GOP Hatred: Ken Mehlman Stirs the Ghosts of the Southern Strategy

Ken Mehlman (pictured left) is out; and in more ways than one.

With the former Bush campaign manager and top GOP strategist's public admission in an Atlantic Monthly interview that he is gay, comes fresh insight and undeniable proof that the Republican party intentionally uses hate, prejudice and fear as the basis of their political strategy.

What is perhaps most shocking is not Mehlman's sexual orientation, but that for years he used the media to help engineer the manipulation of the evangelical Christian right to fan the flames of hostility against homosexuals to score votes.

Among other things revealed in The Atlantic interview, Mehlman admits that he helped to put anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballots of at least eleven GOP-friendly states in an effort to boost votes for George Bush's 2004 re-election campaign and again as the RNC chair during 2006 congressional elections.

As if more proof was needed that the Republican party has declared 2010 the year of hate and intolerance, the TPM Website reports that GOP Louisiana Congressman John Fleming appeared before a Republican women's group and suggested that the upcoming November elections are a choice between America being a "Christian nation" or a "Godless society."

This one-dimensional, intellectually bankrupt "You're either with us, or against us" point of view cannot possibly co-exist in a nation as culturally diverse as America.

On Countdown with Keith Olberman last night, Olberman reminded viewers that the anti-gay GOP strategy is merely the latest version of the notorious "Southern Strategy" used by Republicans to capitalize on the racial fears of white, Christian voters during Richard M. Nixon's 1968 campaign.

What's unsettling here is that even Mehlman KNEW it was morally and politically wrong to race-bait voters - and the RNC chair admitted so in front of the NAACP National Convention in Milwaukee in 2005. Yet a year later he was using the same tactics against both homosexuals and illegal immigrants.

Only time will tell how this will impact restless American voters, but it does raise the question of whether the GOP actually intends to offer ANY new ideas to steer the country back out of the worst economy since the depression, or are they simply banking on stoking the fears of intolerance and prejudice as a means to win the hearts and minds of American voters.

What's happened to the voices of reason and principle in the GOP? When did it all become about marginalizing people and sewing the seeds of division?

I don't know whose party this is right now, but it sure ain't the party of Lincoln.