Tuesday, February 28, 2012

As Santorum and Romney Battle for Loony Right, The Rest of Us Shouldn't Gloat - Robert Reich

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat.  What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.  But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.  Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years.  They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years.

The full article is available here