What's wrong with the GOP & why they must lose the 2012 election

Note: this post was originally published September 8. I inadvertently deleted it on my cell phone. But here it is again, verbatim.

Today's Republican Party has become an un-American party, an enemy of the state. Strange, isn't it, for a party that always prided itself on being the standard bearer of America and what it means to be an American. But it is not so strange when you consider that when you claim to be the only true heir to our founding fathers and the constitution, you make everyone else an outsider, a stranger or worse, the enemy. This is how the GOP became the anti-America party. 
When you claim that the other party is your enemy, when you say that the democratically elected president is not an American citizen, when you declare two years before the next election that you consider it your prime duty to defeat the president, you have lost the ability to distinguish between an opponent you work with to advance your ideas and an enemy you fight to defeat. In other words, you have lost your mind. 
The GOP thinks that its Democratic fellow citizens are intruders or invaders of 'its' country. Those Democratic fellow citizens somehow don't belong here or if they do we should at least check their papers before we allow them to vote again in favor of our enemy. 

The GOP has now become the enemy that needs to be defeated so we, the invaders and intruders, can reclaim our rightful place in society and history. 

I am not so naive not to realize that in our past groups of citizens actively mobilized to defeat other groups of citizens to stamp out practices that were in conflict with the meaning or intent of our constitution. Such gains invariably resulted in enlarging the social contract by expanding civil rights to citizens who's role in society had been marginalized. Whether the marginalization resulted in biases based on heritage, religion, ethnicity, race or gender. Those are fights we will continue to fight in order to expand opportunities for more and more citizens. The arc of history bends towards a society that becomes more and more complex through innovation and because of the emancipation of more and more citizens. 

Today's GOP can't seem to compromise. This illness develops when you think that you have all the answers and that your ideas are superior. If its representatives can't get their way, they accept getting nothing as long as everyone else doesn't get anything either. The GOP is a morally corrupt party, because they have lost the ability to distinguish between enemies and fellow citizens they don't agree with. That is why we must defeat them. It is a battle we, their enemies, better win. If we don't we will forever be held captive, maybe even in shackles, although demonizing may be a more accepted 21st century tool of suppression.

I don't consider the Democratic Party to be inherently superior to the GOP, but they seem to be willing to compromise their ideals in order to move forward. Because moving forward is what it is all about. We can't go back, we need to learn the lessons of history. We are not going to give another national socialist or communist party a chance to repeat what we remember has happened in the past. We are not going back either to a trickle down economy, to a place where salaries of the middle class are being marginalized while those at the top go off the charts. 
The middle may not be where you want to be, but the middle is where most people are or, at least, where most people should be. A large middle class is the basis of every long term successful society. When you have only two political parties, each one must want to occupy the middle. It would be political suicide not to want to strengthen the middle class. For a citizen, the middle class is either where one is, wants to go, or the place one wants to escape to go to the top. No one wants to escape to the bottom.

In its ideology the GOP has maneuvered itself outside of the middle class mainstream, where most of its supporters are, by latching on to extreme, outdated or unscientific ideas. 

Flag bearers of the GOP don't consider Obama a citizen, believe that Obama has a secret plan to destroy America (after he is reelected - but you can do something about that!), argue that tax breaks for the wealthy help the rest of us, want to spend more on defense while our troops are coming home from two wars, really believe that our government should act like an enterprise by privatizing social security, medicare and education, want to repeal medical insurance (Obamacare) that will add as many as 30 million people as customers of insurance companies, don't believe that climate change is real, instead believe that a hundred thousand scientists from more than a hundred nations are in cahoots to cheat the rest of us out of our tax dollars, don't believe in evolution, and in general tend to believe in science only when it is convenient. 

Their solution to erasing the deficit is to destroy the social progress that was build over the last 80 years because we can't afford it now, while we did quite alright in the 1990's under the last Democratic president Bill Clinton, but not the last eight years under the Republican president George W. Bush. Obama may not have made all the right decisions or taken all the right steps, but the economy is growing, faster than the economies of Europe, while those in China and the rest of the developing world have slowed down as well. Obama's fault too? 

Maybe voters are willing to listen to the GOP in four years after they have relearned to play the role of loyal opposition as it was meant to be, by respecting all citizens as loyal Americans, by defending the middle class, by teaching civic lessons to the anti-democratic extremists in their party, by showing that they respect the President even when he does not look like 97.5% of their party.