The Decline and Fall of the Republican Party

It's been said of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates that they are abysmally stupid. Their use of facts is scant, inaccurate and always misleading or self-serving. But the blatant nature of these misuses is what troubles most people.

Granted, in the information age, it's a lot easier to look things up and do fact checking than in times past. Playing loose and fast with the facts isn't terribly new. But we're talking facts which they SHOULD KNOW without having a little gnome whispering them in their ear. For example, Rick Perry blasted Obama over withdrawing our troops from Iraq, saying that Perry would send them back. He lambasted Obama as catering "to his liberal leftist base." and suggested that the U.S. could have negotiated staying.

Obama tried on several occasions to negotiate that but was firmly rebuffed by the Iraqis. Any goodwill credit the U.S. had saved up with them for freeing them from Hussein had long since been spent and the Iraqis (not to mention the majority of the American People) wanted us out. Bush negotiated the original treaty and it was Bush who established the timeline that Obama was required to follow.

No one is sorry to see Iraq fade in the rear-view mirror of American history - except the oil companies who were certainly frothing at the mouth at the thought of exploiting their oil (until they, too, were kicked out of the country). Perry, being from Texas which is huge in oil and whose campaign has been driven by oil company funding, is certain to want to go back.

But the American people aren't. Anyone with two functioning brain cells would know better than to say, "I'll send the troops back to Iraq." For a governor trying to get elected in Texas, that may fly. Texas is a reliably right-wing state and no one loves killing people more than Texans do (Except, maybe, Florida, another reliably right-wing state). But this isn't the Texas governorship he's running for. By saying something that retarded, one may as well shoot themselves in the head politically speaking if they want to get elected to the PRESIDENCY. And yet, he said it.

This is merely one of many examples of stupidity among the GOP candidates. Michelle Bachmann finally dropped out after setting a record low for foot-in-mouth disease. Herman Cain dropped out when his lecherous background caught up with him. Both should have known better than to run in the first place.

But why did they?

One could shrug and claim stupidity, but I believe it goes deeper than that.

There is a dichotomy in the Republican party. The "old school" republicans are getting on in years. They were the ones who mouthed the same rightist rhetoric, but they usually knew to put the needs of the country first. They weren't fundamentally stupid enough to actually endanger the stability of the United States.

Then we have the tea partiers. I don't dignify the name with capitals. These are generally younger people who have grown up listening to the poisonous rhetoric the Republicans kept spouting. But rather than taking it for the hyperbole it was, they began to actually believe it. It was never meant as anything more than talk. Campaign promises were famously ignored in Congress. They were whatever needed to be said to get into office. Like saying people would have two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage (yes, a campaign slogan from the past), it was hyperbole: a thing that was not meant to be taken seriously. Most of us know better than to believe them. But apparently, other things got in the way of that message and the rank and file right-wing fringe didn't get the memo.

Religious manipulation of right-wing followers created people who can't think logically or rationally. To them, the facts are whatever they want them to be, because that's what their political leaders have been telling them. Things like "Evolution is just a theory", or "Gays marriage will undermine the the institution of marriage", or even "If we give the negro the right to vote, the whole country will go to hell." These lies were repeated and passed on as facts. These "facts" were blatant catering to the right-wings' prejudices and preconceptions strictly for the purposes of getting elected, of course, but they started to be believed. In believing this kind of nonsense, it creates nonsense thinking. People believe the lie. We call them "sociopaths". Those people grew up and became voters.

And THAT is what caused the schism which happened in the GOP. The younger right-wingers, believing things that weren't intended to be taken to their logical conclusions, having been manipulated by their religion and politics to ignore reason and embrace ignorance, have finally entered the political fray as political leaders.

The politically retarded, and socipathic, are getting into office.

And they can get in simply because they believe their rhetoric - the same rhetoric the right-wing has been spouting all along. Only now, they're seriously into it instead of treating it as a means to an ends. The long and short of it is that we have a bunch of sociopathic people who can't think willing to destroy the country in pursuit of unrealistic and impossible goals trying to become the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth.

And you thought things couldn't get worse?

If someone wonders why the right-wing is out of control, this seems to be a reasonable explanation for it. And this decay, the radicalism of the hard-core right-wing, will eventually destroy the party. It's a terminal cancer within them. They need to either cut it out or be consumed by it. And given that even moderate Republican candidates insist on cleaving to the GOP while simultaneously trying to cater to this increasingly radical - and more importantly more insistent that their elected representatives actually fulfill their unrealistic, impossible campaign promises - fringe instead of telling them to go pound sand and put the good of the country ahead of the radical right's agenda, I believe the GOP will go the way of the Whigs and fade from the political scene as a political power. They will be marginalized, isolated and finally ignored (or arrested as they become increasingly radicalized).

In either case, the fact is, the GOP is fracturing into the old-school conservative pragmatists and the new far-right radicals. Neither can, in and of itself, sustain a political power larger than a small minority (which may be why they make uneasy allies). But if they want to retain any chance at being part of the political process, they will have to divest themselves of the far right and move toward the center to pick up right-of-center former GOP members who no longer recognize their party.

To put it bluntly, the GOP must move left toward the middle in order to remain a viable political power and leave the tea party fringe to fend for itself. If it doesn't do that, a new, centrist party will arise and will continue to draw disaffected Republicans from the old party, leaving behind nothing but radical idealists with no allegiance to anything but their own ideologies as the inheritors of Lincoln's party.

They have sown the whirlwind, and are now reaping a harvest of pain.