Showering after a Scarborough read

I post the following observations on the assumption that somebody still watches Joe Scarborough on MSNBC and that another 20 or 30 Americans actually care what Joe Scarborough writes for Politico, which, yesterday, was this:

[T]he general theme that the tea party has been bad for the GOP is pure malarkey....

[W]hether opinion leaders like it or not, the tea party helped engineer a Republican landslide, reframed the national debate and put the president so far back on his heels that even Mitt Romney has a chance to be president.

Joe's argument is essentially an amoral one; were he writing 60 years ago, he would, presumably, argue that McCarthyism's defilement of traditional, midwestern Republicanism is a good thing, since, hey, it revs up the more malicious elements of the base--and whatever accomplishes that purely political objective is a good in itself.

Ask not whether reframing "the national debate" in 2010 away from health-insuring 30 million more Americans was a good thing, and naturally we should accept as a national good the unspeakable tragedy of so ruthlessly undercutting an honorable, sitting president that a subterranean rodent like Romney could become a real national threat.

It's one-dimensional cutthroats like Scarborough who give political pragmatism a bad name, and make me ashamed to be an adherent of it.

Comments

[majii]

Scarborough remains true to form--he'll deny reality to push failed policies and RW groups. I imagine he missed the poll that showed the Tea Party has lower approval ratings than atheists, and the one that showed that in 2012, Americans are less likely to vote for a GOP politician who associates himself with the TP. Scarborough may not be willing to admit it, but the political landscape has changed for the TP. In 2009 and 2010, people were encouraged to join tea party groups mainly due to the touting of these groups by Fox News and the Big Money that paid for the bus trips, the lunches/dinners, the "Don't Tread on Me" Flags, etc. Many republicans today won't admit that they were tea partiers a couple of years ago.