Pity The GOP, Pray For Their Safety

If you haven't been paying attention to recent American history, you wouldn't have known that the Republican Party won seven of the ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. Two Republicans won 49 of the 50 states in the Union. Of the Democrats that actually were elected since 1948, the GOP successfully kept all but one of them from a second term. They held Congress for 12 uninterrupted years and regained the House last year in the shortest turnaround since the 1950s.

If you were focused on other things, I guess that you could be forgiven for overlooking the fact that Republicans are a persecuted minority. In fact, they're violently persecuted and are made to fear for their safety. Some might actually be looking for a better life overseas as I write this. No serious person can overlook the possibility that there could soon be no domestic subscribers to The Weekly Standard.

This is news to a lot of folks. It was only last week that I learned that suburban and rural WASPs could be subjected to an ancient blood libel, and that's only because Sarah Palin told me so. And she's pretty reliable on these things, not having a reputation for hysterical hyperbole or misstatement of fact.

That being said, you can imagine my shock when I learned in The Washington Times yesterday that the problem is much more serious than even Governor Palin suggests it is.

Mrs. Palin is well within her rights to feel persecuted. Since the Saturday
bloodbath, members of the liberal commentariat have spoken in a unified voice,
charging her and other conservatives with being indirectly or somehow directly
responsible for the lunatic actions of accused gunman Jared Loughner. Typical of
blood libel, the attack against Mrs. Palin is a false charge intended to
generate anger made by people with a political agenda. They have made these
claims boldly without evidence and without censure or consequence.

This is simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.
The last two years have seen a proliferation of similar baseless charges of
racism, sexism, bigotry, Islamophobia and inciting violence against those on the
right who have presented ideas at odds with the establishment's liberal
orthodoxy. Columnist Paul Krugman took advantage of the murders to tar
conservative icon Rush Limbaugh and Fox News superstar Glenn Beck as
"hate-mongers." It's this sort of reflexive and dastardly mudslinging that
drowns out reasoned discussion of public-policy alternatives and poisons the
well of political debate in America.

A pogrom? Holy shit, I had no idea that things were that bad! Worse still, it's an ongoing pogrom! Has anybody alerted the International Red Cross? Does Sally Struthers know about this? Those people might need food!

Somewhere out there is a tiny Republican village, no more than a hamlet, really. And in the darkness on the edge of town The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Public Radio are donning their Cossack garb and preparing for slaughter. The huts of the GOP will be burned and their inhabitants will be beaten to death with ax handles as they flee.

Won't you please help?