A refresher course on the Republican Party

Lest you or anyone think the Republican Party of today only recently got this way, please read the following recounting of that grand old now-deceased leader of the Conservatives in general but Republicans, specifically as one writer to the editor did in the May 10, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine: "William F. Buckley began his career vehemently defending the worst excesses of McCarthyism; throughout the civil rights movement, opposed integration and black suffrage; during the Vietnam War, advocated using nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese; supported unconditionally the racist apartheid government of South Africa; cheerled for the genocidal CIA-backed coup against Allende in Chile; and, in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, recommended that HIV-diagnosed patients be forcibly tattooed on their buttocks. Despite the virtues of his intellect and charisma, William F Buckley's only legacy to us is that mixture of homophobia, greed, racism, hypocrisy and military recklessness that is 21st-century conservatism." --David A. Murphy, Providence, RI. I hope that clears things up.