In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Marc Ambinder asks:

Have Conservatives Gone Mad?

Short answer?  Yes.   Long answer, well, let's look at Ambinder's argument:

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don't exist -- serious Republicans -- but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors, and where the incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance, causing experimental voices to retrench and allowing a lot of people to pretend that the world around them is not changing. The obsession with ACORN, Climategate, death panels, the militarization of rhetoric, Saul Alinsky, Chicago-style politics,   that TAXPAYERS will fund the bailout of banks -- these aren't meaningful or interesting or even relevant things to focus on. (The banks will fund their own bailouts.)

And the answer to that is simple:  as long as the rest of the Village and Washington continue to take this idiotic arguments seriously, then they will continue to dominate our politics.  They dominate our politics because we allow them to. As I have said over and over again, we need a better pundit class to get better discussions.  And until the right's answer to the arguments that Maddow, Greenwald, and Olbermann bring up is something other than "Glenn Beck is killing all three in the ratings combined!  We win!" then we'll never improve.

Conservatives don't want a better argument.  They just want to win and control the country.  The end justifies the means every single time when you think like that.  Sun Tzu:  if you bind yourself with rules and codes when your enemy is unfettered by them, then you will be defeated.