Republican Insanity Is Increasing

As noted many times, I am a former Republican from a family of now former Republicans.  Indeed, my maternal grandparents were loyal Republicans long before many of today's most loud mouthed GOP demagogues were even born.  Yet I get incredibly vile e-mails and comments on posts - which I do not publish since I don't wish to give virulent haters a platform - which call me a flaming liberal and that are filled with four letter words and all kinds of explicatives.  To my mind it is all further proof that the Republican Party base is becoming even more deranged, delusional and untethered from objective reality.  The GOP base learned nothing form the 2012 debacle. A piece in The Daily Beast makes the same argument.  Here are highlights:

If you’d asked me six months ago whether the Republican Party would manage to find a few ways to sidle back toward the center between now and 2016, I’d have said yes. But today, on the basis of evidence offered so far this year, I’d have to say a big fat no. With every passing month, the party contrives new ways to go crazier. There’s a lot of time between now and 2016, but it’s hard to watch recent events without concluding that the extreme part of the base is gaining more and more internal control.

Let’s start with this recent party meeting in Boston. As with the previous winter meeting, the Republican National Committee was trying to spin inclusiveness as the theme and goal. But what real news came out of the meeting? Go to the RNC website. Before you even make it to the home page, you’ll be presented with a petition imploring you to “Hold the Liberal Media Accountable!” and “Tell CNN and NBC to drop their planned programming promoting Hillary Clinton or no 2016 debates!” 

As an “issue,” this is totally absurd. How many voters are going to walk into the booth on Election Day 2016, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, thinking, “Gee whiz, I never cared that much for Hillary until I saw that wonderful biopic about a year ago, which is what sealed it for me!” Ridiculous. Besides, has anyone stopped to wonder whether Clinton herself wants these movies aired?

The driver is hatred of all news organizations that aren’t Fox News, which in turn reflects hatred of reality itself, hatred of the unhappy truth that there are facts in this world that can’t be neatly arranged behind a worldview of rage and racial resentment. Soon enough, the GOPers are going to get themselves to the point where the only debates are on Fox, moderated, as Reince Priebus suggested last week, by the likes of Sean Hannity. The Pravda-ization of the party, a process that’s been under way since Fox first took to the air back in 1996, will be complete. The kinds of questions candidates will likely be asked on Fox, and the kinds of answers they’ll know will be expected of them, will drive the party even further rightward.

 Now let’s turn to Congress. Six months ago, I might have thought the party could roll with immigration reform. In truth, I was a skeptic from day one, let the record show. But there were plenty of days when I doubted myself. Not much doubt today. . . . The GOP will do the bidding, to whatever it extent it can, of the extremists.

Conservative Myra Adams wrote on the Beast over the weekend that she didn’t see how a Republican could get to 270 electoral votes in 2016. She’s correct about that, but she may be wrong in assuming that most of these people even care anymore if they win. I think many would prefer to win, sure, all things being equal, but only on their narrow terms. And if they don’t, there is great glory in losing because of principle, and then once again purifying the party of its sellouts and squishes like Petelos. How much worse can they get? A lot.

Not to sound like a broken record, but as a former GOP City Committee member, I track the start of the GOP's descent into insanity to when the Christofascists were welcomed into the GOP out of short term expediency with no thought to what the long term damage would be.  By definition, the Christofascists are driven by religious extremism and a deliberate rejection of modernity and knowledge in favor of the half baked writings of ignorant nomads from 3000 years a go.  The handwriting was on the wall, but the GOP establishment refused to see it.