Kennedys voted for Reagan twice.
Trust El Somnambulo. He has never lied to you (save for that little matter about promising to love you forever…). You want to read this one. In its entirety. Like an Easter Egg, it’s dee-licious.