Today's GOP: Brain Dead on Policy

Not to beat a dead horse, but to be a Republican nowadays requires one's principal motivations to be based on racism, religious extremism and greed.  It also requires that one have had a lobotomy when it comes to contemplating any serious policies to address the nation's ills.  Other than the favored knee jerk mantras of cutting taxes, disenfranchising minority voters, ending abortion and contraception, and slashing government, there is a total absence of any real policy proposals.  And in my view, the decline of the GOP as a thinking party tracks directly back to the rise of the Christofascists in the party.  Now, the rejection of objective reality and the rejection of any thoughtful analysis are the highest attributes within the GOP base.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's descent into a policy vacuum.  Here are highlights:

The problem with Republicans today on public policy isn’t that they’re stuck in the 1980s; it’s that they’ve given up entirely. More often than not, what passes for Republican “policy” is just symbolic, not substantive. Think, for example, about the big GOP rollout of the spring, a balanced budget amendment — which wouldn’t be much in terms of substantive policy even if it had a chance to pass, which it obviously doesn’t. Or think of their inability (still!) to come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Again, it’s not that Republican health policy is stuck in the 1980s; it’s that there is nothing that could really be called Republican health policy. Or, to move away from Ponnuru’s topics to national security, there’s the frenzy over Benghazi, Libya, that (as Kevin Drum points out) somehow never quite is about anything, or what seems to be purely symbolic attacks on Chuck Hagel.

The first step out of the policy wilderness for Republicans, then, is for them to decide that developing substantive public policy ideas is a good idea at all. If the way to do that is to attribute it to Ronald Reagan, well, if it works then there’s nothing wrong with it. I hope so; the nation could really use a political party that advances well thought out conservative policy options. There hasn’t been one of those in years.