More GOP Post Mortem

As always, Frank Rich has a great way with words and his column today in the New York Times about the post-2008 Republican Party is no exception. He and I are on the same page in terms of not seeing the GOP come to grips with the fact that it is no longer mainstream for some time. Now run by the delusional far right and Christo-fascists, there is nobody home in the party to focus on reality. Those who have tried to carry the message have been treated as heretics worthy of burning at the stake. I can only shake my head when I see how out of touch with reality the party I once was so involved in has become. The party has now become the party of ignorance and religious lunacy. Here are some highlights from Rich's column:

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Will the 2008 G.O.P. go the way of the 1936 G.O.P., which didn’t reclaim the White House until 1952? Even factoring in the Democrats’ time-honored propensity for self-immolation, it’s not beyond reason. The Republicans are in serious denial.

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The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.

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On Nov. 4, that’s roughly the sole constituency that remained loyal to the party — minus its wealthiest slice, a previously solid G.O.P. stronghold that turned blue this year (in a whopping swing of 34 percentage points). The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points. Those occasional counties that tilted more Republican in 2008 tended to be not only the least diverse, but also the most rural, least educated and slowest-growing in population.

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There’s endless hand-wringing about Bush and McCain blunders and Abramoff-Stevens corruption, but there’s barely any mention of the nasty cultural brawls that defined the G.O.P. campaign narrative this year as the party clung bitterly once more to its 40-year-old “Southern strategy.” There were as many Republican prejudices as candidates.

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Not that McCain was innocent in these exclusionary escapades. He strenuously sought the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, even though Hagee had blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “the great whore,” and theorized that Hitler came about because God’s “top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

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In defeat, the party’s thinking remains unchanged. Its leaders once again believe they can bamboozle the public into thinking they’re the “party of Lincoln” by pushing forward a few minority front men or women. The reason why they are promoting Palin and the recently elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as the party’s “future” is not just that they are hard-line social conservatives; they are also the only prominent Republican officeholders under 50 who are not white men.

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Such window dressing aside, there remains only one Republican idea for reaching out to minority voters: Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, recommends pandering to socially conservative blacks and Hispanics with yet more hyperventilation about same-sex marriage. . . . Pitting blacks and Latinos against them could open up a whole new bloody front in the G.O.P. civil war.

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The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.