The elephants in the room

[dweller]

How the GOP lost its way
13 FEB 2008 • by Hal Crowther

Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle:

"To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy," wrote the liberal economist Paul Krugman, "and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the GOP base, however, you have to say some very stupid things, like Mr. Romney's declaration that we should 'double Guantanamo ... .'"

The next morning, at the bottom of the same op-ed page, after boasting that Romney graduated in the top 5 percent of his class at Harvard Business School, the conservative David Brooks asked us, "Why do the Democratic candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the Republicans pretend to be dumber?"
To answer Brooks as if he didn't know is condescending, so we assume his question is rhetorical. But "the media" have become a bubble where the people inside don't always grasp what is obvious to everyone outside. What Brooks probably knows, he will never write—that Democrats pretend to be as smart as they can because they think many of their target voters are intelligent and discriminating, while Republicans pretend to be as dumb as they can because they think most of their base is even dumber. (The smart ones, they think, understand that the candidates are just whoring themselves to snare the slack-jaws.) This humorously sorry state of the party, the wages of four decades of cynical success, was pulled into focus by a Times headline from the Republican primary camps in New Hampshire: "Candidates Spar Over Who Is a Real Republican."

They can spar until Jesse Helms endorses Barack Obama, but the Real Republican will never emerge from this pack or any other. In its pursuit of power, the Republican Party has dismembered and reassembled itself so that a thousand livid sutures are showing. It's not a party but a Frankenstein monster, patched together from dead and discontinued materials, organ transplants that may yet be rejected, rough pieces that look familiar but never match. Since the party's symbol is the elephant, the parable of the blind men and the elephant is relevant: Touch the thing here and it's a briefcase, over there a cross, down there a bomb, a gasoline pump, a pistol, a golf club, a fetus—a noose? Republicans are no longer a party but a loose coalition of Americans who hate things—different things—praying that fear and aversion can win them another four years of power and excess. Ed Rollins, the old Ronald Reagan operative now working for Mike Huckabee, recently acknowledged the party's unnatural composition and the fact that hasty old stitch work is coming undone. "It's gone," said Rollins. "The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition—social conservatives, defense conservatives, anti-tax conservatives—it doesn't mean a whole lot to people anymore."

What is this quilted, decomposing thing, lurching across the cornfields, scaring crows in Iowa and moose in New Hampshire, terrifying the lowly possum in the South Carolina pinewoods? It used to be my daddy's party, his beloved GOP. Without a coherent identity, without appealing or plausible candidates who can even simulate sincerity, the patchwork party's primary season has been a ghoulish cabaret, scary-funny, more Mel Brooks than Mary Shelley. Every morning's newswire yielded comic treasure. Did Giuliani really say "I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent"? Is it possible that his panicked opponents have tried to hamstring the surging fundamentalist Huckabee, who repudiates evolution, by calling him a liberal? And Huckabee, pressed to defend a son who killed a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp—god love our working press—did he say "It was mangy—it looked like it was going to attack"?

John McCain, now the presumptive GOP nominee, earned his idiot stripes by declaring that "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation"—an embarrassment he could have avoided by reading our absolutely God-and-Christ-free Constitution on page 498 of the new World Almanac. Romney and Giuliani would reverse themselves up to 180 degrees on guns and abortions; Romney styled himself a secret hunter, a closet Nimrod, though there's not as much as a shotgun pellet to prove it. The candidates were divided on the issue of—torture? In their clumsy passion to whore their way into the hearts of Republican conservatives, these mangy candidates have the look of dogs that won't hunt anywhere. And they seemed to have no handlers, no writers or researchers, no scouts to steer them through the minefields created by their own lies and evasions. Primary season has never been kind to the truth; but in an age when any voter can check any lie online, pandering to the base as if it has no mind, no memory and no investment in reality has become a distinctly Republican perversion. In their desperation to connect, Republican candidates could scarcely be distinguished from cloacal right-wing propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who say absolutely anything that comes into their heads and expect their audience to believe it because they want to.

