The Lost Battle for the GOP's Soul

We hear much about the GOP wanting to re-brand itself and making itself more attractive to voters outside of the angry white far right racist and homophobic GOP base.  Yet try as they might, establishment Republicans simply cannot silence that knuckle dragging Neanderthals who keep exposing the GOP for what it has become: a bunch of self-centered, greedy, racist religious extremists who have contempt for democracy and a majority of the American citizenry.  As I have expressed before, I truly do not know how the GOP will get itself out of this long term death spiral given the way in which the Christofascists and their Tea Party cousins were allowed to infiltrate and hijack local committees across the country.  Its a case of a metastasizing cancer that can only be "cured" by killing the patient.  Here are some highlights from a Washington Post column that looks at some of the current ugliness of the GOP:

Arthur Brooks, head of the American Enterprise Institute, had the unorthodox idea to invite the Dalai Lama to exchange views on capitalism with a panel of scholars at the conservative think tank Thursday.

The Tibetan spiritual leader gently suggested that there might be “more sense of universal responsibility and commitment,” even as he listened politely to the Americans’ praise for the morality of the free market.

It is indeed a good thing that some conservatives are beginning to accept that government is not the enemy. But even as Brooks and his ilk push in one direction, the conservative movement and the Republican Party continue to be pulled forcefully toward the opposite pole.

The same week Brooks was contemplating brotherhood and compassion, Greg Abbott, the attorney general of Texas and favorite to be the next governor, was campaigning with Ted Nugent, the vulgar rocker who last month called the president of the United States a “communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.” Abbott wouldn’t criticize Nugent’s abhorrent speech. “That’s just Ted,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said.

Yep, that’s just Ted, referring to President Obama with the same language (“subhuman mongrels”) the Nazis used to justify exterminating Jews. After an uproar, Perry condemned the remarks and Nugent issued a grudging apology.

As the Dalai Lama came to AEI, the world was learning of another Republican expression of brotherhood and compassion — this one in the form of bigoted e-mails sent and received by people working for Scott Walker, now the Wisconsin governor and a prospective presidential candidate. The e-mails, released as part of a lawsuit, include one joke sent by Walker’s then-chief of staff in 2010 saying “I can handle being a black, disabled, one armed, drug-addicted Jewish homosexual on a pacemaker who is HIV positive, bald, orphaned, unemployed, lives in a slum and has a Mexican boyfriend, but please, Oh dear God, please don’t tell me I’m a Democrat!”

A different e-mail, forwarded to Walker’s deputy chief of staff in 2010, joked that welfare recipients, like dogs, are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who [their] Daddys (sic) are.”

“That is hilarious. And so true,” replied Walker’s aide.

Which will prevail in the battle for the conservative soul: the conciliatory idealism of Brooks? Or the crude animosity of Nugent and Walker’s aides? I’m rooting for Brooks, but I wouldn’t bet money on him.