The Escalating Downhill Slide

Eve Fairbanks has an article in the Washington Post today discussing the developing core of the Republican Party in the house: committed to ideology over practicality, this group of new young movement conservatives prefer to be philosophically consistent rather than getting down to the hard business of compromise and, you know, governing.

It’s been a fair long while since the Republican Party (especially in the House, but with a handful of nutters in the Senate) have been interested in actually running the government. When reality contradicts what they believe (trickle-down economics works, having solid first principles is more important than experience, education or knowledge), they simply ignore reality. The end result of this is a group of people in deep red seats that are committed to their own version of the world, no matter what happens. This is the logical endgame of the Republican Party, who for going on forty years now have believed that if reality contradicts them (in the form, especially, of the media) it’s best to simply ignore and slander it.

Talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (ironic spell check suggestions: Sanity) and the rest of the Fox News crew have based their whole program on ignoring and dismissing what their “enemies” (and “enemy” here should be read as “people who disagree and/or point out that they’re wrong”) contradict them, they are either to be ignored, marginalized or demonized, whichever is most convenient. This has certainly been a successful tactic up until now and has reached its fullest flower in Sarah Palin. Instead of learning from their legislative defeats in 2006 and what looks like an upcoming electoral slaughterhouse in 2008, these delightful conservative lawmakers are adapating a new version of the Tinkerbell Theory of Electorial Politics: if you lose, it’s not because voters have dismissed your arguments – it’s just that you didn’t lay out your arguments forcefully enough.

All of this is certainly fine with me. The Republican Party’s headlong rush to religious, racist regionalism can only be of benefit to the rest of the Union. I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you, fellas, but I don’t want to lie.