democraticAs I ponder the tackiness that was Sarah Palin’s ET interview last night, I can’t help wonder something I’ve been thinking about for years, beginning on the 150th Anniversary of the creation of the Republican party.

Why doesn’t the Republican party appeal more to its institutional history?

Founded to stop the spread of slavery in the territories and ending the evil institution with the 13th Amendment in the nineteenth century, the Republican party waged a political war against the New Deal’s disordering of the American Constitution in the twentieth century and helped bring down the Wall on November 9, 1989. Was there a better president of the 20th century than Ronald Reagan? Why not appeal to such events, to such heritage, to such men?

And, if there’s going to be mudslinging, why not at least make it honest? I could see a very powerful video produced by the Republican party:

“We authored the Trail of Tears in the 1830s
We spilt immeasurable blood to keep the institution of slavery in the 1860s
We passed the Jim Crow laws in the 1890s
We re-segregated the military under Woodrow Wilson
We imprisoned Japanese-American men, women, and children in the 1940s
We nuked two Japanese cities in 1945
We introduced stagflation in the 1970s
We exploited female interns in the 1990s
We attempted to nationalize the health and auto industries in the 2000s
Who are we? We’re the Democratic Party of America. And, we’ve been promoting the degradation of the human person since 1827.”

It would certainly be more powerful than anything Bill Moyers produced against Barry Goldwater.

And, at least the video I propose would be historically accurate.

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