A Shakespearean tragedy

Krauthammer has hit a berg, his radio is out, the crew has abandoned him, and from the rails he's watching the last raft drift slowly, fecklessly away: 

This is no mainstream media conspiracy. This is the GOP maneuvering itself right onto Obama terrain.

The president is a very smart man. But if he wins in November, that won’t be the reason. It will be luck. He could not have chosen more self-destructive adversaries.

But of course it won't be merely Obama's luck, nor mostly Obama's luck. What's occurring in Krauthammer's zoo of a party (apologies for the mixed metaphors) is a decades-long culmination of feeding the wildest animals -- its present base.

The GOP asked for this. From its linear, McCarthy-Goldwater-New Right progression of rugged anti-intellectualism to Ronald Reagan's ingratiating simplicity of an always-problematic government to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney's brutish indifference to middle-class and thus traditional American values, the Republican Party has aligned itself with, and by now has narrowed itself to, the commonest denominator of ultraconservative apes, loons and doodlebugs.

This Republican crowd -- as debate audience after debate audience has exuberantly demonstrated -- of gay-booing, gurney-killing, media-vilifying roustabouts and ruffians is worthy of some third-party rabble that meets every second Thursday in beer halls and Pentecostal churches, but it sure as hell isn't worthy of the epithet, 'Grand Old Party.' This crowd smothered that institution long ago in its sleep -- and you, Mr. Krauthammer, were one of the many who were dozing in a kind of conspiratorial trance. You encouraged the anti-intellectual hooligans, you egged them on for cheap electoral profit, you watched as they amassed internal power and squeezed out moderates -- and now you bemoan the demagogues and dimwits who have quite naturally floated to the muckish top.

The fault, my dear Mr. Krauthammer, is not in your stars ...

Comments

[Peter G]

For those who may have missed this little tidbit from way back when: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG6taS9R1KM

[Robert Lipscomb]

I will give you one more chance to mock Occupy Wall Street. :-)

I am amused (and feel vindicated) everytime the the terms, "One-Per-Cent" and "Ninety-Nine Per-Cent" are used in a GOP debate. And there is the poster boy of the One-Per-Cent -- Romney.

And give the likes of Newt and Santorum and Krauthammer their due. They know what the establishment GOP has forgotten. Yes, the Richie Rich, the star quarterback, (1%) can use the the cheerleader from the wrong side of the tracks (99%), but he can't be brazen about it.

In the echo chamber of the GOP, running a Wall Street banker to "fix the economic mess Obama has made" makes perfect sense. And it does in the context of Laffer curves and trickle down economics. But in the frame of the the one-per-centers, well ... that's just jumping the shark.

The discussion is no longer about the question, "Is government always the problem?". Thwe debate is about the question, "Is the system rigged for the rich?".

[majii]

When I think of the GOP's dissatisfaction with their 2012 candidates, I'll always see Krauthammer's smug smile as he sat on Fox News panels in 2009, 2010, and 2011 and pushed his flawed and biased talking points--talking points that led to the GOP's present set of circumstances. This man is shallow, vain, and incapable of introspection. He helped to create the problem, but now it's PBO's fault.

[JD]

Great comment! I especially like the word, "doodlebugs". I've never heard that word before, but it is somehow uncanny in capturing the nuts in the Republican Party.