First, a little about my journey. My flight from the right and the GOP in general began during the first Bush term as president. I can’t pinpoint when, maybe the Patriot Act passing made me question the GOP party? Maybe the way the Iraq war was sold. In the case of Iraq, maybe it was a good thing we invaded Iraq, but I don’t know if I can accept that now because of all the faux excuses they came up with to justify it and try and hide the true scope of the war’s cost in money and lives (the message was don’t worry about the war on terror and Iraq, go out and consume products while we cut your taxes - the war will pay for itself, etc).

Not to recount all of the things that got me to question the political ideology I chose, but it started to happen under W. Bush’s presidency and I was fully hostile to him and his party when the economy collapsed.

But what ever anger I felt and yes hatred, it was compounded when the Tea Party came along. The Tea Party set me off because as I see it they embraced all the economic ideological dogma that failed. Deregulation, lower taxes, less govt did not stop the economic collapse nor is it helping (laws pretty much stayed as they have been before the economic collapse with some minor tweaks) the recovery.

So in effect the right wing as embodied in the Tea Party refused to learn from reality and accepted and pushed an alternate reality where big govt and regulation caused the Great Recession. Coupled with that was this refusal by the right to accept science for political reasons. Man made global climate change is real and it is here and will require big govt and global cooperation to fix it and since those things are ideologically anathema to the right wing they invented non-scientific reasons to reject the science.

The anger I felt is that the Tea Party then went on to push the GOP to win in the 2010 mid terms by doubling down on the GOP’s proven failed ideology. Taxes were at historic lows but they argued taxes were high and needed to be lowered. Deregulation was at its greatest extent since before FDR’s era. Yet they argued that we had too many regulations. It reminded me of the Stalin and Mao era famines I read about where when the communist inspired economic programs failed they did not blame communism but doubled down and declared they were not communist enough and dug themselves deeper into the hole their ideology made for them. The anger of course comes from the fact the Tea Party used this alternate reality denying dogma to take the Congress for the GOP (and did so with a little help from racist dog whistle politics).

But it’s 2012 now. Obama won. And won in such a way as to expose the Republican thinking and their math for the sham dream fairy failure that it is. With that I feel the GOP, while of course still here, has lost it’s alternate reality bubble making machine. Even conservatives at the base are asking how the right wing numbers predicting a Romney win could be so far off and what else has FOX news been lying to them about?

If that is happening, and the way I have been feeling is the way others have been feeling also then I will offer the opinion that there is no need for me to be hostile and angry with the GOPers as I have been. We need to reach out to them and show them why we think we have the real math based, reality world view and their world view is wrong and that can’t happen if we keep calling them kooks, etc.

It is not easy.