Welcome to the weekend! Are you having a good one? It’s been another crazy week in politics but I think crazy is the new normal.
Marc Ambinder, the ultimate arbiter of media conventional wisdom, asks if conservatives have gone mad. The answer is yes (simple answers to simple questions).
erious thinkers on the right have finally gotten around to a full and open debate on the epistemic closure problem that’s plaguing the conservative movement. The issue, to put it in terms that even I can understand, because I didn’t study philosophy much in college: has the conservative base gone mad?
This matters to journalists, because I really do want to take Republicans seriously. Mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez’s phrase, “untethered” to the real world.
Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow’s grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann’s hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn’s keepin’-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.
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.
I guess it’s getting too hard to do the he said, she said when one side screams Nazis! Tyranny! Death Panels! and the other side talks about things that are really happening like recission and pre-existing condition bans.
There’s a lot of evidence that the Sue Lowden (NV-Sen) “chicken care” plan is making her into a national joke. One of Josh Marshall’s readers shares some anecdotal evidence:
I just went to my doctor’s office for a sinus/ear infection. I had never seen this particular physician before and certainly didn’t bring up politics with him, but as I was about to pay my bill, he volunteered, “We take cash, check, credit or debit card. No chickens.” I’m in Indiana, mind you. I think Sue Lowden is in real trouble if even random doctors in Indiana are mocking her to near-total strangers.
A Nevada newspaper describes what’s happening at the Lowden camp:
Now, most mentions of Lowden in national or local media are accompanied by the word “chicken.” Political opponents have produced mocking videos that are going viral on the Internet.
Angry voters have shown up at Lowden’s offices with frozen chickens.
Worse, Democratic volunteers keep showing up at Lowden’s campaign offices with cages of live chickens.
These are campaign donations.
But many voters aren’t impressed.
“We’re being laughed at,” said Will Brown, a Sparks Democrat. “This is absurd.”
…
“I don’t like Harry as the majority leader,” Brown said. “But before I pull the rug out from under him, I’d want to know we’ve got someone who is not an embarrassment to us.”
That’s bad news for Lowden, and I think it probably hurts other Republicans as well. I’d love to see some polling in this race. Markos says that he’s polling Nevada in the next week and plans to ask the approval of Lowden’s chicken plan.