libertarian Tea Party takeover of GOP caused him to leave the Party

From Eric Dondero:

A rather absurd featured letter to the editor at The Daily Herald, Maury County, TN, (excerpted) March 10:

I am a Kentucky native, a former tobacco man... now a historian.

I am writing this letter to every tobacco market town where I worked, because nearly everyone that I met on the tobacco markets were good people, with a highly developed Christian sense of right and wrong and concern for their fellow human beings.

I am 52 years old, and for 33 of those years I was a Republican. I quit the party in disgust after the Tea Party hijacked it. Most thinking people who have analyzed it agree that the Tea Party is a bizarre mix of the fundamentalist Christian Right and Libertarianism. Christians’ support for the Tea Party is inexplicable; unless it is that they do not know what its core Libertarian values really are.

In a “free” Libertarian society, there would be no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, and no tax funded public schools. In short there would be no “welfare” of any kind; every individual, no matter what their age, disability or hard luck, would be left to fend for themselves.

Though masked with rhetoric that proclaims a commitment to personal freedom and individual responsibility, Libertarian socio-economic philosophy is vicious in concept, predicated on brutal dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism. It is morally indefensible.

If this seems chillingly familiar, it should: Rothbard merely reformulated the logic used by the Nazis to justify the killing by starvation of several thousand handicapped German children into Libertarian terms. Good people in Germany failed to see the Nazis’ true colors until it was too late. Many who supported the Nazis’ rise to power later claimed that they thought what Hitler said in Mein Kampf was merely rhetoric, and did not think that the Nazis really intended to put it into practice. Americans dare not make the same mistake with the Tea Party.

Ricky-Dale Calhoun,

Manhattan, Kan.