The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show

From AlterNet, civil liberties lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald on how the long term shifting of the political spectrum has fucked the GOP pretty badly:

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

And

Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

More here.

For the entire history of this blog, I've been relentlessly pushing the notion that conservatives have been agitating so intensely for so long that the center of the American political spectrum has essentially been pulled well into right-wing territory. So today's "liberals" like President Obama are, in fact, conservative, while today's "conservatives" are what we would have thought of as far right-wing psychos thirty years ago. Guys like me, who are well within normal non-radical liberal territory, historically speaking, are no longer counted as part of the ideological spectrum--it's like every point of view even slightly to the left of conservative Obama is tantamount to supporting Chairman Mao or Stalin, which is, of course, bullshit.

Usually, when asserting this notion, I'm talking about the Democrats, and how disappointing they are to actual liberals in this day and age; I've long assumed that this spectrum pull has been nothing but beneficial to conservatives. But if Greenwald's analysis is to be believed, and I think there is definitely some truth here, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Noam Chomsky recently said flat out that the Democratic Party is now in essence the Republican Party, and that's pretty accurate if you disregard the so-called "social issues." But what does this mean for the party that's actually called "The Republican Party"? Apparently, it is now a party of crazy people, which is fairly obvious when you listen closely to what they have to say. So I'm now wondering how long the Crazy Party can continue to have any actual relevance on the American political scene. I mean, they're crazy people, after all, and why vote for crazy Republicans when you can just as easily vote for the sane Republicans who now run the Democratic Party?

Is it possible that decades of hard core conservative propagandizing will soon drive the GOP into total irrelevance? Silver lining, I suppose.

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