GOP Insanity and Paranoia Deepens

It's getting to the point where to be a Republican on needs to be clutching a Bible - a KJV, of course - and wearing a tin foil hat. A lobotomy might also be helpful. There seems to be no alleged plot and conspiracy that the Christianist/Tea Party base of the GOP won't embrace. And actual facts and reality do nothing to dissuade them. Having Mitt Romney fan the flames of crazy conspiracy theories, obviously doesn't help. Now, Mitt :Etch A Sketch" Romney is fanning the flames that gasoline prices are rising because of an Obama administration conspiracy. It's just as disingenuous as the mantra of many in the GOP "drill, baby drill" who conveniently leave out the detail (known to anyone honest in the oil industry) that drilling, even if successful in finding new oil production, often doesn't truly increase supplies for a decade. That's right, drilling today might lead to more gas supplies in 2022, but certainly not this summer. Yet the cretins in the GOP base - there really is no other term to adequately describe them - buy the lies and deliberate bullshit from slippery politicians like Romney time and time again. Paul Krugman demolishes this latest conspiracy myth in a column in the New York Times. Here are some highlights:

Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.

This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.

[L]et’s get the facts on gas prices straight. First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. . . . .The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.

And it’s a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.

Finally, there’s the paranoia, the belief that liberals in general, and Obama administration officials in particular, are trying to make driving unaffordable as part of a nefarious plot against the American way of life. And, no, I’m not exaggerating. This is what you hear even from thoroughly mainstream conservatives.

As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.

And it’s not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it’s hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we’re talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà.

Why is this happening? At least part of the answer must lie in the way right-wing media create an alternate reality. For example, did you hear about how the cost of Obamacare just doubled? It didn’t, but millions of Fox-viewers and Rush-listeners believe that it did.

But what about the broader electorate? If and when he wins the nomination, Mr. Romney will try, as a hapless adviser put it, to shake his Etch A Sketch — that is, to erase the record of his pandering to the crazy right and convince voters that he’s actually a moderate. And maybe he can pull it off.

But let’s hope that he can’t, because the kind of pandering he has engaged in during his quest for the nomination matters. Whatever Mr. Romney may personally believe, the fact is that by endorsing the right’s paranoid fantasies, he is helping to further a dangerous trend in America’s political life. And he should be held accountable for his actions.

The past generations of Republicans in my family would be utterly horrified over what has become of a party where facts and rational though used to matter.