Today's Republican Party bears more resemblance to the KKK or perhaps even Al Qaeda than it does to the Republican Party of my youth and which my parents and grandparents were active supporters. How did this happen? Two words: Christian Right. Or perhaps more appropriately, Christofascists. It started back in the 1980's and began to accelerate in the 1990's and the sickness worsened in the first decade of the 21st century. Now, a metastasizing cancer has almost completely taken over the GOP and the very health and financial well being of the nation is at risk. Yes, we hear the term "Tea Party" over and over again and again, but when you scratch the surface of the Tea Party you find that roughly 85% of the Tea Party is made up of Christian extremists who now identify with a dangerous mix of racism, religious intolerance and vehement opposition to anything they think will help those deemed as "other." The overlap is so extensive that I've even remarked that it is as if the "Tea Party" label was invented to hide the activities of the Christofascists given their unpopularity with many Americans. A column in the New York Times looks at the morphing of the GOP into something dangerous. Here are excerpts:
The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent.
Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform. This was crazy talk.
But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists. Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. . . . . Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.
It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. . . . . party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable.
Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
Every sane, rational and responsible America needs to be fearful of today's GOP and the extremists who now control the party grassroots.
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