Republican "Principles" Busting Out all Over

I've been agonizing for some time over how as a country we've catapulted so far beyond George Orwell's 1984, which taught us that rhetoric could be constructed to match a reality exactly opposite of the slogans uttered. We're now to the point that up is truly down, at least in political "discourse," if you could call it that. Into my mailbox comes the tome below, from a thoughtful public servant who has worked for the greater good for going on 30 years. Here's what he has to say about the Principles Of Republicanism:

What Republicans are not.--Republicans generally describe themselves as "conservatives," but they haven't been truly conservative for decades. Republicans want to conserve some things they like and don't want to conserve other things they don't like. So the term "conservative" - which suggests a general predisposition to conserve things as they are - doesn't fit. It doesn't explain what they want to conserve and what they don't. Look at their record: Republicans don't want to conserve the environment - they want to allow corporations to consume (the opposite of conserve) natural resources to enhance short-term corporate profits. They want to dismantle - not conserve - the social contract that has bound Americans together for the past 70 years in the form of Social Security, public education, publicly built highways, unemployment insurance, sound regulation of the financial system, and the economic safety net for poor Americans. They don't want to conserve the balanced, progressive tax system that has made possible the American Dream for middle-class Americans and distinguished us from third-world countries run by economic elites. Most significantly, they favor a radical restructuring of the relationship between the rights of corporations and the rights of actual human beings, that would astonish the founding fathers, who viewed corporations as a narrow legal construct designed to raise capital for building canals, not an out-of-control leviathan spending multi-millions to buy elections.

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