Logic dictates that presidential candidates of the patchwork party, staggering under the weight of the Iraq war and their own mendacity, will soon be as dead as the poor beast at the Scout camp, and that by the time their burlesque is concluded the survivor will be begging his Democratic opponent for a chance to die with dignity. But logic dictated that George W. Bush was too inconsequential to be elected governor of Texas. It dictates that a corrupt two-party system most Americans despise will soon be replaced by something more democratic and manageable, perhaps even less expensive. It dictates that a party made of four or five belligerent constituencies with nothing in common would lose every election—yet up till the eve of the 2006 midterms, the Republican Frankenstein was enjoying one of the longest winning streaks in its checkered history.

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dp

[shraby]

1. Crowther is always good!

He had one when the torture at Abu Ghraib story broke that was excellent. You could feel his anger.

[dweller]

2. i especially hope readers make it to the end of the article

where they will find this:

I have no consoling confidence that a fairly impressive selection of Democratic candidates—Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, even the brilliant, unreliable two-headed creature its enemies call "Billary"—includes that savior, that consummate surgeon who will be able to stop the arterial bleeding in the Middle East. One of them deserves a chance to try. But neither Iraq nor the gathering jihad Bush has blindly nurtured is necessarily the end of the American imperium. We still have money and weapons to spare, and ample manpower once we start drafting college boys to replace the poor soldiers we wasted in the wrong war, in the wrong country. The true firebell in the night rang quietly, compared with the screaming sirens in the Middle East. I heard it ringing in a Times story under the byline of Adam Cohen. It appeared a few weeks ago and didn't create much of a stir. It scared me to death. According to Cohen, a wealthy trial lawyer named Paul Minor, a major supporter of John Edwards and a bellwether of the minority Democratic Party in Mississippi, is now serving an 11-year prison sentence for, in Cohen's words, "a crime that does not look much like a crime at all."

Minor, son of a famous liberal journalist, was convicted of violating the state's vague campaign finance laws. Apparently lawyers in ethically easygoing Mississippi have always contributed openly to the campaign funds of judges who may later hear their cases. But only Democrats have been prosecuted for conflict of interest, and only under the politicized Bush Justice Department recently run by Alberto Gonzales. Minor was a painful thorn in the local Republicans' side; Cohen claims that his real crime was his fight to keep a slate of pro-business Republicans from taking over the state Supreme Court in 2000. "Disturbingly vague," Cohen calls the corruption charge on which Minor was convicted, and his draconian sentence effectively silenced all political activity by trial lawyers, the chief support of the Democratic Party in Mississippi.

You see where we're going. Cohen is implying, and not cautiously, that Minor is a political prisoner—a case for Amnesty International. He suspects that former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, now serving a seven-year sentence, was a similar victim. Gonzales' partisan manipulation of U.S. attorneys is the focus of hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, where one Alabama Republican testified that she'd heard Karl Rove himself directed the plot to "hang Don Siegelman." Another indignant witness, who called the Justice Department's prosecution of a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat "bizarre," was Dick Thornburgh, Republican attorney general under Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Savor the headline, "Opposition Leaders Jailed." Does it remind you of our wonderful allies in Pakistan, and all the vicious little countries where martial law is declared and words like "dictator," "strongman," "coup" and "junta" are routine? Never in the United States, not in our wildest dreams. And these are wealthy men, these prisoners, with the best lawyers and the best connections. If it can happen to them, it can happen overnight to you or me. Eleven years? You realize many murderers serve less. If Cohen has it right, this is the final insult, the final straw imposed by a party that abandoned every principle in its pursuit of power. Will you vote for these thugs? Would you die for them? Islamic extremists have proven, to our amazement, their readiness to die for their god and their prophet. The beauty of America was always that our citizens would sacrifice themselves not for god or king or glorious leader, but for a way of life and a set of laws they believed in. (For African-American soldiers, it was harder.) I don't know about you. But I wouldn't lift a finger to defend a country where such a creepy, fascist, banana republic trick could pass inspection.


dp