More on the RepubliWON'Ts

Greg Anrig at TPM Cafe discusses the fact that Bush can't be the ONLY thing screwing up the conservative project, considering he delegates everything to committed conservative ideologues. Maybe the problem isn't the messenger, but the message:

Congress has been in the hands of folks who learned everything they know about government policy from reading the National Review, attending Heritage Foundation workshops, and parroting soundbites provided by Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh. If Bush is some sort of rogue liberal – what about all the other proud conservatives who have been doing their thing to the country the past five years? This is what government run by people who proudly call themselves conservative looks like. Their failure is the failure of conservatism. Period.

And they're getting that in Kansas, of all places, where a horde of moderate conservatives are running, screaming, to the Democratic Party.

(Lt. Gov. candidate Mark) Parkinson became the third Republican politician in the last nine months to startle this red state by switching to the minority party. The other two are targeting GOP incumbents in the attorney general's office and in the state House of Representatives.

Political observers say the fracture within the Kansas GOP may foreshadow the future for the national party. The division between moderates and social conservatives is expected to define the contest for the party's 2008 presidential nomination [...]

"A lot of people in Kansas are feeling lost right now," said Parkinson, 48, who was invited onto the ticket by popular Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. "I decided I'd rather spend time building great universities than wondering if Charles Darwin was right."

The moderates are beginning to understand that the divisiveness and anti-progress policies of the hard-core GOP don't end up getting anything done for people. Indeed their entire point is to distract and subvert the real issues. Giving the fundies a voice, to the extent that in Kansas the Republican INSURANCE COMMISSIONER is being challenged because he's pro-choice, means that insurance issues might not be as prominent in the debate. Which suits real conservatives just fine. Conservative projects often fail by design, because success would mean that government works. And that's the last thing conservatives want. They want to destroy government to shrink government. They want to reduce it to the size where it can drown in the bathtub.

That's why I think the massive fraud taking place at FEMA is emblematic. FEMA used to be a model operation in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and James Lee WItt. Then the Bush Administration hired a bunch of people who weren't all that interested in effective management or serious policy, and everyone's eyes went off the ball. Indeed fraud on that scale HELPS the conservative ideology. Bad government means an outcry for LESS government, in their view.

That's why I've taken to calling the Party the RepubliWON'Ts because they simply refuse to govern in a way that would responsibly help Americans get to where they might want to go. There's a pointless debate in the Senate right now where they actually might get an anti-flag-burning amendment through the chamber. Only three countries on Earth have such an amendment (Cuba, China, and Iran), and furthermore this is a non-existent problem. There's a debate on Iraq, scheduled for tomorrow in the House, where the Majority Leader is telling his party to emphasize 9-11 and call your opponent "weak" and "conceding defeat on the battlefield." These are misleading and false choices, and they have nothing to do with the current policy and how it has proven unacceptable.

But this is the level of debate when you have a majority party that just refuses to govern.