Begin by Learning How to Spell!

When right-wing protestors cannot even bother to learn proper use of the language they insist new immigrants employ, why should they expect to be taken at all seriously?

Tactical Terrors

A few days ago, I posted some extended quotes from political analyst Christopher Parker, talking about the misconceptions many Americans harbor as to what goals the Republican Party’s increasingly dominant wing, the Tea Party, has for its activism. Tying in with that is today’s Paul Waldman piece in The Washington Post, looking at why it’s not as important for every Tea Party candidate to win as it for that right-wing faction to keep up the election pressure on more traditional, less radicalized Republicans. Here’s part of his argument:

I’m not saying that everything is about appearances for the tea party and that they don’t have policy goals, because they do. But they understand that electing committed tea partiers is only one way to achieve those goals. Keeping ordinary Republicans terrified is another way, and almost as effective.

Before you accuse me of giving them too much credit, I also understand that the tea party’s policy goals almost never get accomplished, and failure doesn’t necessarily harm them. Each failure--a lost election, a government shutdown that ends, a budget that gets passed--can be cast as a betrayal, maintaining the urgency of the crusade. But part of the movement’s power comes from the fact that it isn’t dependent on any one leader or even a group of leaders. A politician whom tea partiers love today can easily be cast aside if he shows glimmers of reasonableness tomorrow, as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was after he began working on immigration reform. (It may be hard to remember now, but when Rubio got elected in 2010, he was a tea party darling). There will always be more people to challenge the establishment, and more quisling Republicans who need to be taught a lesson.

So the tea party has a cycle it runs through: Get angry, find a Republican target of the anger, mount some sort of campaign against him and if you win, great, but if you don’t, just find the next traitor to go after.

You can read Waldman’s full piece here.

Trying to Understand Tea Party Thinking

U.S. Senator Thad Cochran’s win in last week’s Republican runoff election against Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel in Mississippi was anything but expected, and was credited in large part to the grudging support of African-American voters--voters who seem to have won no favors through their actions. In the wake of that balloting, Salon’s Elias Isquith called University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, the author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton University Press), “to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party, and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi as of late is likely to go away any time soon.”

You can read their full exchange here.

I was particularly interested, though, in the section where Isquith and Parker talked about divergences between what the American public thinks about the right-wing Tea Party faction--a short-sighted bloc that’s already undermining the Republican brand--and how the movement’s members look at themselves. We begin here with an Isquith question:

What are some other popular conceptions about the Tea Party that you think are mistaken?

The bottom line is that a lot of people assume that the Tea Party people are just crazy … but that’s not the case. I mean, that’s really not the case, and I want to dismiss that misconception as soon as I can … Another misconception [is] that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of racist people and that their movement is about racism--and it’s really not … It’s bigger than racism. People who tend to support the Tea Party, they tend to be sexist, they tend to be homophobic, they tend to be xenophobic; so it’s not just about race. It’s about difference. It’s about anything that violates their phenotypical norm of what it’s supposed to mean to be an American: white, mainly male, middle-class, middle-aged or older, heterosexual, and native born. Anything that falls beyond that description is considered not to be a true American and therefore … these groups are encroaching on what they see as the “real” America, the America that they’ve come to know and love through their lifetime.

Would you include Christian among those things a Tea Partyer is likely to think an American is supposed to be?

Christian, writ large, yeah. I would definitely say that.

To that point, though, what would you say to Tea Party folks who would point to the popularity of women like Sarah Palin--or people of color like Ben Carson--as proof that charges of bigotry are unfounded?

They would say people like Ben Carson and Herman Cain [are] these sort of “silver-minded Negroes.” They’re the exceptions. Now if we want to talk about looking at black folks as a whole, no--they’re racist. There are some exceptional people that agree with their views whom they like and whom they want to hold out there to blunt any claims that they’re racist; they’re going to pick a couple token people. But that doesn’t absolve them of racism.

OK. So what was your other point about Tea Party misconceptions?

My other point was that [Tea Partyers are] not crazy. People want to say that they’re crazy, and they’re really not. They want to maintain their social position, their social prestige; and as Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” So it’s rational to want to hold onto your position; it’s completely rational. It’s about the means through which [Tea Partyers] do that--that’s what the problem is.

