Honestly and truly, I do miss them. I long for the real Republican Party, when they called themselves the party of ideas and weren’t completely wrong. It was back before President Jimmy Carter and Watergate, but yes, they existed.

I disagreed with them back then, too, but I had to work at it. Not that all their ideas were golden, but at the bottom, under all the crap, there were pearls. And they changed me. Not that I can pretend I did so gracefully, but because of their ideas, I changed. Their intellectual insight forced me to accommodate the truth I couldn’t deny, hard as I tried.

Where did they go, and who are these hucksters who’ve taken their place?