Editorials & Other Articles

babylonsister

(171,075 posts) Wed May 9, 2012, 07:09 AM May 2012

Why Conservatives Chose Nuttiness

http://www.nationalmemo.com/lyons-mass-conservative-delusion/

Why Conservatives Chose Nuttiness
May 9th, 2012 7:00 am Gene Lyons

Following the comprehensive failures of President George W. Bush, conservatives faced a hard choice: rethink or go crazy. For too many, the election of Barack Obama appears to have made it, so to speak, a no-brainer. Millions have chosen the comforts of delusion, envisioning the ordinary give and take of politics in a democracy as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.

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But it took the economic catastrophe caused by George W. Bush’s policies followed by the election of President Obama—not merely a black man, it’s important to note, but a black Democrat with a foreign-sounding name—to bring that paranoia to epidemic proportions.

In consequence, longtime GOP congressional aide Mike Lofgren wrote last year in explaining his resignation, “the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”

In practical terms, for Obama to succeed where Bush had manifestly failed also had the potential to reduce the GOP to a powerless bloc of neo-Confederate whiners for a generation. So Obama had to fail at all costs.

Sometimes it’s appeared as if the president himself was the only man in Washington who didn’t grasp the irrational zeal of his GOP rivals. “Has his vision of himself as a transformative figure, his sheer narcissism,” I wrote two years ago “made him confuse the rough-and-tumble of Washington with the genteel precincts of the Harvard Law Review?”

Alas, crazy can’t be reasoned with, only defeated.