One could say, “Maybe they need to be more educated!” But that’s another fallacy as it pertains to the Tea Party: People think they’re dumb. They’re not dumb. Twenty-six percent of all strong Tea Party identifiers have at least a bachelor’s degree. People think they’re poor, or that they’re working-class. No, they’re not. Twenty percent of all Tea Party households have at least a $100,000 of income. So they’re not dumb, and they’re not working-class or poor--and this has been the case with Birchers, this was the case with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, this was the case with the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. Same demographic group, every time.

Another problem is just the double-talk that they use. They claim they’re about small government; they’re really not. They claim that they don’t like Barack Obama cause he’s a progressive; have they really looked at his legislative record? He governs as a centrist, regardless of what they believe his beliefs to be. On that, if you look at what happened on George Bush’s watch--I mean, let’s be for real: the deficit on George Bush’s … expanded 104 percent … If you look at [Bill] Clinton’s tenure, it only expanded about 14 percent. If you look at the national debt, how much that expanded on George Bush’s watch; if you look at the extent to which discretionary spending in George Bush’s first term expanded--I think it expanded by like 48-49 percent. I mean, come on! We didn’t see any Tea Partyers out there at the time. We saw nothing when George Bush was doing all this stuff. George W. Bush got TARP passed. We saw nothing. Now we get Obama in, and now the world is going to shit …

READ MORE: “The Right’s Absurd World Culp Paranoia Explained,” by Andrew Leonard (Salon).

No Tea, Thank You

It’s not a good time to be a member of that short-sighted, radical Republican contingent known as the Tea Party. From The Hill:

Support for the Tea Party has reached its lowest point ever, as a growing number of Republicans now hold a negative view of the movement, according to a Pew survey released on Wednesday.

Forty-nine percent of the public have a negative view of the Tea Party, up from 37 percent in June and nearly double from where it stood in the early days of the movement, the poll found.

Only 30 percent said they have a favorable view of the Tea Party, down from 37 percent in June.

While the Tea Party has long been viewed unfavorably by Democrats and independents, the latest Pew survey found that Republicans have turned sharply against the group. Only 27 percent of centrist and liberal Republicans view the movement favorably, a 19-point drop from 46 percent in June.

In addition, non-Tea Party Republicans are increasingly likely to say that the Tea Party is not even associated with the GOP. While 41 percent of Tea Partyers say they identify as Republicans, only 27 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans say the movement is a part of the GOP.

Meanwhile, in an interview with National Journal, Representative Charles Boustany (R-Louisiana) questioned the “institutional loyalty” of Tea Party congresspeople:

“Their allegiance is not to the members in the conference,” Boustany said. “Their allegiance is not to the leadership team and to conservative values. Their allegiance is to these outside Washington DC interest groups that raise money and go after conservative Republicans.”

There’s more about Boustany’s comments here.

READ MORE: “Two Cheers for the SWAT Team,” by Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly); “Historian: Tea Party Rise Tied to ‘Continuing Abandonment’ of Responsibility by Media,” by Susie Madrak (Crooks & Liars).

Americans Broke Their Own Government

In an article appropriately titled “The Reign of Morons Is Here,” published in the weekly electronic supplement to Esquire magazine, Charles P. Pierce reflects on the current state of the U.S. Congress, driven to anarchy and the brink of economic irresponsibility by the phony patriots and short-sighted, anti-intellectual, right-wing extremists who’ve taken control of the Republican Party:

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress--or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress--a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do--to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouth-breathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

You can read the entirety of Pierce’s piece here.

READ MORE: “Neocon Pundit: The Right Is Committing ‘Suicide,’” by Elias Isquith (Salon); “Republicans Are Awfully Close to Violating the Constitution,” by Kristin Roberts (National Journal); “The Republican Arcade Claw Machine,” by Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly); “Tea Party’s Shutdown Lunacy: Avenging the Surrender of the South,” by Josh Eidelson (Salon).

