Oh how far the Republican Party has fallen. Once viewed as the the party of the educated and socially moderate country club set, the GOP has become the party of religious extremists and, worse yet, racists and the ignorant and down right stupid. Indeed, to be a member of the GOP it is de rigor that one either have had a lobotomy, be a ultra-far right Christian, be a quasi-member of the KKK or some other white supremacist group, or be less educated and less informed than most 6th graders. And unfortunately, things do not seem to be getting any better with demagogues like Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh now representing the party's intelligentsia if you will. Indeed, the level of intellect of Republicans is in a virtual downward spiral as those with education and rational thought processes leave the party and take on the mantle of independents if not quite able to bring themselves to being Democrats. Timothy Egan has an op-ed in the New York Times that looks at this phenomenon which is harmful to the nation as a whole. Here are highlights:*
Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.
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Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”
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That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
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A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
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In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. . . . So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans.
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Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.
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Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily.
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Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, . . . But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy.
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It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
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