The Shrine

GOP 'cranks' dominating debate

Good article.

The Republicans have lost their fuckin minds lately.

Like you saw the cracks forming during the election, but as soon as they lost the really insane members started stepping to the forefront, and we keep getting shit like this in the news almost every week.

I really blame Fox News. They put the wingnuts front and center and make every effort to give the impression that what the wingnuts do is the only true, patriotic, American conservatism. You hear Hannity and Beck and others extolling a mentality reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh, day in and day out. (For what it's worth, my late grandfather, chairman of the FDIC under Reagan, as staunch a Republican of his time as there ever has been, and someone who was widely viewed as transcending partisanship during his time in office, said to me once, "I think that guy (Rush) is such an idiot.") Back before they took over the conservative news scene I can genuinely remember the two parties having dialogue, and now I can't see any such thing.

Anyone else seen those ads for home security systems they run on Fox News nearly every commercial break? The ad that has the young-looking housewife whose door is broken down all of a second out of nowhere by some random invader, and then she screams and the security alarm goes off and the dude runs out of the doorway back into the night, and she's safe from the hostile, dangerous world because someone sold her a fancy security system?

I think that really nails the default attitude of the party right now - people who are afraid literally ALL THE TIME of some unforeseeable catastrophe. I know (or used to know) someone like that, always living in the moment when the next terrible thing would happen to her and constantly feeling like a victim over those terrible things which had already happened to her - not capable of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of human lives involve some degree of serious emotional hardship or tragedy, and pretty much living the majority of her life in a moderately afraid state. As a result she was paranoid, hard to deal with, utterly intractable over any disagreement she had with anybody else, and bitterly judgmental (and she watched Fox News all the time).

I really think that the predominant character note behind the party these days, which they try actually fairly successfully to cover over, is chronic, overdeveloped, overreacting fear. I don't even know if *I* have any idea how scared these folks are behind the militaristic and hostile front they're putting up. It can't be easy to live like that.

I also think they're blowing their own damn feet right off. They've managed to raise an entire generation of young people that think that Republicans are warmongering, nasty, financially incompetent and blind to any form of dissent (thank you, George W. Bush). Their supporters aren't getting any younger and young voters went for Obama 2 to 1 in the last election. The only thing that really concerns me about it all is that I'm not very sanguine that some of these folks can psychologically deal with a long period of being on the outs politically. Many of them seem on the edge of completely losing it as it is. If that does indeed come to pass, I worry that many of them will take to genuine violent extremism and uncontrollable anger rather than trying to understand why they've lost the mandate to govern.