Can We Have A Different Opponent, Please?

I am beginning to think that the Republican Party is too corrupted to serve as a major political party in a functioning democracy. It's not that just that they're wrong on policy. It's that they're a bunch of power-mad crooks.

Look, I know that negative ads are part of politics. But there's a way to do things and a way not to do them. If your opponent does something stupid or hypocritical, if he/she has something sordid in thier past, it's your job to tell the voters about it. But the attack has to be about something political (rather than personal), it should be about an issue rather than "character." It should never, ever appeal to the darkest fears in society, and it certainly should never just make stuff up.

I'm not talking about the "Democrats are soft on terror" ads, because as much as I dislike them, as much as they're designed to push people's emotional buttons, one could argue that the Republicans are making a substantive point: that the Democratic Party's resistance to the Iraq War indicates a lack of seriousness about the War on Terror. I violently disagree with this position, but it is an argument. I even think that the attacks on Jim Webb in Virginia for writing that women don't belong in the military is fair game.

But what they're doing to Harold Ford down in Tennesse is just awful. Bob Corker is a lousy candidate, and out of desperation he (and his allies) are appealing to every negative racial stereotype they can think of, attacking Ford's family, and making accusations so ridiculous that the tv & radio stations won't even play them. In Ohio the Republicans won't pull an ad against Sherrod Brown that has been demonstrated to be absolutely false. And I wish I could be amazed about Rush Limbaugh's insinuation that Michael J. Fox was "faking" Parkinson's symptoms for political purposes, but Limbaugh does this kind of thing all the time.

Whatever the Republican party used to be, it is now full of scoundrels. They run up piles of debt, undermine the Constitution, bungle a war, turn Americans against each other, abandon a major American city, turn the entire planet against us, and get indicted for everything from bribery to pedophilia. All the while they have the audacity to claim that they are the party of morality, liberty, competence, and strength.

I know some Republicans read this blog. So I ask them: how can you in good conscience continue to support these people? How can anyone?