You Don’t Have to Be Nuts to Be a Republican, but It Helps

A recent The National Memo had an article entitled, “Why Conservatives Chose Nuttiness.” And I, of course being a Democrat found it hilarious.

Their premise is that following the disastrous Bush Administration, Republicans had to regroup and they regrouped by going nutty, choosing many forms of extremism to follow. For example, Florida’s GOP Rep. Allen West told his constituents that 78 to 81 congressional Democrats were communists. A lady at a Romney gathering in Ohio yelled she wanted Obama tried for treason for governing outside the constitution. Romney ignored both comments. The Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank (which may be an oxymoron) put up a billboard on the Eisenhower freeway featuring a portrait of the Unabomber, Ted Kacyznski saying “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” The article noted What I do know, however, is that virtually every major scientific organization in the world—ranging from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, to the British Royal Society and the Science Council of Japan—agrees that the atmosphere is warming far in excess of natural variability, and that greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels are the cause.

By the way the Heartland Instituted is funded by oil and coal interests.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, Washington Post writers have recently written a new book, “It’s Even Worse than it Looks” which talks about this Republican extremism that in uncompromising, ideologically based intolerant and takes a winner take all mentality. More British in nature than American, but then we have different forms of government and it has brought our system to nearly a stop.

They note in the article that Obama, a black man with a foreign sounding name getting elected set off this paranoia, of course following the Bush debacle.

Reasonable Republicans such as GOP congressional aide Mike Lofgren resigned last year with this in his resignation: ““the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”

What amazes me is that Obama keeps on trying to compromise and reason with these folks to move the country along. In fact, I think the entire Democratic Party has been far too accommodating to these paranoid radicals and need to call them out rather than just keep moving to the right with them. Democrats today appear to be where reasonable Republicans were 40 years ago. But the progressive Democrats that made this country work up until that time have nearly disappeared.

In the meantime while the country’s middle class loses money, the poor become poorer, and the social safety nets crumble and the rich get rich, the nation snoozes. How bad does it have to get?