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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" align="left"></a></div><br></div>
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<div class="timestamp">February 25, 2012</div>
<h1>Ghastly Outdated Party</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Maureen Dowd" class="meta-per">MAUREEN DOWD</a></h6>
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<p>
WASHINGTON </p>
<p>
IT’S finally sinking in. </p>
<p>
Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party
eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.
</p>
<p>
“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex
Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.” </p>
<p>
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.) </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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? </p>
<p>
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? </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by. </p>
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>