Reply to Peter (good grief...!) Hennessey

I can't help but agree with Peter Hennessey when he says he sees a "deep, irreconcilable mental and psychological divide between the two Parties (sic)." That is manifestly the case.

In 2010 I volunteered for Rory Reid's campaign and made the mistake of mentioning that I had been a registered Republican for 34 years. Predictably I was given a list of supposedly "persuadable" Republicans to canvas, which I dutifully did.

When I returned with the results they asked me how it had gone. I told them I used to think of "Republican" as a political affiliation. Somewhere along the line it had been turned into a diagnosis. That got a good laugh, but I had to tell them no, stop, I was being dead serious. On doorstep after doorstep I'd been greeted with open hostility, ranting, raving, multiple conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant venom and thinly veiled threats. I was a little shell shocked, and couldn't imagine how I'd ever been part of that bunch.

I'll never forget one old guy with pale skin and pure white hair who instantly turned red as a beet when he figured out what I was there for. He started yelling obcenities so loudly that I could hear echoes around the otherwise sedate neighborhood, then slammed the door in my face. That experience reminded me of my mother's pressure cooker, which exploded one day and imbedded beef stew into the kitchen ceiling. It was awesome, and a little bit scary. I kept my distance from the stove after that.

The Republicans who actually talked to me sounded exactly like Peter Hennessey, so I can spare you the details. Just read anything he's written here and you'll get the drift. Nobody was open to hearing any new facts or alternative points of view. Almost everybody was an expert on the "Democrat Party" and all it represented. It quickly became obvious that trying to engage in meaningful dialog with these people was a pointless exercise. Everyone on my list was clearly immune to any similar epiphany. Their minds were sealed tight. Their raging emotions were always close to the surface and ready to erupt. I always ended up feeling sorry for them.

It was all as scary as it was disturbing, not to mention a complete waste of time. I'm no expert on collective insanity, but I've got to believe the lunacy you hear every day on KOH, 99.1 and Fox News has something to do with it. I've even encountered a few Democrats who've drunk that Kool-Aid, with similar outcomes.

Speaking of Democrats, we saw a list of people so-described who signed an ad urging us to vote Republican in our local Assembly race. They got what they wished for, and can take pride of ownership for our new Republican speaker. Together with the Republican Senate majority leader and Republican governor, he will lay out a conservative agenda and make the Democrats like it.

It will be interesting to see how Nevada's new one-party government deals with the gigantic hole in the next biennium's budget. Most of the GOP majority has already given Grover Norquist their solemn pledge never to raise a penny of new revenue. If I were a state employee or retiree who just voted to make all this happen, I might already be feeling a little buyer's remorse. We all know where the "savings" to balance the state's budget came from in the last two bienniums. That's about to happen again.