A Republican who misses the old GOP

President Eisenhower said, “If you aren’t in the middle of the road, you are in the gutter.”

What he expressed 60-plus years ago applies to today’s Facebook.

Sure, there are lots of pictures of happy family gatherings, new babies, memories of past good times. But increasingly my newsfeed is filled with hatred, largely from the right, but from the left as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Facebook.

It keeps me connected to old and new friends both close at hand as well as halfway around the world. I like seeing pictures of the wonderful places to which people are traveling. But I am increasingly sick of the vitriol and anger that clutters my online experience.

When Ike was president we had a bipartisan foreign policy. “Politics stops at the border” was the watchword. Ike was part of the Eastern establishment, largely moderates who controlled the Republican Party. His vice president was a Californian, Richard Nixon.

The two men, though largely moderate in their time, would be labeled RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and dangerous liberals by today’s nasty Republicans. After all, Eisenhower warned and worried about over-population, serving as honorary co-chairman of Planned Parenthood after his time in office. And Nixon not only opened the door to friendly relations with communist China, but proposed universal national health care.

My Facebook page is filled with hatred for President Obama for his opening to communist Cuba and his passage of a national health care program.

I have always been a “live and let live” kind of guy – like Barry Goldwater, for instance. Goldwater was truly a conservative and as such didn’t believe in government telling people how to live their lives. But today’s activists want to tell us who we can marry, whether we can use birth control and that “choice” should not be a woman’s option.

And the telling is often done because the God they believe in, or the holy book they take as truth says that is how things should be. No toleration of other views, no acceptance of different opinions. Just dead certainty shouted in anger.

Well, I have had it. I can’t go through the next campaign season reading all the slime about a candidate’s email faux pas, attacks on the union rights and pensions of middle class public servants, and people like a leading Republican candidate who wanted to phase out Medicare.

When politics comes down to cutting back Amtrak, chopping university budgets 30 percent, kowtowing to a national group that thinks it is OK for private citizens to own assault rifles, and seeking tax policies that will make huge corporations and billionaires even richer, I say, “Enough.” But politics is no longer about what we little guys say. It is about obscene amounts of campaign cash buying politicians.

So I am opting out. I am no longer going to scan all the outrageous headlines. Not going to read all the biased stories that the ideologues repost. I am going to clean up my newsfeed. I am going to stop “following” a goodly number of my Facebook friends. Time for sunshine and unicorns.

But, if a person like Dwight Eisenhower appears on the national stage, let me know and I will definitely “friend” him.

Phil Bradley of Chatham misses the old GOP.