That's Not My Father's Republican Party

My thoughts at the end of this second week in August of the field of canidates for the Republican Presidental nomination.

From Living The Dream | The Digital Cuttlefish.
August 13, 2011 at 11:11 am cuttlefish

Look at the fearless Republican candidates
Telling the people their comfortable lies
Magical thinking, revisionist history,
Alternate versions as seen through their eyes

Compromise seen as a sign of your weakness,
No one admits to his previous deals
Matching the facts is completely irrelevant
Truth is determined by how a thing feels

Lying is raised to an art or a science
The bigger, the better, or that’s how it seems
People are frightened by too much reality
Better to peddle them beautiful dreams

There in the crowds, cotton candy surrounds them,
Melting away into sugary air
Sweet little nothings, political promises
Served by the ton at the Iowa Fair.

In the New York Times, an editorial, “Magical Unrealism“, examining the antics of not the extremists, but the putative center of the Republican party. It’s one thing when the wingnut faction lives in fantasy land; it’s quite another when the mainstream is building castles in clouds.

Believe it or not I describe myself as Free Thinking Secular Humanist Kenysian Rockefeller Republican. As a very very young kid I can recall a conversation with my dad who was a die-hard Rockefeller Republican and activly worked in Republican state & local politices about the John Birch Society and while I don’t recall what exactly he said to me about them the lasting imppression I have had all my life was that they were wacko right wing extremists and outside of mainstream Republican thinking….that is until now.

Looking back ten, twenty, thirty and forty years now I am so shocked at how far the Republican party has moved to the right and how they have now come to embrace the radical irrational revisionst extemists of the reactionary fringe,… the Tea Party and even worse the Tea Baggers.

On the news today it was stunning to see that last night all 8 GOP candidates in the Ames, Iowa Republican primary debate would walk away from a 10 to 1 spending compromise deal with Democrats and the audience cheered the response!

Not at all willing to work with Democrats on a compromise deal these are not politicians and in my estimation they are not at a qualified to lead our coutnry. Each one of them (and I am sorry to say John Huntsman & Mit Romney joined the crowd) are uncompromising ideologues.

This country doesn’t need ideologues. This country doesn’t need any more seperation and division than it has right now. This country needs genuinne authentic stand-up honest leadership and while individually that group of Republican canidates may be able to lead a small group of uncompromising right wing ideologues they can’t, never should, and never will lead this great county of ours.

Matthew Yglesias wrote on this moment:

One can say that this was merely politicians playing to their base and some of them know better. And perhaps it was, but it’s extremely difficult to turn around and break a promise like that. So you have the entire Republican Party committed to the view not only that tax increases are undesirable, but that it’s unthinkable to include even small increases in a bipartisan bargain for large spending cuts. In a normal country, that would be an extreme and strange position to take, but I’m not sure it would be a damaging one. The question, after all, would simply be whether such an extreme party can or can’t win a governing majority. If it couldn’t, its weird views would be irrelevant. If it could, then it would deserve congratulations and good luck in its effort to implement an all-cut agenda. But by a series of odd quirks of fate, the Republican Party exercises substantial influence over budget outcomes even if it mostly loses elections. So as long as they stick to this view, it will be neither possible to raise taxes nor to substantially reform major spending programs.

Standard and Poor’s work may be shoddy, but it hardly strikes me as an insane conclusion that this is not the soundest political culture in the world.

Rationally thinking Republicans should feel let down if not outright eembarrassed and ashamed by that sad grouping.