« Friday Night | Main | Monday PM »
July 27, 2009
Birthers
Best commentary I've read on the Birthers yet comes from Erik Tarloff in The Atlantic. He writes:
Something troubling has happened to the Republican Party in the last twenty years or so, and it demonstrates why these tactics are always a bad idea, even if they win you the occasional election. The respectable, responsible wing of the Republican Party, the wing that for decades thought it could use its crazies but still control them, has been unhorsed. The crazies are in the saddle. The sorry spectacle of the noble John McCain forced continually to kowtow to the religious right wing honchos of his party during last year's presidential campaign, and his evident although only intermittent pain at being confronted with what he had thereby unleashed; the transparent and pusillanimous eagerness of Mitt Romney in pursuit of his party's approval to disavow almost everything he has ever stood for in public life; the willingness of putatively serious conservative pundits to defend and even laud the indefensible and incoherent Sarah Palin; the reduction of a once-proud political philosophy to a set of simple-minded bromides and shibboleths, combined with vitriolic, dishonest, and irrelevant personal attacks on the other side...these bespeak a party that has lost not only its way, but its soul. If you're willing to keep on telling your supporters that the other side fucks pigs, at some point they may actually believe it, and beyond that, they may think pig-fucking is what elections are about.
But the whole thing has to be read in full.
Posted by caps at July 27, 2009 02:37 PM