One of the few uncertainties left about the modern Republican Party is the precise date and time they will devolve into cannibalism. For those of you that are making your own predictions, here's actual Republican vice presidenting candidate Sarah Palin answering a Fox News viewer's Twitter question (yes, I know) on whether she might consider abandoning the dirty rotten liberals in the GOP and forming a new "Freedom Party"
for the nation's real conservatives:
“I love the name of that party — the ‘Freedom Party,’” Palin said. “And if the GOP continues to back away from the planks in our platform, from the principles that built this party of Lincoln and Reagan, then yeah, more and more of us are going to start saying, ‘You know, what’s wrong with being independent,’ kind of with that libertarian streak that much of us have. In other words, we want government to back off and not infringe upon our rights. I think there will be a lot of us who start saying ‘GOP, if you abandon us, we have nowhere else to go except to become more independent and not enlisted in a one or the other private majority parties that rule in our nation, either a Democrat or a Republican.’ Remember these are private parties, and you know, no one forces us to be enlisted in either party.”
Yeah, I'm not seeing Sarah Palin follow through on something that sounds like so much work.
The problem here, I'm beginning to realize, is that John McCain taught her the word "maverick" and she loved the notion so much that she's now devoted her entire life to an extended sketch on the topic. Suddenly, being lazy is a virtue, and being a stubborn, ignorant crank is the patriotic ideal? There have been people who have been stubborn, ignorant cranks all their lives and have been waiting that whole time for a party to acknowledge their contribution to American freedomz; they must be absolutely giddy now that it's an actual movement.
So deep within the conservative bowels of the party, there's a deep growling sound: These damn Republicans are too liberal. They're infringing our rights just like the Demmycrats. They're not tearing down our stop signs and unpainting the crosswalks; they're not sympathetic enough to every crackpot conspiracy theory that gets sent through the conservative wires along with the desperate pleas from flighty African nobles and bored Russian women; they're not entirely allowing us to shoot poor people for sport, though you can't say we haven't made great strides on the subject. No sir, what we need here is an even meaner, dumber party. That'll fix everything.