I consider Morton Kondracke to be a conservative, but now the GOP attack dogs will undoubtedly call him a liberal, because he starts a recent column this way.
How can the Republican Party rebound? The first step would be to quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set its agenda.
I’d add Bill O’Reilly to that list, but Kondracke throws a big blanket over the whole bunch of idiots by saying…
Step 1 is to fire Limbaugh and his ilk as the intellectual bosses of the GOP. They shouldn’t be muzzled, as some liberals want to do by reviving the “fairness doctrine” in broadcasting, just ignored more frequently.
Kondracke may work for Fox News, which otherwise would put him way at the bottom of my list of people to pay attention to, but he wrote a short and sincere book about his late wife, while she was in her final years of Parkinson’s Disease.
Saving Milly, which was made into a TV movie, is now out of print and available for pennies on Amazon. Kondacke was unhappy with the cut in federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, showing he isn’t driven by ideology. He was critical of gay activists for demanding so much money for AIDS research while complaining about having to wear condoms, but he wondered how people without his financial resources manage to care for a family member with Milly’s condition. All in all, Kondracke came across as very thoughtful and not at all driven by an agenda other than the reality of an illness for which there is neither prevention nor cure.
So now Kondracke is telling the GOP what it needs to be told but doesn’t want to hear. They won’t listen, they’ll only attack. It’s all they seem to know.