WHAT HAPPENED?

At what point in our history did people start referring to this viewpoint with epithets such as "communist", "socialist", "fascist", etc.?  I used to hear some of that stuff about "they're going to try and take away all our guns" stuff around my house when I was 12 in 1969 and taking my Hunter Safety courses from local NRA members, but not a whole lot...  and my dad was extremely conservative when it came to guns.  I also didn't hear this kind of talk during the days when I used to go out target-shooting and plunking around in the hills around town when I was in my early to mid-twenties.  Now there is even a radio program called "Gun Talk" that pushes the NRA's views with a vengeance.  So when did the NRA turn away from being an organization for sportsmen and into the political monster it is today?  And spare me the stuff about it turning into what it is now about the time "the liberals started trying to take the guns away", etc.  You still have your guns and you are likely to always have them, so give me a break.  ;-)

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"Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it's common sense."  - Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address, January 25, 1984

This is a good quote from one of the most revered politicians (by Republicans) in our history.  He often missed the mark, but even the blind squirrel finds the nut once in a while.  Nowadays, anyone who would say something like this would be tarred by right wingers with names like "tree hugger", "environmentalist whacko", etc.  Common sense doesn't include ending all logging and locking up all the forests as wilderness, just as it doesn't include destroying our environment to satisfy our thirst for energy by doing things like fracking, strip-mining, drilling and drilling some more.

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”    - Dwight D. Eisenhower  

The more I think about this quote, the more I think it proves Ike was one of the last good Republican politicians.  

http://www.alternet.org/story/149700/rachel_maddow%3A_in_america_today,_republican_president_dwight_d._eisenhower_would_be_bernie_sanders_in_the_u.s._senate 

I think Rachel Maddow makes some good points here.  Do those who doggedly adhere to the dogma of today's Republican party even have any historical sense of how far rightward their party has gone?  Those "good old days" they want to "take the country back" to seem to be the 1950's...  yes, THOSE days, when the tax rate under Ike for the top American wage-earners was 92%!  Today's Republicans seem to have created a faux-historical "Father Knows Best" utopia, in which they seem think people didn't pay taxes, there were no Democrats, etc.