When the Republican Party handed itself heart and soul to Big Business in the 1890s, it was the start of an epic battle to defend power and privilege in the United States at all costs.

Briefly, under Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican Party was captured by the progressive wing, and TR had little sympathy for the "malefactors of great wealth" as he called them. But by the 1920s the fanatically pro-business, anti-worker orientation of the Republican Party was set.

I have wracked my brain and I cannot think of ANY time the Republicans EVER acted in the interests of ordinary working men and women. They and their allies fought savagely against unions, never hesitating to use violence and state power to destroy them. (There is a myth that violence in labor disputes is only union-generated; check out Henry Ford's war against the unions to see a powerful refutation of this, or the war of the coal mine owners against the unions in West Virginia and Kentucky.) 

Today, look what the Republican Party stands for: opposition to American working men and women, the channelling of trillions of dollars to the richest Americans, hatred of gays, hatred of immigrants, continued smouldering racism, opposition to desperately needed health care reforms, opposition to all environmental protections, spitting hatred for science, hatred for public schools, hatred of all those who are not fundamentalist Christians, support for torture, support for rendition, and support for the fantastically corrupt Bush-Cheney regime.

The conservative cancer is the perpetuation of all the worst features of American life - intolerance, fear, prejudice, and tribalism. It is this cancer that screams out that Barack Obama is "the Anti-Christ", a "Muslim radical", "corrupt", "ally of Satan", and all the other filth we have seen hurled at our next president. The Radical Right is now going to try to destroy Obama and block every reform he tries to institute. We, the Progressive Networks, must and will fight these dangerous radicals every step of the way.

It is time for the conservative cancer to be cut out of our body politic. All of our nation's most shameful acts and policies have their roots in it. The humane, progressive, and sensible American majority must, once and for all, put the right-wing minority in its place - and save our country from the death toward which the conservatives have so blindly pushed it.

http://jamillerrampant.blogspot.com/2008/12/cancer-of-conservatism.html