The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin

[brooklynite]

Washington Post:

When The Post’s front page declares: “Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national party,” it’s time to ask: How did this come to pass?

You can choose from a litany of insurrections, government shutdowns and other self-inflicted wounds. But this year’s carnival-like GOP presidential primary makes one event, in retrospect, stand out as a crucial turning point on the road to upheaval: the 2008 embrace of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat from the presidency.

Palin’s blatant lack of competence and preparedness needs no belaboring. What’s critical is that substantive, serious Republican leaders either wouldn’t or couldn’t declare, before or after the election: “This is not what our party stands for. We can and must do better.”

...snip...

Once McCain put Palin on the ticket, Republican “grown-ups,” who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down of the party. They stood by as Donald Trump and others noisily pushed claims that Obama was born in Kenya. And they gladly rode the tea party tiger to sweeping victories in 2010 and 2014.

If McCain can't acknowledge his screw-up, hard to imagine anyone else would.

[Ilsa]

1. If the movie Game Change was based in fact,

it seems that Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace knew, and to some degree, spoke up against the ignorance-embracing tea party. But I suspect they were largely alone.

[nruthie]

2. Pretty much sums it all up.

[Glitterati]

3. I disagree. It started with W's "selection"

Palin was just a side show.

[uawchild]

9. I also disagree. Its really started with Reagan's presidency

Reagan was the frontman for America's unhinging lurch to the insane right.

[we can do it]

15. You got it. It's been awful for decades.

[jberryhill]

31. Winner, winner, chicken dinner

[Blue_In_AK]

40. Yes, Reagan, absolutely.

The beginning of the end, although I will say that Nixon never should have been pardoned. Gerald Ford was a feel-good kind of guy, and I can understand him wanting to put Watergate behind us, but he really did the country no favors.

[trof]

60. I'm convinced that Ford's pardon of Nixon was part of the deal. Here it is:

"Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-ninth."
http://watergate.info/1974/09/08/ford-pardons-nixon.html

This was a blanket pardon for any and all offenses that had occurred, might have occurred, etc. I guess if Nixon had murdered Pat (his wife) during this period, he would have gotten off, scot free.


I'm convinced that Ford's pardon of Nixon was a condition of his being selected to replace Spiro Agnew as vice-president. Agnew had been forced to resign because of corruption charges that would surely have resulted in his impeachment.

So...for the first (and so far only) time in the history of our nation both our president and vice-president were forced to resign one jump ahead of impeachment proceedings.

'Resigned' looks much better on your resume' than "IMPEACHED".


This is a time and acts that should live in infamy (to borrow a phrase) in American politics.
The Republican Party should NEVER be able to live this down.

[hifiguy]

43. Agreed. See my "history" post below.

[LuckyLib]

51. Yes it did. Reagan was clearly a doophus as a CA governor,

and we laughed and said we "gave" him to the rest of the country who loved that feel-good air-headed puppet managed by his handlers. Then when he was no longer cognitively competent to be in the office, it was all carefully covered up. The BS began then and has just snowballed. No idiot is too dim for the Republicans -- witness the Clown Car they have now.

[Warren DeMontague]

57. Oddly enough, Jerry Ford and maybe even Bob Dole were like the last ones with a brain.

[Bucky]

52. They just keep getting worse and worse

Reagan talked slow, but at least he never shut down the government. He supported terrorism in Nicaragua, but he more or less stuck to the Truman Doctrine to see the Cold War come to a close. He talked a mean game, but at the end of the week he at least cut the deals and knew to backtrack on his no new taxes policy.

The problem since Reagan is that the rest of his acolytes don't understand it was all stage magic. While the Gipper put on a good presto-chango show, he never actually sawed a woman in half. Newt had some of that same quality, eventually backing down from the periodic shut-down threats. He knew it was a game, a high wire act, even if he occasionally paid the price of somersaulting in mid-air without a net.

