way back when, I remember a Doonesbury cartoon with I think it was Zonker's mom at a Republican Convention as the lone voice pushing for Pete McCloskey for President. That is most of what I personally know about Pete McCloskey: former Congressman, former failed candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, and someone from a long line of Republican McCloskeys.

Well, Pete McCloskey is ending a family tradition because of Bush and the barking crazy right wingers. McCloskey's statement says it all:

McCloskeys have been Republicans in California since 1859, the year before Lincoln's election. My great grandfather, John Henry McCloskey, orphaned in the great Irish potato famine of 1843, came to California in 1853 as a boy of 16, and joined the party just before the Civil War.

By 1890 he and my grandfather, both farmers, made up two of the twelve members of the Republican Central Committee of Merced County. My father's most memorable expletive came when I was a boy of 10 or 11: "That damn Roosevelt is trying to pack the Supreme Court!"

I registered Republican in 1948 after reaching the age of 21. We were the party of civil rights, of free choice for women and fiscal responsibility. Since Teddy Roosevelt, we had favored environmental protection, and most of all we stood for fiscal responsibility, honesty, ethics and limited government intrusion into our personal lives and choices. We accepted that one the duties of wealth was to pay a higher rate of income tax, and that the estates of the wealthy should contribute to the national treasury in reasonable measure.
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