The rain it falls with equal force,
Upon the just and unjust feller,
But more upon the just, because
The unjust has the just's umbrella.

In addition to being a crank, he writes like an eleventh grader. An eleventh grader from the brave new world of No Child Left Behind where schools don't teach writing because it cuts into their standardized test cramming time. And where American history is taught by a jingoistic ignoramus football coach.

Does the picture in the article remind anybody else of a reversed version of Colbert's "this is my black friend" pose?

Disturbing. The GOP really is becoming a comic, fringe party of extremists.

Take a look at the Amazon reviews. Right now there are 62 reviews and 55 of them are 5 star reviews. I've clicked on quite a few of the reviewers "See all my reviews" links going back through the years, and in most cases, this is the only book the user has reviewed.

Here's Jeff Limon, who actually did have one other review of a dog "bark free" product, but sounds awfully astroturfish:

"After reading the first few pages of this book, I began to get pretty angry. All of my life I have voted Democrat and this book really chilled me to the bone. I personally feel totally duped. Did you know that every single African-American congressman before 1934 was a Republican? When I heard about the violence perpetrated by Democrats, their invention of the KKK, the "Southern Manifesto" that Southern Democrats in the late 1950s tried to use so that they could argue that Brown versus Board of Education (which forced racial integration into public schools in the South), and the white Democrats lynch mobs that killed hundreds of blacks in places like Colfax Louisiana, it just made me sick to my stomach. Top it off with Strom Thurmond (Democrat - West Virginia) being a former Ku Klux Klan member, who filibustered against the passage of the civil rights movement to 1964, and you've got wholesale fraud on behalf of the Democrat party. I'm changing my voting registration today. Tomorrow I will be a proud Republican."

Maybe some of these people are for real, but it seems like a very patient sockpuppeteering job to me.

Those "hero" pages are bizarre. Besides the fact that they wouldn't be Republicans today, many of those people featured were only tenuously tied to the Republican Party when they were alive.

It seems that they could have found scores of accomplished people more closely identified with the Republican Party if the only criteria was that so-and-so "campaigned for" a Republican at some point in their lives.

The huge emphasis on African Americans is really, really weird -- what were they trying to do with that -- some sort of baiting? Or are they just that stu . . .

Extraordinary! The author explains the development of his party from the 'Civil War to the LBJ administration in one paragraph!

It would be okay if Zak's take on causes of the Civil War were just facts viewed from a different angle — as opposed to being merely insane rambling.

It's true that the fates of slaves was a central point over which the entire war revolved. But, a sad fact (aside from the more humanitarian aims of abolitionists that precipitated the schism) is that the CW was fought for primarily economic reasons. It was that the profits of a slave-based economy primarily in the South were threatened when the practice of slavery came under attack. This caused that day's southern corporate structure (plantation system) that ruled the South to force states to secede from the Union.

It actually holds very strong analogues to the situation today, where Wall Street corporations have so infiltrated our government as to become indistinguishable from it — we live in a virtual corporatocracy — and reforms, from health care to Wall Street threaten their bottom lines and obscene, inhumane profits.

These corporations' communal reactions have been to foment fringe groups into a frenzy of anti-democratic, anti-governmental, anti-American rhetoric including (interestingly enough) talk of "secession."

It is also true that the nascent Republican party of the mid-nineteenth century bears far greater similarities to today's Democratic party than today's Republicans, and vice versa. The Democratic party of the mid-nineteenth century (The Dixiecrats) was a primarily southern, pro-slavery party. The two parties' ideologies apparently only flipped around the time following Teddy Roosevelt (initially a Republican) and cemented in place with the appearance of the other Roosevelt, Franklin D.

So, yup: We have just one more example where today's Republican party is attempting to call "red" "blue" and to rewrite history, flipping it on its head to fool "low information voters" into accepting as fact things not borne out by actual history.

Insane.

Wow, that is bizarre. I wonder how it feels to be a member of a party that has to lie, outright LIE, to make itself sound better.

Free-market v. Slave states? His bizarre twist of history *almost* works until you look at a map - oops! Those red states are the former slave states!

Michael Zak: "On this day in 1864, the Chairman of the Republican National Convention, Senator Edward Morgan, opened the national convention.

What he was trying to say, "On this day in 1864, chairman Senator Edward Morgan opened the National Union Convention." The day was February 22, 1864.

There was no "Republican National Convention" in 1864. The National Union Convention nominated a ticket with a Republican (Lincoln) and a Democrat (Johnson).

http://books.google.com/books?id=pAIbAAAAYAAJ&dq=national+union+convention+1864

Presidential election, 1864: Proceedings of the National union convention ...
By D. F. Murphy