Since Newt, they've just got dumber and dumber. Quayle, Dubya, Palin... how slow can ya go? Reading wise, they were putterers, but at least they had visible displays of energy on the stump. Now they're on the verge of rejecting a charlatan huckster, not because he's racist, but because he lacks sufficient outward signs of dementia like the new front runner, Dr. Boo Radley.

[Cyrano]

4. I think what drove them nuts was

Obama, a president whose color they don't like.

[Bucky]

53. nah, they went nuts over Clinton and are going nuts over Clinton II

Not that race isn't a factor at all, but it's not the only thing. Stoopid this big can't have just one cause. It's a perfect storm of imbecility out there.

[randome]

5. Bush, Jr., Palin, Romney and now Trump.

It's not always a steady progression (Romney was more incompetent than evil) but the pattern is clear.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[aikoaiko]

6. You can see the seeds that were planted by Goldwater and Reagan even though they would be

repulsed by what grew out of their conservatism.

[yeoman6987]

7. I actually think newt Gingrich did the beginning damage

[aikoaiko]

17. I think you're right that Gingrich is when republican in congress got crazy nasty

[Phentex]

44. He was a very nasty pretend politician before he put on a suit and went to D.C...

just despicable at the local level. Then he got a little attention and a fan base and became downright dangerous.

[trof]

8. I think it was backlash from Nixon/Watergate.

That's when the repugs got into the "We're gonna get you back for that."
It was no longer about 'governing' for the overall good of the nation.
It was about 'revenge' for what they perceived that 'we' (Dems) did to Nixon.
It's gone downhill ever since.

[malaise]

16. Ding ding we have a winner

because you see ReTHUGs must never pay for their criminality

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

27. That was when they declared war on the media

You could argue they hated the media for McCarthy being exposed.....but after Cronkite going on air and calling Vietnam a quagmire and Woodward and Bernstein and all of that......they declared war on the media so as to make anything they reported on them, such as Iran/Contra and the attack on the Clintons to be "biased".

[Gidney N Cloyd]

29. That was probably the butterfly flapping its wings.

Though possibly it goes back to not 'having Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.'

[edhopper]

10. Like most things with the GOP today

it started with Reagan:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. "

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

30. But that wasn't dysfunction

The GOP has actually, sadly, run like a well oiled machine in it's criminal and lying elements for years.

Only recently have they lost their narrative, and it's hurting them......though not enough. They still have Congress.

[edhopper]

36. This mindset

that the government and everything it does (except the military) is bad, has brought us the tea party and all the government hating politicians we now have.

[randys1]

54. He planted the seed...To this day he is worshipped by the rich for drastically reducing

their taxes while simultaneously destroying the middle class and infrastructure.

[CrispyQ]

11. Getting in bed with the fundies was their first mistake.

http://theocracywatch.org

Some interesting reading at the link above. The Dominionists are a scary group of people. Many years ago when Jack Cafferty was still allowed a few minutes on Blizter's show, he did a segment on them & asked viewers to write in. Of the 7-8 comments he read, only one person had heard of them & everyone expressed a combination of dismay & fear at how crazy they sounded. Jack made a comment at the end that people need to educate themselves about this group, but of course, CNN would never consider an hour long special on that.

Even today, I wonder if GOP leadership has any idea just how crazy their crazies are?

[Brother Buzz]

22. Specifically, the watershed moment happened when Reagan hired Robert Billings

Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings hired on as a Reagan's campaign adviser, and the deal was pretty much sealed.

[annabanana]

12. It is a genuine continuum from the Civil War.

via Nixon's "Southern Strategy"

[dembotoz]

13. you could go back further to lbj and civil rights.when the crazies left the dems... who cares

does not matter when the cancer strikes, only that all if it is removed

[Octafish]

14. I think it started with secret government.

Back when CIA director Allen Dulles contracted with the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro in 1960.

[villager]

28. Well, that too. It's been a long inevitable trajectory since the in-earnest collusion

...with both corporations and the MIC in the wake of WWII.

I wrote downthread that I thought it began, in earnest, with Reagan, but I think that was in terms of putting a public face to the bitterness and craziness they use to win elections.

