(no subject)

[barking_iguana]

It's a pleasure to see DHinMI's sense of the underlying structures and trends of American politics back on the front page of Daily Kos. (Not regularly, alas. Former front-pagers are allowed to guest-post when they wish, but don't put in the work to do so regularly.)

...

Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country. Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base.

It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago. It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up at Daily Kos, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power. They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public. While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged. In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II. Republicans involved in organizing and running elections and selling their policy positions to the press and the talking heads know that the American public is far to their left. But they conceal their radicalism through clever marketing scams like Frank Luntz’ Contract on America and the pabulum of "compassionate conservatism."

Further obfuscating the dangerous radicalism of a main current in current Republican politics is that most of their office holders, at least in the past, appeared to the keepers of beltway conventional wisdom as genial men, the type who David Broder or David Ignatius wouldn’t mind chatting up at the Safeway in Georgetown or while waiting for a flight at National. They seemed like good guys, and on the major organizing principle of our politics after World War II—the Cold War and the long fight against communism—they made common cause with Democrats. While nasty people like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were scurrilous red baiters, and the Republican party was full of people who made common cause with reactionary Southern Democrats to fight unionization and the full inclusion of blacks in to our nation’s public and economic life, they weren’t fundamentally hostile to cooperation with Democrats on any and all issues.

But Bob Michel retired, Bob Dole was attacked by the right for doing his job and actually passing legislation, and Newt Gingrich became the leader of the Republican party. People like David Broder never saw or understood what happened and continued to indulge their idiotic fixations on making a fetish of bipartisanship. Joe Lieberman and his ilk confused moderation with centrism; as the Republicans moved farther to the right, Joementum followed them, thinking there was virtue in being equidistant from the middles of both parties, but showing that someone who’s deepest principle is appearing to be above a passionate partisan love of our country can be played like a rube from the backwoods facing his first big-city grifter. And people like Joe Biden, who haven’t figured out that the hatred that fearful conservatives mustered against commies and blacks has now been directed at tolerant and non-authoritarian Americans, and that these haters control and intimidate all but a few of the once proud Republican moderates...

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

DHinMI sounds reasonable, except that there are apparently a significant number of people in the US who think that the Democrats voted for the mess we got in Iraq when they voted for the use of force way back when. If the Democrats don't stand up and scream louder about having been taken by the Republicans, we'll be blamed for both the war and the withdrawal.