Oregon GOP Takes Dems off Crime List

The blogosphere had a field day with the story. Within a couple of days the Oregon Republican Party platform was the talk of the Internet. One of many blog entries was by Jesus' General in an open letter to ORP executive director Amy Langdon on 27 November.

"How many Young Republicans can you put on the street at any given moment to shut down a Democratic meeting? Are they well supplied? Do they have night sticks, tasers, pepper spray, brass knuckles, and Mayor Rudy's Little Black Book of 911 Quotations? Are they supplied with a fetching utility belt on which to carry these tools?"

However, Jesus' General noted the next day that the offending reference had been removed, and other blogs stated that the Oregon Republican Party platform was changed by the evening of 27 November. Thus, it took me only two days to change the Oregon GOP platform, apparently without a meeting of its Platform Committee. Ha! Who's the Decider now, Dubya? Of course, I had a lot of help from Jesus' General and other commanders of the blogforce.

A Soviet historian once quipped that the most difficult problem in Soviet history was trying to predict it. Likewise, the history of the Oregon GOP is being rewritten as we speak. The rumor is now spreading around the blogosphere that the Oregon Republican Party's website was hacked, and that is how the reference to the Oregon Democratic Party was inserted into the platform. Not so fast, bub. There is such a thing as the Internet Archive, and it provides irrefutable evidence that the reference to the Oregon Democratic Party was in the Oregon Republicans' platform as early as March 2007.

Now, try to tell me that the Oregon GOP website was hacked nearly a year ago, and possibly even earlier, and the Republicans never noticed it until I pointed it out. Right.

As diverting as this episode has been, the truth is that changing the web version of the Oregon Republican Party platform doesn't mean anything. It has a formal procedure for making official changes to its policy document, and that procedure requires that any amendments be adopted at its convention (ORP Bylaws, Article XVI, Section A; and Article XXVII), which won't meet until next year. Oregon Democrats officially remain criminals and terrorists in the eyes of the Oregon GOP until it duly adopts an amendment to its platform. Will it mean anything if this happens? Perhaps this agenda to use the coercive powers of the state to crush political dissent simply will be driven underground to wait patiently in the dark for its chance to spring upon us.

I still say that this is not a Republican agenda, even though it reared its ugly head in an official Republican Party platform. Call me a Pollyanna if you like. I can be as partisan as anyone in a political street fight, but I don't want America's streets to look like Beirut, and that is where criminalizing the opposition ultimately leads. I don't know whether the people who put that plank in the platform are fascists or just damned fools, but I wouldn't dignify them with the name of Republican, a label I was once proud to bear. Those who remain in the party, who are thoughtful and of good conscience, are at a crossroads. They may conclude, as many of us already have over the years, that the GOP left them, and seek a new political home. The other option is to take their party back from the extremists and return it to what it once was: one of the major political parties with a positive vision for all Americans. The one thing they cannot do, and remain of good conscience, is ignore what was revealed in Oregon last week, or be blind to such abominations anywhere in the future.

Thomas Gangale is an aerospace engineer and a former Air Force officer. He is currently the executive director at OPS-Alaska, a think tank based in Petaluma, where he manages projects in political science and international relations. He is the author of From the Primaries to the Polls: How to Repair America's Broken Presidential Nomination Process, published by Praeger.