Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute — for now anyway. Good on him for telling the truth, something conservative Republicans like the late Sen. Barry Goldwater used to do before his party was hijacked by Tea Party cranks, ignorant religious crackpot
s, dumb-as-dirt bigots, and slick sociopathic swindlers conning the first three groups to gain money and power. As Goldwater said in 1994: “Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” And it’s not just the anti-Constitutional theocrats now — the Grover Norquist Teabagger no-tax pledgers are right up there with the Calvinist Christopublicans in defying reality to serve their demented and unworkable ideology.
However, 2012 is shaping up to be a year when the far-right GOP will be swept from the political landscape by a landslide of historic proportions and returned to the babbling fringe where they belong. Most Americans are just sick and tired of their laughable claims of victimization, sleazy deceptions, fake outrage, cheesy word games, rejection of science, lack of common sense, Orwellian attempts to rewrite the past, ugly obsession with controlling other peoples’ private lives, blind fealty to corporate power, kowtowing to wealth, gossipy nastiness, and, most importantly, utter inability to govern for the good of the country. Let’s hope this potential utter defeat at the polls doesn’t spark more violence from the far right.
Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
The Washington Post
April 27, 2012Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
Read the rest here.