“They Feed Off of Anger and Cynicism”

Wisdom from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

An old friend, who has been active in politics for more than thirty years, told me yesterday that he was giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington any more,” he said. “The hell with all of them. I have better things to do with my life.” My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into--such disgust and cynicism that we all give up on politics. Then they’re free to take over everything.

Make no mistake: Ted Cruz and his Tea Party followers, and the Koch brothers and their other financial patrons, are relishing this [government] shutdown. They’re delighted that 95% of the Environmental Protection Agency is down, so polluters can do whatever they want; that 80% of the Labor Department is down, so unscrupulous employers can trample on their employees; that much of the Securities and Exchange Commission is down, so corporations can have a field day. And they’d like nothing more than a default on the nation’s debt in two weeks, because the resulting financial chaos will cause even more of us to become angry and cynical. That’s the point: They feed off of anger and cynicism.

Our response should be the opposite: We will not give in to bullies or intimidation, and nor will we give in to cynicism about what our government needs to be and who it needs to serve. We will remain engaged and active, and push every member of Congress as well as the President to remain steadfast.

(Via Facebook)

READ MORE: “Battle Stations,” by Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly); “Clueless Republicans Hatch Incoherent Shutdown Strategy,” by Brian Beutler (Salon); “Boehner: ‘I Don’t Want the United States to Default on Its Debt, But ...’” and “Why ‘Negotiations’ Are No Longer a Credible Option,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “The Shutdown Is the Tea Party’s Last Stand,” by E.J. Dionne (The Washington Post); “A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire (The New York Times).

From the “Unbelievably Stupid” File

The Web site Think Progress reports:

In July, the press learned that Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), a Tea Party freshman in Congress, owed $117,000 in unpaid child support to his ex-wife. Walsh, despite earning a hefty salary as a member of Congress, has continued to refuse to pay his ex-wife to support his children. Now, it appears, an influential Christian right lobbying group is lending some support to the deadbeat congressman.

The Sun-Times reports that the Family Research Council, a social conservative advocacy nonprofit headed by CNN pundit Tony Perkins, has awarded Walsh a 100 percent rating as a “True Blue” member of Congress. The FRC said it gave the honor to Walsh because of his “unwavering support of the family.”

You’ll find the whole piece here.

Can Republicans Agree on ANYTHING?

Jonathan Bernstein of The Washington Post today lays out what he defines as the paramount difficulty in solving the Republican-created debt-ceiling crisis:

The bottom line in the debt limit showdown, the ultimate reason for the impasse and the impending apocalypse, is this: John Boehner and the Tea Partiers in the House of Representatives have not passed, and apparently cannot pass, anything at all.

The United States Government reached statutory debt limit in May. We’re now a week away from exhausting every way around that, at least according to the Treasury Department. And the House of Representatives has not passed a debt limit extension. They haven’t passed a clean one, and they haven’t passed one with conditions. It seems highly unlikely to me that Speaker Boehner’s plan to raise the debt limit in stages will pass the House. Indeed, after months of wrangling, there still doesn’t seem to be any plan that can pass the House.

So far, the closest they’ve come was in passing their Cut, Cap, and Balance scheme, but that did not include a debt limit increase; it only contained a commitment to do so if, among other things, Congress sent a specific Balanced Budget Amendment to the states. And yet CCB passed by a slim partisan margin, not even getting close--in the GOP-controlled House!--to the two-thirds needed to pass an Amendment and send it on to the states.

The bottom line is this: even if the House constituted the sole branch of government, it’s really not clear that the Republicans who run it could figure out a way to get the debt limit increased. Too many House Republicans either have no idea what they’re doing or actively welcome a default. And without them Republicans must appeal to at least some Democrats just to get anything through the House--which is a problem for those Republicans who are terrified of being labeled RINOs if they cut any deal with Dems at all, ever, regardless of what they get in return.

Bernstein’s full column is here.

READ MORE: “Boehner’s Truth Allergy,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “Tea Party Warns GOP: A Vote for Boehner’s Debt Plan Violates Our Pledge,” by Jennifer Bendery (The Huffington Post); “Boehner’s Debt Ceiling Plan Found Insufficient by Wall Street: Bank of America Report,” by Sam Stein (The Huffington Post); “Democrats’ Game Plan: Split GOP,” by Alexander Bolton (The Hill); “Behind a Deficit Façade Burns a Dream of Secular Government Collapse,” by Rmuse (Politicus USA).

