Only Fools and Clowns Believe Republican Ideology
Have mercy, there is one MORE, Republican debate tonite! I’m pretty sure that most of Delaware Liberal’s readers will be getting their houses ready for Thanksgiving dinner, baking pies, taste testing the wines, picking the activities to keep the kids busy on the drive to Grandma’s or in Zumba class and therefore too busy to watch the carnage. If you happen to be watching (I hope after successful taste tests of the wine!), use this thread to comment on the train wreck. But to get you in the mood, Paul Krugman tells you everything you need to know about the current form of the GOP —
“I have a structural hypothesis here,” Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour Sunday. “You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn’t believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that’s just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can believe in. And that’s the Republican problem.”
Peggy Noonan (are you kidding?) defends Newtie and gets her butt handed back to her:
“We need a little on the pro-Newt side balance,” she remarked. “The base of the Republican Party knows that the establishment of the Republican Party doesn’t like Newt. That’s a big plus.”
“It was his time,” Krugman explained. “The Republican base does not want Romney and they keep on looking for an alternative. And Newt, although — somebody said, ‘He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.’ But he is more plausible than the other guys they’ve been pushing up.”
In other Gingrich news, there is some Christian group passing out flyers in Iowa questioning Newtie’s character via the number of marriages he has had.
Tags: Republican Bamboozlement
‘He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.’
spot on description of Newt.
These Republican candidates don’t believe ANYTHING. They are simply saying what they think voters want to hear. And unfortunately for a lot of voters they are right.
For too long, American voters have behaved like the townspeople in the Monty Python witch trial. Ignorant, atavistic, backward and not knowing or caring they are backward, and out for the blood of a scapegoat to excuse their own inadequacies, and not really caring about the facts.
And like the judge in that scene, Republican candidates have fed the mob and its know-nothing hysteria with one scapegoat after another, providing the phony logic to convict the scapegoat and take away any remaining shred of blame or painful conscience over their fate. Welfare queens, socialists, troop-haters, gays, hippies, foreigners, deadbeat homeowners, all have been paraded before the town with witch hat and fake nose. And the mob rejoiced. Damn the facts, bring us some fresh blood!
Americans weren’t always this way. Oh, we always had these tendencies as part of human nature, but ever since the Great Depression we understood these feelings are wrong. That we are our brother’s keeper, and that in a modern society it is possible to fail because of factors not under your control. So we kept our urge for scapegoating and blood lust under tight control for forty years.
But then Ronald Reagan told us to embrace those feelings and give them free rein, that those feelings were right and good. And a grateful nation let the demons loose from the catacombs where we had exiled them. For thirty years since, the way for Republicans to get elected has been to appeal to that mob.
But now, there may be the tiniest doubt. After ten years of Republican economic policy, some of those years quite crushing (just as under Reagan), enough Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their disposable income. Many of those Americans were those who gleefully took part in the mob. But now, there might be the faintest glimmering that the mob was wrong, we are our brother’s keeper, and the demons must be sent back to their imprisonment.
But the Republican candidates are still out there, trying to whip up the old mob with the old stories. And God help us, now Democrats are doing it too.
It is up to us to tell them No, we are done with that. We are once again going to embrace the liberal sensibilities of our better nature.
SO after Romney (who i still believe is the pre-determined winner, no matter what the primary election results say….. because the people will fall in line no matter what) for the sake of argument…. is NOT selected as the candidate…. It will be because of how he prays and how he thinks. He will be discriminated against by republicans (shocker) Will he have enough honor to turn his back on the party? or will he he go all McCain 2000 and present his soft under belly for Frank Luntz to feast upon? (rhetorical)
Up until the early 1980’s when we had a legitimate investigative newspaper culture, as a counter weight to the right wing public relations machine, it was easier to point out the craven scapegoating.
Now we have poor and middle class people who are such low information voters that they believe the television when it tells them that Newt has legitimate ideas on how to govern.