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Remember this, the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.
--Paul Krugman
The Left views the last 40 years of the Republican Party as an alliance of sometimes strange bedfellows that increasingly justified its means by its ends.
Watergate, IranContra, The Contract With America, Clinton's impeachment, The Worst Presidency Ever are all of part of a trend to accumulate power. Burglary, negotiating with terrorists, shutting down the government, putting the President's sex life on trial, weapons of mass destruction, were all part and parcel of a strategy intent on exterminating the other side. It used to be that Republicans were not identical with the conservative movement. The GOP was hijacked by wingnuts.
He Who Must Be Read has a good column on the sad state of the Republican Party. Offshore drilling, the issue du jour is, at best, irrelevant. At worst, it's a distraction from an effective energy policy. Yet it's getting a workout in the press and it has some traction.
Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.
Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.
What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”
Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.
--Mb