America’s Coming One-Party System?

My political views have definitely evolved over the years. When I was a young man in the 1980s, I thought that, despite my antipathy toward the policies put forth by Republicans, at least they had to have the best interests of America at heart. They just saw a different way of moving the country forward.

But I can no longer endorse that opinion.

Given the recent unwillingness of right-wingers on Capitol Hill to negotiate in good faith on a federal budget; their zealousness to shut down the government as part of a continuing culture war (just as they did in 1995); efforts by GOP governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to destroy public and private unions (the backbone of workers’ rights); Republicans’ drive to “essentially end Medicare” and do away with Medicaid, roll back President Obama’s important expansion of health-care coverage, and make us even more dependent than we’ve been on bottom-line-driven insurance companies; their wish to hand out more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and hand the bill for those to the already strapped middle class; their push to eliminate regulations that hold corporations accountable for the health and safety of their employees and anyone else; and House Speaker John Boehner’s 11th-hour insistence that any federal budget win the approval of a majority of his caucus (a pretty ludicrous proposition, when you consider the ideological extremism of so many of its members), I must now accept that Republicans don’t really care about advancing the cause of all Americans.

As right-wing U.S. Representative Mike Pence (R-Indiana) accidentally acknowledged last night during an appearance on Fox “News,” in the battle over the budget “we’re trying to score a victory for the Republican people.” Some in the Beltway media will undoubtedly pass that off as a slip of the tongue, but there’s more truth in Pence’s statement than anything else.

Now, I don’t think that all Republicans share the radical viewpoints espoused by their national leaders. There are certainly decent members of the party, and each of us knows some.

But when it comes to the GOP leadership in Congress, and in at least some of the 50 states, I’ve come to believe that they don’t honestly care about anybody except themselves. No matter what they might say in front of microphones. They don’t care about union enrollees. They don’t care about members of the middle class. They definitely don’t care about the poor or the unemployed. They don’t care about people who believe that women ought to have birth-control choices, or those of us who think that arming more and more Americans (even college students!) can only lead to increased violence. They don’t care about people who don’t attend a Christian church. They don’t care about anyone who’s black or Latino or Asian, or anything but white (except if those same people are willing to swear fealty to GOP causes, and pay big into the party’s coffers). They don’t care about folks who think government plays a vital role in keeping citizens healthy and preventing corporations from taking advantage of their employees. They don’t care about people who endorse public funding of the arts. And they damn well don’t care about anyone who calls him- or herself a Democrat or a progressive. We are, to their minds, the enemy. Not simply people with different ideas of how the nation and the world should operate. We’re the enemy.

“The worldview to which much of the GOP subscribes,” writes MyDD’s Charles Lemos, “is one that we as a nation thought we had long put behind us, but they want to repeal the twentieth century and they don’t mind destroying the country in the process.” The evidence of that seems to abound right now. Today’s Republican Party, led by religious and social extremists, appears anxious to turn the nation over to Big Business, deny clear evidence of global warming, escalate the wealth gap among Americans, and ignore anybody who isn’t pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

What’s more, as Rachel Maddow laid out last night on her MSNBC show, Republicans have developed a long-term game plan--assisted by now-unregulated corporate funding--to do away with any political opposition whatsoever. To make the United States, in effect, a one-party system. With right-wingers in charge--and to hell with the rest of us. As she explains it, it doesn’t matter that over-reaching GOP governors or other legislators might fall before the wrath of angry voters in the interim; what matters is that laws and practices are slowly but surely bent in favor of the Republican Party and its worst ideologues for decades to come.

This is a frightening and undemocratic proposition, and I hope it’s nothing more than a great conspiracy theory. But after observing the games being played of late by the GOP, I am more convinced than ever that today’s Republican Party stands up only for “the Republican people.” It’s a sad turn for a political party that Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt once hoped would do its best to improve the lot of all Americans.

