[Vision2020] Ghastly Outdated Party

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 25, 2012
Ghastly Outdated Party By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

WASHINGTON

IT’S finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating
itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex
Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all
want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he
said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another
trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can
be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it
humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to
make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals.
The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination
than the left’s image of W. was.

Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.’s trumped-up invasion
of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa,
Okla., that defeating Obama — “the most dangerous president in modern
American history” — was “a duty of national security” because “he is
incapable of defending the United States” and because he “wants to
unilaterally weaken the United States.” Who killed Osama again?

How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented
in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Gingrich and Rick
Santorum?

“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told
CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude
about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live
in.”

After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be
a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think
I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are
appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to
look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called
Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to
become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home
from the Senate, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so
far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and
the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic
for Rick Santorum to represent America.” That from the man who accused
Anita Hill of perjury.

Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain
with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back
all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a
fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience
at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.

Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in
his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a
virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the “right
height” of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann “drives a couple of
Cadillacs.”

Romney’s Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican
strategist, told the Ripon Forum: “If we are only the party of Wall Street
and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant.”

Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious,
went on Glenn Beck’s Web-based show with his family and offered this
lunacy: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,”
because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country. He
evidently wants home university schooling, which will cut down on keggers.

His wife, Karen, suggested that her husband’s success is “God’s will” and
that he wants “to make the culture a better culture, more pleasing to God.”

The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look
foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave
Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse
with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”: he suggested that he was
denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would
have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women
seeking abortions.

With music, red wine and a big-screen TV, he made a move on his wife, Rita,
while she was watching a news report about the bill. “And she looks at me
and goes, ‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ ” Albo said as his colleagues guffawed.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party,
living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public
education long ago won by the other side.

They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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