Today's GOP: Running From Reality

As a former Republican (and now ardent Democrat, as are all the members of my extended family who have likewise fled the GOP), I am disgusted with what the Party has become and how patently dishonest the Party has become. The first principle of the Party seems to be that of NEVER TELL THE TRUTH and like naughty children pretend someone else created the mess and is responsible for discovered misdeeds. The ultimate question in the November elections is whether or not enough Americans are stupid - yes, I said stupid - enough to buy the bull shit being spun by the GOP. Listening to MSNBC as I am blogging, I am near nauseated by the GOP talking heads making statements they know are down right untrue. They claim to be the Party of God, yet constantly disregard the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness. Bob Herbert at the New York Times has a column today that looks at this phenomenon. Here are some highlights:

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If there was one pre-eminent characteristic of the Republican convention this week, it was the quality of deception. Words completely lost their meaning. Reality was turned upside down. From the faux populist gibberish mouthed by speaker after speaker, you would never have known that the Republicans have been in power over the past several years and used that titanic power to lead the country to its present sorry state.

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If there were any good ideas at this convention of mostly rich and mostly right-wing delegates about how to haul the country out of this mess that the G.O.P. has gotten it into, they were kept well hidden. Perhaps they were tucked away behind the more prominently displayed creationism and “just-say-no to global warming” documents.

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It stretches the mind almost to the breaking point to think of John McCain as an agent of substantive change. He once believed that Phil Gramm was the most qualified person in the United States to be president. And he now believes that Sarah Palin is the most qualified to be vice president. That is not the fault of Mr. Gramm or Ms. Palin. But it sure tells us a lot about the judgment of John McCain.

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For most voters, the No. 1 issue in this campaign is the financial struggle facing working families that are trying to cope with job losses, declining wages, the high cost of health care, home foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like. To a great extent these problems are the result of national policies, forged under Republican rule, that overwhelmingly favored the interests of the very wealthy over working people.

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Senator McCain’s economic guru through all of this was Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the banking committee. . . . Phil Gramm was one of the lead architects of the breathtakingly irresponsible policies (No more restraints! No more regulation!) that led to the subprime mortgage meltdown and the current credit disaster.

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To Senator McCain’s great embarrassment, Mr. Gramm dismissed the economic downturn as a “mental recession” and complained that the U.S. had become a “nation of whiners.” That may have been a political no-no, but it was an accurate expression of the slavish devotion of the G.O.P. to the rich and powerful among us, and of the party’s contempt for the interests of working families and the poor. Senator McCain, it should be noted, fully shared Mr. Gramm’s anti-regulatory zeal.