Watch and learn:



READ MORE: “What’s Really Holding Up the Budget Deal?,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “New Polls: Tea Party Roadblock to Budget Compromise” (The Huffington Post); “Countdown to the Tea Party’s Comeuppance,” by Steve Kornacki (Salon); “Shutdown Fever” (Think Progress).

Hate Talk Has Consequences

Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg writes that “There’s something offensive, as well as pointless, about the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner,” the man who allegedly tried to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) last Saturday in Tucson, but wound up killing half a dozen other people and wounding 14 more. Nonetheless, Weisberg contends, the “inflammatory language” used by Tea Party types and other right-wingers over the last couple of years certainly “increased the odds of something like [that shooting] happening.” More perspective here.

READ MORE: “The Right’s Role in the Arizona Massacre,” by Dan Fejes (The Reaction); “‘Promoting a Paranoid Culture,’” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “The Amazing Recovery of Gabrielle Giffords,” by Michael J.W. Stickings (The Reaction).

One-Trick Ponies

Why does this new headline on the Web site Think Progress not surprise me? “Asked If Untaxed Corporations Like Exxon Are Taxed Too Much, Tea Party Leaders Say Yes.”

Wrong-headed Political Stubbornness

“This is not a time for compromise, and I can tell you that we will not compromise on our principles.”

The quote comes from Republican House minority leader and would-be speaker John Boehner. He was talking on Sean Hannity’s radio program specifically about right-wing pipe dreams of overturning President Barack Obama’s

history-making health-care reform legislation. But his statement encapsulates what has gone so wrong with American politics these days.

As has been said many times before (so many times, in fact, that the quote’s originator seem to have been forgotten), politics is the art of compromise. Or, to quote former President Gerald Ford, “Compromise is the oil that makes governments go.” Politicians are supposed to legislate for the benefit of all, not only for the people who elected them from a specific region, or the most wild-haired members of the voting public. This great responsibility requires that the office holders demonstrate common sense and pragmatism, as well as diplomatic and arm-twisting skills, in order to craft legislation that benefits the most people possible. What’s so ridiculous about the above remark from Ohioan Boehner (who, admittedly, has never been the sharpest knife in the drawer), and other similar declarations from right-wing extremists hoping to win seats in the next U.S. Congress, is that they fail to realize that without compromise, a democratic government does not work. Of course it’s important to stand up for one’s principles. But it’s vital, as well, for officeholders to acknowledge that the business of national governance is too important to be sacrificed before the hissy fits of obdurate politicos who insist that everything has to work on their terms, or not at all.

Looking over the current U.S. political scene, I see far too many candidates who are unprepared for working with their fellow legislators to overcome the nation’s longstanding economic and social ills. The Republican Party--once the home of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--has been taken over by its most radical, hateful fringe, the “tea party” cultists, who want to privatize and kill Social Security; get the government completely out of the health-care business (which would mean terminating Medicare and Medicaid) and put your long-term health completely in the hands of bottom-line-driven private insurers; blithely ignore global-warming warnings until it’s too late to avoid disaster; do away with the Department of Education; impeach President Obama (if only to satisfy those ridiculous “Birthers,” who propagate lies about his not having been born in the United States)--and if the president and Democrats don’t let them have their own baby way, they’re fully prepared to shut down the U.S. government.

Clearly, there are no longer adults in power in the GOP.

This morning I exercised one of my foremost rights as a citizen of the United States: I filled out and mailed off my midterm election ballot. And nowhere on that ballot did I vote for a Republican, because I no longer trust them--I don’t trust them to act in my best interest, rather than their own or the interests of their loudest-screaming right-wing backers; I don’t trust them to maintain programs such as Social Security and Medicare that work well and have provided the foundation of hope for American seniors; I don’t trust them to respect constitutional prohibitions against establishing a national religion and persecuting the irreligious; I don’t trust them to work with the president to strengthen the U.S. economy (Republicans spent eight years under George W. Bush weakening the economy through wasteful spending and an aversion to business regulation--why would I be stupid enough to believe they’d do anything different now?); I don’t trust them not to be corrupted further by their too-cozy association with Big Business; and I don’t trust them one iota to compromise when compromise is necessary to pass legislation that would boost the nation’s well-being or maintain America’s thoughtful leadership in the world.

