The Republican Party was founded as the antislavery party. It was, thus, a regional party. After the Civil War, the North and Upper Midwest were Republican, the South and Southwest Democratic. With the exception of the solidly Democratic Catholic vote in the Northeast, the North was virtually a one-party region right up to the Great Depression ...

All that changed after the 1960s. The Democratic Party embraced the '60s Cultural Revolution, with its hostility to the military and traditional values. The GOP pursued Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to court Southern conservatives away from the Democratic Party ... The divide intensified due to the dramatic leftward shift of the Democratic Party. It has morphed into a made-in-the-USA Western European liberal party that seeks to grow the power of government, increase the public's reliance on Washington, wage class warfare, downplay national-security threats, relinquish our sovereignty, redefine the family, and substitute secular humanism for our society's Judeo-Christian underpinnings.

-- Former Sen. Rick Santorum, in his column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wondering whether John McCain is a true conservative or whether he'll bring the U.S. to the same ignominious end as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, "only slower."

We have to wonder, by the way: Could there be some reason for the geographical shift in party allegiances in the 1960s beyond just liberal hatred for everything good and pure? Something Santorum glosses over by mentioning the "Southern Strategy" only in passing? Something, maybe, about a fight over desegregation and civil rights? Nah ...