The Evolution of US Politics

Or maybe this blog entry should be titled "How God has come down from on high and (righteously) taken control of the Republican Party" since evolution is a verboten word among the radical right.

Here is a bit from Paul Krugman's latest op-ed in the NY Times:

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The crazy thing to me is that the party that created the catastrophe may benefit from it. The party that de-regulated everything and then watch Enron rob Californians through their manipulated "brownouts" and that created an unnecessary war in Iraq that they sold to the public as a cake walk and necessary to stop Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and who allowed Wall Street to create $700 trillion in financial derivates which melted down and has now thrown Main Street into the most severe recession since the Great Depression is the very party claiming to "lead" people out of the mess it created:

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

This is pathetic. People with money thought they could control the crazy right to use them as their foot soldiers to win "permanent power". Funny, that was exactly the strategy of the wealthy elites in Germany in 1932, but they lost control of the process and Hilter rose to power. It is sad to see the same "strategy" being played out in America with a result which threatens to be just as damaging to the country as Hitler was to Germany. Tragic.