Even as four-fifths of Americans polled “say they want Republicans and Democrats to work together to get things done, as opposed to rigidly sticking to principles,” Boehner and his ideological cronies insist they will not cooperate. Not now, not ever. If there’s any silver lining to be found in this mess, it comes from remembering that the GOP of Newt Gingrich’s era said pretty much the same thing--and look at how soundly their shenanigans were rejected. If, as political pundits predict, Republicans win control of the U.S. House of Representatives on November 2, then I suspect we’re in for a repeat of the politically divisive 1990s. The efforts of the radical-right to impose their out-of-the-mainstream agenda on the country will eventually be scorned by a majority of Americans, and President Obama will benefit (just as President Bill Clinton did before him), because he will be the adult in the room who most publicly stands up against political fanaticism.

I voted today because I recognize what’s at stake in this election. What are you waiting for?

READ MORE: “GOP Leaders Tell Obama: There Will Be ‘No Compromise,’” by George Zornick (Think Progress); “Why the GOP’s Gains Are Built on a Sham,” by Justin Gardner (Donklephant); READ MORE: “Three Unorthodox Ways Obama Can Fix the Economy--Even with a Republican Congress,” by Noam Scheiber (The New Republic).

The Unmaking of the GOP

E.J. Dionne has a very good column in The Washington Post today, reflecting on longtime Republican Congressman Mike Castle’s embarrassing loss this week to the more ideologically right-wing Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party favorite, in Delaware’s primary race for a U.S. Senate seat. He writes, in part:

Castle’s defeat at the hands of Christine O’Donnell, a perennial candidate who may be the least qualified Senate nominee anywhere in the country, does indeed mark the collapse of the Republican Party not only of Nelson Rockefeller and Tom Dewey but also of Bob Dole and Howard Baker.

After two decades in which moderates fled a party increasingly dominated by its right wing, the Republican primary electorate has been reduced to nothing but its right wing. O’Donnell, boosted by a last minute anti-Castle spending spree from the California-based Tea Party Express, pulled off her revolution with a little more than 30,000 votes. That’s all it took to seize control of a once Grand Old Party in which the center no longer has the troops. ...

Yes, the Tea Party has just about handed Delaware’s Senate election to Democratic nominee Chris Coons, the young New Castle County executive who was transformed from an underdog to Castle on Tuesday morning to the overwhelming favorite against O’Donnell by late evening.

But the larger question is whether the country is ready to deliver a majority to a Republican Party that now holds problem-solvers like Castle in contempt; is scared to death of a well-financed right wing that parades under a false populist banner; and, in primary after primary, has aligned itself with Sarah Palin, who anointed O’Donnell one of her Grizzlies.

Will moderate voters take a chance on the preposterous proposition that this Republican Party will turn around and work in a calm, bipartisan way with President Obama? Or will they use their ballots to wake up the Republicans and tell them that they need more Mike Castles, and fewer extremists?

We can hope that what few remaining “adults” there are under the GOP tent will take their party back from the insurgents now holding it hostage, but I don’t expect that will happen anytime soon. The Republican Party is bound to go through a very trying period in the near future, as its weak leaders endeavor--and fail--to satisfy the extremists who don’t care about governing, but only about undoing decades of social progress, reducing public oversight of business, and bankrupting the national treasury with tax cuts for the well-to-do.

READ MORE: “The Effect of Fringe Successes,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “OD’d in Delaware,” by Clive Crook (The Atlantic); “David Brooks and the Possible Backlash Against the Tea Party GOP,” by Michael J.W. Stickings (The Reaction); “A GOP Senate Would Battle Obama on the Surface, but Itself Within,” by Patricia Murphy (Politics Daily).

The Crazies Are Now in Charge

I’m not always fond of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s editorializing, but his piece from tomorrow’s edition of the paper is absolutely priceless. It begins:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

Less well known, but equally ominous, is what happened that same day, 2,500 miles east in Maine. There, the state Republican Party chucked its platform--a sensible New England mix of free-market economics and conservation--and adopted a manifesto of insanity: abolishing the Federal Reserve, calling global warming a “myth,” sealing the border, and, as a final plank, fighting “efforts to create a one world government.”

