Thank You, Republicans

Thank you, Republicans.

Thank you for marginalizing the moderates in your midst while embracing the extremists.

Thank you for the longest-ever campaign season with its way-too-early primaries and endless string of debates that knocked out most of your own potential nominees without the rest of us having to lift a finger.

Thank you for announcing to the world back in 2009 that your party’s sole goal for the next four years was to make Barack Obama a one-term president, so that when people complained about the lack of congressional cooperation and compromise it was just so easy to identify where to lay the blame.  

Thank you for alienating women, Latinos, African Americans, gays, veterans, union members, senior citizens, taxpayers, immigrants, social libertarians and middle class Americans – in other words, pretty much everyone but billionaires, evangelical Christians and racists.

Thank you for the numerous transparent efforts at voter suppression that left no doubt as to which party was more than willing to cheat and steal to win.  

Thank you for repudiating an honorable heritage and historic leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, and turning your party into a caricature, complete with a comical premise (Ronald Reagan was America’s greatest president) and a cast of accomplished comedians (Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, the Fox News Network).      

Thank you for making it abundantly clear to the American electorate which is the party to lead us into the 21st century and which one wants to return us to the 19th.

Thank you, Republicans, for doing all you could to assure President Obama a second term.

Really. I mean it. Thank you.