Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

As Charles Pierce points out, the raft of idiotic GOP laws at the state level this year are just a warmup for rolling back the last 150 years or so of progress at the federal level.

I hate to keep harping on this, but what you're seeing in the state legislatures is the activity of the Republican farm team. The people voting for laws springing from the mushy brains of people like Bob Marshall and Lori Klein are the young Republicans who, a few cycles from now, will be running for Congress, probably from safe Republican districts that they've helped draw up, and aided immeasurably by voter-suppression laws that they've helped pass. Most of them will be the products of the vast conservative candidate manufacturing base — the kids at CPAC, the College Republicans, the various Christianist organization. They will not equivocate. They will not moderate. And they are the future of the party. Anyone who thinks the Republican party eventually again will have to "move to the middle" (this translates from the Punditese to "regain its sanity") isn't paying attention. In 2006, the Republicans were handed a defeat every bit as epic as any one ever handed to the Democrats. They did not pause to give it a second thought. Their resolve hardened. They ran what few "moderates" were left right out of the party. And, in 2010, they got a wave election that not only gained them the House of Representativse, but also the legislative majorities in the states that are now producing these goofy-ass laws, and a lot more seriously dangerous ones as well. And, even then, they blew a chance to retake the Senate by running sideshow freaks like Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell. They didn't care.

They do not stop, even when they're losing. The country told them, through the 1998 midterms, that it didn't want Bill Clinton impeached. Bill Clinton got impeached. In 2005, everybody including their Democratic colleagues told them that they were going off the cliff in their meddling in the life and death of Terri Schiavo. There were gobs of polling data to back them up. The Republicans kept meddling even after Ms. Schiavo passed. Is there any evidence that the Republicans are moving "toward the middle" in their presidential contest? Ask poor Willard Romney if that's the case. The current frontrunner is a nutball ultramontane Catholic who lost his last race by 18 points, at least in part because he was one of the more noxious of the Schiavo meddlers.

There's nothing left but the event horizon, pulling all the stupid in to form a super-dense core of Future Republican All-Stars.  As the percentage of white Christians in the voting population decreases, the crazier the group becomes as a whole. We're going to get the point where people are going to start running on bringing back "separate but equal" and maybe that whole union thing of ours needs to be reconsidered.   If they can't have their America, then there won't be a recognizable America to be had when the sheer forces of inevitable demographics exact their toll.

Burn it all down to the ground, salt the earth beneath the ashes, reap the whirlwind, cheer the thunder, and ride the lightning flashes.