The extreme Republican Party

[Forkboy]

BACK IN 1970 when Richard Nixon nominated a little-known district court judge named Harold Carswell for the Supreme Court and Carswell’s opponents branded him “mediocre,’’ Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska famously rose to Carswell’s defense. Even if he were mediocre, Hruska said, “mediocre people are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?’’ With that ringing endorsement, Carswell’s appointment was soundly defeated by the Senate, but not even Hruska could have foreseen how his prescription would be adopted by our political system.

Let’s not mince words here: We now have an entire political party that is not only dedicated to the mediocre. It is dedicated to the nearly deranged.

We are long past the time when we can pretend there are two serious political parties in this country - one right of center and one left of center. That is the situation in virtually every other industrialized country. England has its Tories and Labor, France its Gaullists and its Socialists, Germany its Christian Democrats and its Social Democrats. These parties generally don’t agree on policy; they are, after all, political adversaries. But they are all serious, they all represent large constituencies and interests, and they all operate from a set of shared values, not least of which is that the other side is not treasonous or evil or ill-intentioned; it just has different prescriptions for solving problems. Typically, the differences between right and left in these countries are fairly small because in most democracies most people agree on the really big stuff. Even Tory leader David Cameron has vigorously defended England’s National Health Service.

But that is not the case here. We have one party that is severely compromised by its ties to big money, and another party that is just plain nuts. There is no other way to parse it. According to recent polls, a majority of its followers either believe that President Obama was born in Kenya or aren’t sure, believe there is no such thing as global warming, believe that the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61 percent!). The only bright side is that according to a recent Pew poll, only 23 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, which makes them not only a fringe in beliefs but also, thankfully, in numbers.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/09/12/the_extreme_republican_party/

Great read.

[tularetom]

1. And to think it reached this level because some loud mouth radio DJ's

found out they could get filthy rich by playing to the bigotry of a bunch of losers living in their mother's basements.

Even republicans who know better (yes there still are a few of them) have to act stupid in order to appeal to the booger eating morans who now make up the "base".

[opihimoimoi]

2. KnR :o)

[Mister Ed]

3. "One party is compromised by its ties to big money, and the other is just plain nuts."

That sums up our whole political landscape in a single sentence.

K&R.

[Forkboy]

4. You got that right.

Sadly.

[Hidden Stillness]

5. This is All the Result of the Complete Corporate Takeover of the Process

I think the whole thing has been allowed to get so bad because everything--campaigns, fundraising, issue-describing, which issues get dealt with, image, everything--is now completely geared to corporations and the corporate media. Little incidental comments are fixated on, responded to way over any sane level and amount of attention, every word gone over and attacked with even more obsessive wording; many, many camera angles from cameras, cell phones, God knows what else--narrowing the entire world of public life down to one "hyped fad" after another, and all with the corporate advertising attitude. "Glenn Beck said this--What should we do??" "Rush Limbaugh said this--What should we do??" There is a level of now-unending fixation on annoying things that can't be solved (such as how stupid and dishonest these people are), which makes you more and more stressed, and nobody addresses real problems anymore. I think this is deliberate by the corporations that own the media. It isn't even that they are so horrible, they lie and now what do we do? It is that every God-damned thing "must" be responded to according to this attitude, and not let go, and get on with the real work for the Nation.

I am old enough to remember a really vicious archcon named Joe Pyne, who was a lot like the current ones, but it revolved around issues of the 1960s, etc. The difference was that Joe Pyne was considered "the lunatic fringe" (along with that nut Barry Goldwater), ignored, not given "importance" beyond their little group, and meanwhile, the Democratic Party of that time--before corporate "D"LC--worked on issues the American people had elected them to do. Now the corporations and their lobbying interests have taken over the entire process, from selection of candidates to writing legislation, and everything just spins in a whirl of their closed group's intentions.

They have pushed the political agenda to the corporate archcon extreme, where most people are still moderatlet liberal; they have made all things rich and corporate, where almost everyone in the real country has populist, anti-corporate concerns; it is entirely a process affecting them, not us out here. The extremist nuts were always there--but it used to be that their small numbers were ignored and not placated; now they are the only ones given attention and response, by a corporate media having "fun," and now we get the result.