Thursday, November 12, 2009

Collective Insanity

It's nice to know even Salon thinks the GOP has lost its mind with the Hoffmanization of the party, as Gene Lyons points out.
To rational minds, the resultant disaster could hardly have been more comprehensive: a lagging economy (the worst job creation since Hoover), yawning budget deficits (Bush doubled the national debt in eight years); two unfinished wars, costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars -- one completely unnecessary, the other so forgetfully prosecuted that Gen. Stanley McChrystal warns the United States and NATO could yet lose it.

Meanwhile, if Pakistani terrorists had done to New Orleans what Bush's hapless FEMA appointees did after Katrina, he'd have invaded Iran. Staffing regulatory agencies with See-No-Evil disciples of Ayn Rand made them feckless spectators of the banking crisis that damn near destroyed the nation's financial system, dragging the economy into the deepest recession since (again) Herbert Hoover.

By the time the make-believe cowboy retired not to Photo-Op Ranch, but to the Dallas suburbs, his approval ratings hovered in the mid-20s. That they were so high testified to GOP team spirit. But what on earth were Republicans smoking?

Courtesy of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Limbaugh and a passel of pusillanimous GOP congressmen, we're definitely finding out. With the alternatives being rethink or go crazy, much of the GOP base has chosen the comforts of delusion.

Ahh, but it's not just any ordinary crazy, it's the fever-bright crazy of righteous indignation, the crazy of those resigned to believe there is no other choice. It's the crazy of salting the fields, the crazy of scorched earth tactics, the crazy of mutually assured destruction.

It's the crazy of "If we're going down, we're taking the country with us!" you see. If they can't win, then neither will the Democrats...and what's left to "win" won't be worth winning at all.

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