Griper Blade: The GOP's Wasted Effort

This weekend, the right had what can only be described as a big (but not nearly as big as they claim) whine-fest on the national mall. The idea was supposedly to recapture the non-partisan unity that followed 9/11. although I don't remember that unity being expressed as a belief that President Bush was an Indonesian Muslim terrorist who was instituting death panels and FEMA work camps to spread communism, like Hitler. The fact was that the 9/12 rally wasn't actually about anything in particular, other than a wish that someone else had won in November. Healthcare reform, creeping socialism, taxes, take your pick -- the protests were about everything and nothing, as focused as bare light bulb, it's light spreading out in every direction.

Writing about this new wingnut rage in general, Henrik Hertzberg writes in The New Yorker:

This sort of lunatic paranoia -- touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism -- has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain -- is a "conservative" media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially FOX News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful -- they all routinely liken the President and the "Democrat Party" to murderous totalitarians -- but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism -- the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

Yeah, that's about it. The tail, wagging from fear, is wagging the dog. The Republican Party is leading by following and those they're following are marching in circles with signs advocating contructive ideas like making Barack Obama the president of Kenya (signs, by the way, that use skeptical quotes suggesting that they don't even believe this "Kenya" place really exists)... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]