One world government? Do our friends Down East fear an invasion from the Canadian maritime provinces? A Viking flotilla coming from Iceland under cover of volcanic ash?

The full essay can be found here.

READ MORE: “Another Angel Loses Its Wings,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “Maine Tea Party: Worse Than You Think,” by Joan Walsh (Salon).

“The People to Whom You Are Listening with Half an Ear Are Telling You Half the Truth”

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann used his “special commentary” segment last night to slam quitter ex-governor Sarah Palin of Alaska over her fact-free assertion that President Obama’s health-care reform legislation will create “death panels” of bureaucrats to judge whether sick senior citizens are of sufficient value to society to be given life-sustaining medical care. “There is no ‘death panel,’” he stated. “There is no judgment based on societal productivity. There is no worthiness test. But there is downright evil, and Ms. Palin, you just served its cause.” Olbermann did still more to sink Palin’s rising star, calling her “a clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation.”

I’m not sure I would go that far. But Palin has certainly proved herself to be a fool, and willing to fool all Americans all the time, if that’s what it takes for her to stay in the political limelight. The Associated Press has already issued a “fact-check” story pointing out the inaccuracies of statements made by Palin and others regarding the health-care overhaul. “Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision [of death panels],” the AP explains. “The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes.” That story addresses this matter further as part of its Q&A section:

Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote “mercy killing,” or euthanasia?

A: No.

Q: Then what’s all the fuss about?

A: A provision in the House bill written by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would allow Medicare to pay doctors for voluntary counseling sessions that address end-of-life issues. The conversations between doctor and patient would include living wills, making a close relative or a trusted friend your health care proxy, learning about hospice as an option for the terminally ill, and information about pain medications for people suffering chronic discomfort.

The sessions would be covered every five years, more frequently if someone is gravely ill.

Given the AP’s recent history of fawning over Obama’s GOP rival, if it too is willing to denounce Republican’t talking points, then the limits of truth-telling must really be tested on this matter.

Facing South, the online magazine for the Institute for Southern Studies, notes that Blumenauer isn’t the only Capitol Hill habitué pushing for advance care planning. “[A]s it turns out,” the magazine writes, “the cause of advance planning has been championed especially strongly by a pro-life Republican--U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia.” Isakson has already come out in The Washington Post to refute Palin’s “death panel” comments.

Meanwhile, both Slate and Salon point out that private insurance companies already withhold treatment based on a person’s age or state of health. Is Palin going to call out Blue Cross or any other giant, wealthy U.S. insurance company for the very abuses she insists--erroneously--that Obama and his fellow Democrats are building into their health-care reform programs? Of course not. That might hurt her future campaign fund-raising prospects.

And it seems that Thomas F. Schaller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, and a contributor to Salon’s informative War Room column, has kicked up a brouhaha with his column in today’s Baltimore Sun, where he charges that the level of political discourse surrounding America’s present health-care reform “debate” has sunk to kookiness among right-wingers. He writes, in part:

Their [birther] dreams of deporting Mr. Obama dashed, kooky conservatives have turned to Plan B: Shouting that the president’s health care proposal amounts to socialism. No, wait, make that fascism: At health care town halls and other public events, we’ve seen posters of Mr. Obama with a Hitler mustache and of a child in a stroller holding a sign warning of impending fascism.

Socialism, fascism--whatever, same diff. It speaks to the incoherence of these protesters that they can’t distinguish the two. Yet, so long as the comparison makes the president sound evil, dastardly and un-American, such complications hardly seem to trouble them.

Following up in Salon this morning, Schaller says, “OK, there’s nothing wrong with voicing opposition. This is America. I have no objections to protests, even loud protests. People should attend town halls and public forums and other debates. They should let their members of Congress and the President know what they think. But what’s annoying--and I won’t bore you with some of the e-mails I’m getting--is the disconnect between this sudden surge in First Amendment expression when, just a few years ago, many of these same folks were deafeningly silent.” He continues:

Where were these same people in the run-up to the Iraq war? Did they call for more concrete evidence, further study? Where were their voiced worries about government overreach or thwarting public will? Remember, a majority did not want to go to war, so why weren’t they raising noisy concerns about an elitist government that was ignoring the will of the people and imposing its own will on them instead?

