At times I wonder what my Republican ancestors would think if they could see the GOP today. I suspect that they'd run away screaming in horror at how low the Republican Party has fallen and just how insane and hate filled the GOP base has become. And with CPAC in full swing, the insanity is on open view to any who are interested in watching with displays of dishonesty and derangement ranging from Paul Ryan, a/k/a Lyin Ryan, to the Christofascists of Family Research Council to white supremacists. A column in the Washington Post looks at the foul state of the GOP. Here are excerpts:
The notion of “civil war,” often used to describe the clash between the Republican establishment and the tea party, implies a conflict with identifiable sides. In reality, the GOP condition is more of a free-for-all.
The annual CPAC gathering, conservatism’s trade show, provides a snapshot of the anarchy:
The group’s much-celebrated straw poll of presidential candidates listed no fewer than 26 prospective contenders on the ballot this year — a sign of just how fractured the party is in advance of 2016.
A rump group of conservatives, thinking CPAC insufficiently pure in its ideology, staged a shadow conference in the same National Harbor complex outside Washington. Breitbart News, which hosted the event, used a battle image from the movie “Braveheart” on its announcement of the gathering and called it “The Uninvited,” because many of its speakers “were not invited to CPAC.”
CPAC, though not pure enough for “The Uninvited,” was pure enough to snub the nation’s highest-ranking Republican; House Speaker John Boehner wasn’t invited.
[T]he reception for Christie was cool (and many of the “premium” seats up front remained empty) even as he pandered to the crowd by bashing the media and touting his anti-abortion record. A more enthusiastic reception was given to billionaire Donald Trump, a leading figure in the movement questioning Obama’s birth certificate; his rambling speech included a premature reference to the 39th president as “the late, great Jimmy Carter.”
. .
The conservative movement is united in one way: its antipathy toward anything that has to do with President Obama.
But their shared opposition to Obama masks disagreements over who will lead the party and where it will go. “The fact is,” Christie told CPAC to modest applause, “we’ve got to start talking about what we’re for and not what we’re against.”
Take away the shared contempt of Obama, and there was little left. . . . . The booths in the CPAC exhibit hall made very clear what the conservatives are against: anti-United Nations, anti-AARP, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-bilingualism, anti-lawsuit, anti-gay marriage.
When you have 26 conservative combatants, you don’t have war; you have mayhem.
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