Why the GOP Can't Come to Terms with Reality

 photograph "zirkus-circus" by Thomas Totz, used pursuant to Creative Commons license|

by Damozel | Can it be?  Is it so?  Ben Smith and Jon Martin at The Politico seem to be predicting a pro-reality "rebellion" on the part of Republicans who have tired of the bizarro-world circus atmosphere of the party's first three months well and truly out of power. 

A quick tour through the week’s headlines suggests the Republican Party is beginning to come to terms with the last election and that consensus is emerging among GOP elites that the party needs to move away from discordant social issues.

But, aha!  The key phrase, it turns out, is "GOP elites."  The base?  Maroons to the end.  In other words, the clowns are threatening to strike and the ringmasters have suddenly realized that everyone else has left the tent.  

[O]utside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.

"There is a sense of rebellion brewing," said Katon Dawson, the outgoing South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who cited unexpectedly high attendance at anti-tax “tea parties” last week.  (The Politico)

A rebellion!  Christ knows how that will look....   Um, oh, wait.  Actually, we know exactly how it will look.  DWT:

We watched that rebellion on tape 2 weeks ago as Gresham Barrett, a right-wing congressman who had hoped to become South Carolina's next governor, was mercilessly booed at the Greenville teabagger party. And Barrett has dedicated his entire political career to far right extremism-- except when it got in the way of his ability to raise "donations" from the now unpopular banksters. The Republican Party, devoid of respected leadership, and stuck with the flotsam and jetsam of opportunistic hacks like Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Hensarling, McConnell, Kyl, and Cornyn, has no choice but to embrace the paranoid hate, ignorance and bigotry of its base-- and race towards... well losing another dozen or two congressional seats in 2010.

Meanwhile, the base is still demanding that its leaders embrace their platform of fear-and-hatred-of-the-other:

That same sense is detectable in New Hampshire, where Union Leader publisher Joseph McQuaid – a stalwart of the base – warned in a column last weekend that the push for same-sex marriage in the state legislature was really about “forcing society to embrace and give positive reinforcement to their lifestyle and agenda in our schools and in every other area of public life imaginable.”

And it is perhaps most tangible in Iowa, where same-sex marriage will become the law this month in response to a state Supreme Court ruling. There, Republican activists and officials say the party is as resolute as ever, if not more so, on cultural issues – regardless of the soundings of some party elites.(The Politico)

It's the same agenda of obliviousness and Fox/Rush-generated-and-fostered misdirected fear and rage as always:  the people at the bottom of the pyramid don't want affordable health care, tax breaks for the not-so-wealthy, and stimulus money to kick-start the economy.  They especially don't want gay people to be happy. 

From their standpoint, it's all about having other people's "values" force-fed to them, even though I -- just for example -- have no intention of forcing anyone to get gay married or to choose abortion over life.  I just want the affordable health care, the tax breaks, and the stimulus money.

But this is the segment of the American public that is always angry and whose anger always masks a deep, deep fear masking an even deeper anger.  Those fellow Americans who don't share their values and simply want to make it possible for those who don't to pursue their own interests in their own way are perceived as somehow interfering with the "rights" of the Right.  And certainly they sense the contempt in which they are generally held by other Americans of a less Taliban-like bent.  Certainly they do.

And so....

"I’ve never seen the grass-roots quite as motivated, concerned and angry," said Steve Scheffler, the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance and the state's RNC committeeman.....

Asked about how a presidential candidate urging the party toward the middle on cultural issues would fare, Scheffler said flatly: “They’re not gonna go anywhere.”

In one sense, Republican leaders face the same challenge their Democratic counterparts did during the Bush years: how to effectively channel the deep emotion of the base while tamping down its excesses. (The Politico)

Only Jesus himself could tamp down those excesses.  But since Jesus was a progressive too, even Jesus might not be able to channel the flow of those "deep emotions."  After all, he failed at it the first time.

We're talking about the same sort of mentality that turned on him from practically the moment he said, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."  One word to that lot about doing to others as you would be done by, treating those most despised by society with the deepest compassion and care; what you have to give up to follow him, and Jesus would be forced to raise Pontius Pilate from the dead so Pilate could condemn him all over again. 

The angry and frightened will always be with us, forming mobs, waving pikes and teabags, screaming for those who offend them to be hanged in effigy, on the nearest cottonwood, or on the cross. 

The GOP needs to quit trying to manipulate the fury of that segment of society before it brings itself crashing down like a house built on sand, but it's become too addicted to power to do what it needs to do to recover its connection to reality:  push the racists, the religious nuts, and the plain old nuts out of the tent. 

Heh. skippy says -- you'll have to click the link to find out in response to what -- "if these people ever learn how to spell, we might be in trouble."

More at Memeorandum....

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