And how about the coverage of the war debate back in 2002 and 2003? Did these same folks who say the liberal media fix is in for health care question the planting of stories in major papers, sourced from shady characters like Ahmed Chalabi, by the vice president and his cohorts? Did they challenge as bogus the later citation of these planted stories as proof that the case for weapons of mass destruction? Why weren’t they protesting outside the supposedly liberal, dastardly Washington Post’s editorial offices as that paper issued editorial after editorial calling for war? Shouldn’t the Post’s and the New York Times’ pro-war reporting--both papers later had to conduct internal investigations of their journalistic failings--have been warning signal enough to these same liberal-media-conspiracy-believers that something was rotten in the White House? ...

We hear about the fear of government bureaucrats who are out of touch and can’t be relied upon to make good health care decisions for the public. Fine, but where was this argument as we watched Anderson Cooper reporting live from New Orleans before the federal government managed to arrive post-Katrina? Why is there never any anti-bureaucrat fervor directed at defense department acquisition and deployment personnel, given that our troops were sometimes bathing in unsafe water and couldn't get sufficient armor for their vehicles in Iraq? (Oh, right, it was just a matter of “physics” back then, according to our glorious Secretary of Defense.)

I could go on, but you get the point. What amounted to heresy, even treason, a few short years ago in our public discourse has now morphed into patriotic, true-blue American First Amendment expression.

Hypocrisy reigns supreme among America’s right-wing extremists. Which goes back to a point that’s been made by Schaller and some of our more thoughtful TV and newspaper commentators: that opposition to the present health-care reform plans has only tangentially to do with the legislation making its way through Congress; it’s really fueled by lingering opposition to Barack Obama’s election as president last year. Some of it is just conservative discomfort with the U.S. government having fallen into the hands of a smart Democrat, someone who opposed much of what George W. Bush stood for during the last eight disastrous years. Some of this fervor is likely fueled, too, by racism, which remains a pernicious force in the South, the only place in the nation where the Republican’t Party is still strong. Obama is America’s first black president, which makes racists more than a bit uncomfortable. Conservative activists are exploiting the bigotry still infecting this land to drum up opposition to Obama’s agenda. It’s an ugly, hateful tactic, and one that could have the result of turning what Palin called “the America I know and love” back into a place divided not just by political disagreements, but by racial animosities and consequent violence.

Aren’t Americans a better people than all of this suggests?

FOLLOW-UP I: The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen notes today: “It appears that conservative organizers and Tea Party activists aren’t really interested in some kind of bipartisan reform of the health care system, or watered down Democratic proposals. Their goal is to protect the status quo at all costs.”

FOLLOW-UP II: President Obama’s New Hampshire town-hall meeting earlier today on the subject of health-care was particularly powerful. Watch here.

FOLLOW-UP III: Sometimes I think I must live in quite a different world from the minority of Obama-haters out there. Steve Benen lists some of the wacky statements made during a health-care reform town-hall meeting Senator Arlen Specter held today in Lebanon, Pennsylvania:

Specter’s largely right-wing crowd insisted President Obama isn’t an American. One nutty man said to applause, “One day, God is going to stand before you and he’s going to judge you!” Another yelled, “This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China.”

One attendee drew a standing ovation when she said health care reform is about “dismantling” the United States and “turning” the country “into Russia.” She later added that she feared toilet paper rationing.

Someone in the audience wanted to explain that the Qu’ran says that “all unbelievers will be executed.” The same person added that if we close Gitmo, “criminals” will “escape” and we'll find “a bunch of innocent people are murdered. And that’s what’s gonna happen.”

What sort of hallucinogens are these folks taking?

READ MORE: “Exposing the Euthanasia Scare,” by Harold Pollack (The New Republic); “Making the Same Mistake Twice,” by John Dickerson (Slate); “It Is Democracy, Not Health-Care Reform, That Is Sick,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “Health Care Protestors Largely from Out of District, Sign-in Sheets Show,” by Ryan Grim (The Huffington Post); “Over the Top and Beneath Contempt,” by Roger Simon (Politico).