Not that weren't clear traces of that in the Goldwater and Nixon campaigns...

[hifiguy]

46. More or less everything concerning the extermination

of actual representative democracy can be traced back to the establishment of the Deep State/Double Government in the immediate postwar era of the late 1940s to early 1950s. See Michael Glennon's "National Security and Double Government" a bone-chilling book if ever one there was.

It was developed, birthed and midwifed by the Dulles brothers and their supposedly ex-Nazi friends they brought over from Germany after the war; there was nothing at all "ex-Nazi" about most of them, which is exactly the Dulles brothers got them out of Germany. Others played their parts, but the Dulleses (who hated the idea of fighting Germany, which they and the oligarchic clients of their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, saw as the bright, shining face of a pirate capitalist future) and their little German friends were the prime movers.

In a very real sense, Nazi Germany can be said to have won WW II. Its ideals, absent the anti-Semitism, largely captured the true power in the US government over the last 65 years.

The key moment was, of course, the (almost certainly Dulles planned-and-approved) coup of 11.22.1963.

[RobinA]

18. Ken Starr

was the official shark jumping in my opinion. It probably started earlier, but Starr was the when they finally left the rails.

[GeorgeGist]

19. It's been downhill since Eisenhower.

[Rex]

58. Agree 100%, Ike warned us all not to build the MIC.

We ignored him completely.

[geek tragedy]

20. the Nixonian politics of white resentment nt

[gratuitous]

21. So many mileposts on this road

Difficult to pick just one as when it "all started." But it's been appalling to watch the slide even since as recently as 2008, and realize that the popular media haven't done a thing to inform the public just how wretched the current policies of the GOP are. It's not "opinions differ" or "both sides," it's one political party doing its level best to dismantle the social, economic, and physical structure of the nation while the millionaires who are supposed to tell the public about these things worries more about being invited to the next big cocktail party.

[ryan_cats]

23. It started

It started with Nixon and I'm not talking about Watergate.

[retread]

24. That was my first thought, then I remembered Goldwater. n/t

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

25. It started before that, but Palin's clumsiness allowed it to become obvious

"This is real America", a phrase she used several times in rural areas, made it obvious she was only interested in speaking to a certain demographic and her supporters, not America as a whole.

[villager]

26. It started, in earnest, with Reagan in 1980

I mean, there were behind-the-scenes moves, like Nixon's Vietnam war treason during the '68 election.

But as far as a public face to the craziness, it was the Reagan boys with their demonizing the opposition (us, in other words) from 1980 onward, along with the courting of apocalyptic Evangelicals, etc...

[Marr]

34. They were really just useful stooges for a long time, though, with no real say in anything.

Sure, they had the occasional bone thrown their way, but the party establishment retained a very firm grip on the reins. Sometime in the fairly recent past, they lost control of it, and their loony base has been exerting actual control of the party.

[villager]

35. Except that many of us could see exactly that coming, from 1980 onward...

Perhaps that was my point: The present moment has been inevitable for the GOP, since 1980...

[Warren DeMontague]

32. It's not like Dan Quayle was any towering intellect.

[hifiguy]

48. As dumb as Quayle was, is, and always will be,

Sparklemoose and the teatalitarians make him look and sound damn near like Stephen Hawking.

A concept that borders on science fiction.

[Warren DeMontague]

56. Certainly up there in the top ten reasons I keep voting for the Democrat come hell or high water-

Because no matter how bad the GOP ever is, somehow they always seem to manage to be able to get even worse.

[Marr]

33. I agree that Palin roughly marks the spot where the GOP's loony base got free of the leash.

[3catwoman3]

38. Civility certainly went down the sewer...

...when she came on the scene.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

37. Ralph Reed and his Christian Coalition didn't help much. nt

[0rganism]

39. i'd put it much earlier than that

like back when Nixon decided to tailor the Republican party to embrace southern racists to win elections
his strategic choices, while seemingly incremental changes at the time, have led to consequences much further-reaching than i presume Nixon himself would have desired

[missingfink]

41. All the points are valid

There have been a continuous build-up of starting places for the way GOP politics are at the moment. Not to be overlooked is the effect that right wing radio/tv have played in this slide. Rush Limbaugh & the clowns at Fox Noise have certainly help divide America.

