Republican Party Disbands

Steven Reynolds, AllSpinZone.com: Isn’t that a headline you expect to see, after all the sex scandals, from Foley through the restroom solicitation of Larry Craig, after the Abramoff scandals, the corruption of the Republican Party during the Bush Administration, the trashing of our civil liberties and constitution, the abject incompetence on the part of the Republican Party under George Bush. Wouldn’t you expect that, at some point, given all this, that we’d come to a point where no Republican had the gumption to serve this diseased party? Well, it’s happened, albeit on a local level near Green Bay, WI. The Republican Party there has disbanded.

It would be easy to blame this on Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman, who was caught a while back plying a 16 year old boy with alcohol and marijuana. This is a story about Republicans, so you know the rest of the story — sordid sexual contact ensued. From RawStory, October 14, 2007:

The boy was found by police in Fleischman’s home on two occasions in late 2006 while being sought as a runaway from Ethan House, a home for at-risk youth. Now 17, he says he stayed with Fleischman at his house and a cabin, where he was provided with alcohol and cannabis, and regularly fondled.

On November 19, 2006, according to a September 7th complaint obtained from the WisPolitics Courtwatch Blog, the boy in question was found hiding in a bedroom closet, and a pipe was found in the house, which tested positive for THC. Shortly after, on December 8, 2006, Fleischman said he was trying to convince the boy, discovered again in the home, to turn himself in as a runaway.

It would be easy to blame Brown County’s Republican Party disbanding on Donald Fleischman resigning, and nobody wanting to sit in the chair he once sat in. I guess they probably thought there were cooties there or something. But Fleischman was not convicted, and the charges have been dropped. The boy will not testify.

As the Wisconsin State Journal notes, Brown County is a Republican bastion. This isn’t a case of them being beaten by Democrats so long that they can’t find anyone with the gall to lead a failed party. But they did get beaten in the 2006 mid-terms. It seems Mr. Bush’s failures, whether with Katrina or Iraq, had an effect up in the thumb of Wisconsin. Still, I’ll not discount the sex crime angle.

This is encouraging, I think. Evidently we’ve got some Republicans out there in the heartland who are embarrassed by their party. Sure, it might just be the sex crimes they’re embarrassed about, but it could also be that they are embarrassed by the ethics of their party, or by the runaway spending, or by the incompetence. I hope even more Republicans show they are human and develop a similar sense of shame.