The Fractured Republicans

Huntsman on Iowa: ‘Nobody cares’ – PostPartisan – The Washington Post

“A message for the winner of the Iowa caucuses?” Huntsman asked with a smile. “Welcome to the winner. Nobody cares.

Huntsman on Iowa: ‘Nobody cares’ – PostPartisan – The Washington Post

Santorum, Huntsman and the future of conservatism – The Washington Post

If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they’d send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight. Huntsman is a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He’s a defender of science, a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejects Santorum’s neoconservative moralism, and he speaks the policy language of an upper middle class that likes its politics to focus on deficits and our future competition with China.

Santorum, Huntsman and the future of conservatism – The Washington Post

Three very different GOPs in Iowa – PostPartisan – The Washington Post

[T]he split in the Republican Party is no longer between conservatives and moderates, but between members of the party who are very conservative and those who are only somewhat conservative. The days of Rockefeller Republicans are long gone. Close to half of Iowa caucus-goers thought of themselves as very conservative; a third said they were somewhat conservative. Fewer than a fifth were moderates, including a very tiny (and brave) group of self-described liberals.

Three very different GOPs in Iowa – PostPartisan – The Washington Post

Ron Paul’s consistency doesn’t make him right – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

[U]nless you enjoy salmonella in your food and lead in your paint, unless you think it’s OK that your doctor has no medical degree and your lawyer no license, unless you’re fine with breathing sooty air and drinking tainted water and unless you really think a black woman in Mississippi, locked out of public places by threat of violence and force of law, should have been required to wait on market forces to rescue her, you must regard Paul’s moral imbecility with a certain appalled awe.

Heaven help us if the intellectual rigidity he symbolizes is really the only alternative to the intellectual malleability of so many of his colleagues.

At its best, government vindicates and defends a people’s noblest ideals. The Civil Rights Act was government at its best. Paul disputes this and styles himself a defender of freedom for so doing. Too bad he can’t spend a day being black in Mississippi in 1964. He might emerge with a better understanding of that word.

As it is, Paul’s extremism only proves this much: Emerson didn’t know the half of it. ["A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." – Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Ron Paul’s consistency doesn’t make him right – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

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