RATHER FIGHT THAN SWITCH? NO, THEY SWITCH TO FIGHT

August 8, 2000 - Like hundreds of other Chaffee County residents, I changed
my voting registration so I could participate in the hot election this year
- - not the national yawner between the son of a senator and the son of a
president as to who will appoint prosecutors and judges with the shiniest
jackboots, but the Republican primary today, where Joe De Luca is
challenging incumbent county commissioner Frank McMurry.

So for the past month, I've been a duly registered Republican. As far as I
know, this has not improved my wardrobe or credit rating, and my pleasure
from recreating in those socialistic national forests that are burning
because of eight years of Clinton-Gore-Babbitt mismanagement has not been
replaced by an irresistible craving to play golf.

I was worried, because this sort of thing happened to Sen. Ben Nighthorse
Campbell after he made the switch, and has of late been raving that
environmentalists are a threat to national security.

Perhaps that's why my influence in party circles is minuscule, or else Bush
the Younger would have picked New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson as his running
mate (like Dick Cheney, he's a Western pol with some private-sector
experience, and unlike Cheney, Johnson has a sensible attitude about the
War on Drugs - just end it).

Then again, perhaps there's been a lot of this party switching, and that
might explain the spectacles that were on television last week. For
instance, there was an African-American speaker denouncing the "affirmative
action" of tax breaks for big corporations. Another speaker was gay. No one
called for a constitutional amendment to forbid the teaching of evolution
in public schools, and there were no demands for the death penalty for
history instructors who mention things like Sand Creek and Ludlow that
might tend to cast doubt on the nobility of America.

At first I checked the television set and its connections. That used to be
fairly simple, but we just got one of those little satellite dishes (mostly
because the local cable monopoly believes that its Salida customers prefer
down-home wholesome stuff like the Compulsive Shoppers Network and
"Baywatch" to elitist fare like C-SPAN and A&E) and I haven't mastered its
multitude of channels and options.

But as nearly as I could tell, I was watching the real Republican
convention, not some fake event contrived by the Biased Liberal Media.

This got me to wondering. Perhaps the Chaffee County party-switching
epidemic had gone national, and all manner of erstwhile Democrats were now
Republicans, perhaps on the theory that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

That would explain what I saw on TV, a Republican convention that looked
like a Democratic convention, as the result of a stealth takeover by
Democrats. If this is indeed what is going on - and for all I know, the
15,000 residents of Chaffee County represent the cultural and political
vanguard of this great republic - then we should be able to look forward to
a new Republican Party, sort of like the one we saw on TV. That Republican
Party would do pretty well at election time, since it would manage to avoid
gay-bashing and dollar-worshiping.

The problem, though, is what would happen to the offended Republicans who
want the death penalty for any woman who miscarries after a horseback ride.
Having lost control of the GOP, would they try to get it back? Or would
they follow Pat Buchanan off a cliff?

Or would they infiltrate and take over the Democratic party, so that in a
dozen years, the Republicans would be praising affirmative action (which
was, after all, the product of a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon)
and environmental conservation (Nixon, again, and Theodore Roosevelt before
him), while Democrats would be demanding prayer in school (in response to
public demand) and school vouchers (as a result of discovering that there
are more parents than there are teachers).

The conservatives of the conservative party would actually be trying to
conserve things like small towns, small business, open space, local
control, personal responsibility - what a pleasant thought.

Never mind. This is starting to sound like I've been smoking some of that
stuff that the Republican governor of our neighboring state of New Mexico
says should be legal.