For decades, and certainly since Lewis Powell published his infamous template for polluting democracy in 1971, the most powerful and wealthy forces behind the Republican Party establishment have cheerfully financed the right-wing infrastructure's jihad against government, facts and sense.
The rich and corporate would prefer to pay less taxes and not be regulated, thank you. So Americans have been subjected to a relentless and uncompromising rhetorical pounding, with the result that a large swath of the citizenry not only accepts but fervently demands a tax system that lets Mitt Romney pay a tax rate half as big as the their own while unregulated industries endanger their health and safety, their environment, their class, their opportunity to achieve economic independence and capitalism itself.
It's all worked splendidly. Well, almost splendidly. It turns out that in their zeal to discredit government specifically and the social contract generally, not only did our plutocrats preside over the creation of the most right-wing major political party in the developed world. They also effectively mainstreamed America's angry, paranoid and benighted fringe. In state after state, teapeople, dittoheads, Paulites and the rest of the wild-eyed right who are the inheritors of the John Birch movement once despised and shunned by the GOP establishment are now the tail wagging the Republican Party dog.
Politicians from the party's corporate wing are wringing their hands. Gov. Brian Sandoval and Sen. Dean Heller, the two highest-ranking elected Republicans in Nevada, deliberately avoided the ickiness of the state Republican convention because they didn't want to get any on them. (Against the backdrop of their party's collective mental unbalance, the selection of a dim but skanky flim-flam man as party chairman seems but a footnote to the NV GOP tale of fail.)
And around the country, Republican officials and the powerful interests that own them worry that their party's ongoing drift to the Island of Whackadoodledoo could seriously damage their electoral, and hence financial, interests in 2012 and beyond.
Yes. Boo fucking hoo.
Recent Comments