Goodbye, GOP (JOY-ANN REID / South Florida Times)

[struggle4progress]

... For starters, the party seems completely stumped by a popular president, Barack Obama. Meanwhile, it’s scrambling to both defend and distance itself from the failed presidency of George W. Bush. The economic mugging the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress perpetrated on the country for six years was bad enough; Mr. Bush was simply signing every bill his party put in front of him. As for tax cuts that made about 400,000 very rich Americans even richer, and the total economic collapse on the way out the door? As Dick Cheney would say, stuff happens.

And then there are the Bush-era national security ideas that, while they had the complicity of some weak-kneed Democrats after 9/11, are now Official Property of the GOP. Some of these ideas are so radical, they’re not recognizable as American: the all-powerful “unitary executive,” indefinite detention without trial, “sneak and peek” searches of private homes, pre-emptive war, warrantless wiretapping, and worst of all, torture – specifically, the kind of torture – waterboarding – made infamous by the Spanish Inquisition, the Khmer Rouge, Maoist China and the Japanese and Gestapo during World War II. Add them to the list of Things Republicans are Defending, while simultaneously declaring a 3-percent tax increase on the rich to be “tyranny.”

Even as they are haunted by the ghost of George W. Bush, Republicans keep scaring up the ghost of Richard
Nixon, as when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a group of Stanford students last week that when the president authorizes waterboarding, it’s not torture. Meanwhile, a raft of memos detailing torture techniques with cold precision are in a sense, Bush’s “Pentagon papers.”

Add to this baggage the outsized importance of the religious right, and carnival barkers like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and “the boss” himself, Rush Limbaugh. The requirement that elected Republicans swear fealty to both has only accelerated the GOP’s transformation into a rump party with narrow appeal and virtually no coherent national message. And with the party’s political talent bench consisting of Sarah Palin, folksy-talkin’ Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Britney Spears concert fan Eric Cantor, bumbling RNC chair Michael Steele, and lately, Jeb Bush – whose last name is BUSH, it’s no wonder the religious muckrakers and right-wing shock jocks have the floor ...

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