I checked in at the Power Line site to see what the Philosophers might be saying about the latest episode of Michele Bachmann's moving lips. While still hyperventilating about the hoax of climate change during the middle of a scorching drought, they are silent about Bachmann. I conclude she is indefensible.
But she is really not so much more far gone than the rest of her party. Rick Santorum, silver medalist in their recently concluded Presidential Sweepstakes, is an ardent foe of contraception. Last April Alan West, who represents a Florida district in the Congress, charged that "78 to 81" Democratic representatives belong to the Communist Party. (Apparently there are 78 open-and-shut cases and three others who are suspected only by sages like him.) Four years ago, the party's vice-presidential candidate was the half-term, half-wit governor of Alaska. Let's return to this year's Republican presidential aspirants, who were asked in a debate whether they'd support a budget deal in which there were ten dollars of cuts for every one dollar of new revenue: eight candidates, all opposed. Newt Gingrich is sometimes said to qualify as a big-thinking Republican intellectual. Alack, it's true. Those with a stronger claim to the title are falling away. The conservative jurist Richard Posner recently said, "I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy."
Thus the conclusion of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two sober observers of the American political scene, in their Washington Post editorial, "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the problem":
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Many people thing we have two major political parties, one liberal, the other conservative. It would be nice if this were true. Actually, we have two parties, one moderately conservative, the other bat-shit crazy--or, more politely, "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts."