[hifiguy]

42. The real roots of the prion disease are further back in history.

Back in the 1970s when the old-guard wealthy far-right (many of whom were still, in essence, Nazi sympathizers who never forgave FDR for the New Deal and fighting against Fascist Germany, which they thought was the shining wave of the future) made common cause with the rising tides of religulously insane fundymentalpatients, and the preachers' roots also lay in a more American form of fascism akin to that described by Sinclair Lewis.

Their first project was getting the Zombie King himself, Raygun, into the WH.

The history is described in enormous and fascinating, enlightening detail in three books by historian Rick Perlstein ("Before The Storm," "Nixonland" and "The Invisible Bridge&quot and Kevin Kruse's equally frightening "One Nation Under God."

Princess Sparklemoose and the teatalitarians are nothing more than the more distilled version of a fascist madness that has deep, deep roots in this country. This has been a long time a-brewin'.

[bemildred]

45. +1. Indeed so. nt

[hifiguy]

47. You don't even have to read that many books

to connect the dots. The ones in my prior post, Michael Glennon's "National Security and Double Government", Steve Kinzer's "The Brothers" a joint biography of Allen and John Foster Dulles, and the very shortly forthcoming "The Devil's Chessboard" (a comprehensive overview of the career of Allen Dulles) explain it all. Every bit of how this country has gone so tragically wrong since WW II.

[bemildred]

50. There are many, they go way back.

Walter Karp is good. Yours are good. Gore Vidal, Ferdinand Lundberg, and Lewis Lapham all did excellent deconstructions of the rich and their games with our democracy. We don't want to connect the dots. We think we are going to be rich too. That's why all the emphasis on growth, without growth, people will be faced with what they have.

[Sunlei]

49. still not sure why Palin got the VP spot. something to do with the pregnancies?

Old Mom pregnant Palin, not her pregnant kid.

[hifiguy]

55. The story I have most often read and seen cited

was that McGrump had a terrible sad because the party powers told him he could under no circumstances nominate his BFF the nominally democratic warmonger and scumbucket Moldy Joe Lieberman. So the floor was thrown open to suggestions, including sitting Repig governors.

Palin's name came up by way of the noisehole of (who the fuck else but Mister Wrong About EVERYTHING FOREVER) Bill Kristol, who literally and openly had a huge high-school crush on the big-winkin', fancy pageant walkin' MILF of his sticky little dreams after meeting her at some conference of reichwing dingbats he attended after Sparklemoose was elected governor.

BILL KRISTOL was the shitweasel who ultimately foisted her on McGrump and thence the nation.

[Blue_In_AK]

61. From a local Alaska perspective,

some of us have thought that she was picked (with the encouragement of Big Oil) to get her out of Alaska where she was a thorn in the sides of the industry. She had raised taxes on them substantially and they weren't happy about it. Her replacement, Sean Parnell, was much more friendly to the oil companies, having been a ConocoPhillips lobbyist and attorney for Exxon during the spill litigation. Under his rule, the tax law was rolled back, with the result that we are now paying more to the oil industry in incentives than we're taking in in revenue, which kind of sucks when you're an oil-based economy.

This is just speculation, of course, and i'm sure the other reasons listed also factored in. There's no doubt though that the industry wasn't sad to see her go.

[hifiguy]

62. Maybe someone put a bug in Kristol's ear. Wouldn't be a bit surprising if it happened.

But Kristol's centrality to her being picked seems to be the accepted gospel. Though surely more could be involved.

[Rex]

59. Ike warned the nation not to waste our money on bullets and bombs.

Nobody listened. It all started back in the 1950s. Reagan was a catalyst to the downfall.