A Look At The Monster

To see the monster that the Republican noise machine has created, you have to watch this rant by Bill O'Reilly with John McCain, where he

O’REILLY: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

MCCAIN: In America today we’ve got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don’t need so many.

O’REILLY: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don’t know, I don’t know. We’ve got to cap it.

MCCAIN: We do, we do. I agree with you.

This is essentially what people who get bombarded with the Republican noise machine hear day after day. They hear that brown people are filthy gutter people, white male Christians deserve to be the leaders of the nation by divine right. They hear that this is a deeply religious country and that religious leaders should govern our politics. They hear that everybody who isn't down with the Republican program is a witch and an America-hater. They even hear that the 90s were a horrible time to be an American even though it was a decade of peace and prosperity.

In a potential preview of next fall’s presidential contest, Mr. Giuliani, who is seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, directly attacked the leading Democratic candidate, Mrs. Clinton, over a speech she gave Tuesday in New Hampshire bemoaning the return of “robber barons” and promising to pursue “shared prosperity” by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.

“This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. “She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology.”

Giuliani's telling VC people in Silicon Valley that they shouldn't want to go back to the 1990s, when the NASDAQ was double what it is today. But in the upside-down world of wingnut logic, this makes sense.

John Boehner is out there trying to polish the GOP brand. He should abolish it. They kept adding new pieces into the mythology that were contradictory and doctrinaire and just plain thunderingly stupid that it's unsustainable. You have to believe so many wrong things about the world to be a true conservative that only the self-delusional can participate. The simple ideas of small government, freedom and personal responsibility are hoplessly gone. You can't have freedom AND torture, you can't have small government AND massive military spending and porkbarreling, you can't have personal responsibility AND blaming Democrats for mistakes that happened under one-party rule. The whole ideology is twisted into knots, and it's not surprising that the result is incoherent. Maybe that works for O'Reilly, but my sense is that the rest of the country is tuning it out.

UPDATE: The New Yorker article on the Republican implosion is a good read along these lines, though it sort of just presents the folly and you have to do the work yourself.