Deconstructing

IT ALL BEGAN with Newt Gingrich, the unrelenting attack on political civility and reason which has now become not only pervasive, but transparently visible within the Republican party, according to journalist Dana Milbank in his illuminating new book "The Deconstructionisits: The twenty Five Year Crack Up of the Republican party". The very moment Bill Clinton was sworn in as the nation's fortieth president in 1992, conservative America, accustomed to having the presidency, spoiled after twelve long years of Reagan and Bush, reacted with hostility. Young white men began forming "citizen's militias", hate groups well armed in the woods, pretending to be military organizations in defense of liberty and virtue, a trend which persisted but came to a sudden end when the federal building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by two militia members. Then came 1994, and Gingrich's "contract With (On) America". Gingrich, mentored by right wing extremist activist Carl Rove, himself a shady Nixonian figure, decided to destroy bi-partisanship in favor of all out, no holds barred war agasint Clinton, the Democrats, and progressive policies. Gingrich was successful in persuading a sufficient number of his fellow right wingers to adopt this approach, that it became the only approach employed by Christian conservative America. Never compromise with, never agree with the left, no matter whether the left makes reasonable proposals. Republicans had been out of power in the House of Representatives for forty years, and Gingrich decided that the time to work with Democrats across party lines was done, and that only by waging all out war and abandoning any pretense of cooperation could conservative America regain legislative power. The rise of Gingrich coincided with the entry of Dana Milbank into journalsim, and ever since he has carefully kept track of the situation, a situation he contends which led directly from Gingrich to Dondald Trump, passing through the Tea Party along the way. Thus has the Republican party evolved from a center right party of Reagan and reason, to the extremist, violent terrorist-criminal enterprise it is today. Milbank reminds us of what we already knew; that Donald Trump and "Trumpism" is a symmpton, rather than a cause, of this disease. There was a time when consrvative America reacted to its losses with at least some small degree of equanimity. Now it reacts by fasely claiming that elections are stolen from them, and by violently attempting to overthrow the federal government. Milbank details with incisive detail how we arrived at this sorrowful place.