The Infantile Style in American Politics (Salon.com)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/05/the_infantile_style_in_american_politics/singleton/

The farce known as the GOP presidential campaign has officially become a freak show. Newt Gingrich, the creepiest huckster in American politics, whose unique combination of hypocrisy, opportunism and sanctimoniousness led to his being unceremoniously bounced from Congress back in 1998, is now the front-runner to become the Republican presidential nominee.

Having gone through Michele “the founding Fathers ended slavery” Bachmann, Rick “I’d close down the federal government if only I could remember what it is” Perry, and Herman “all this stuff twirling around in my head” Cain, Republican voters have now embraced their latest unelectable stooge, a narcissistic, ethically challenged trough-feeder and third-rate history professor whose brilliant ideas include a ludicrous two-track Social Security option and undermining the Supreme Court.

I pity the mainstream journalists who are required to pretend they take this grotesque process seriously. The GOP campaign has become indistinguishable from one of those episodes on “Montel” where a mouth-breathing woman in a hot pink warm-up suit accuses a big-haired sleazebag in a leopardskin muumuu of sleeping with her skanky boyfriend, who watches them pulling each other’s hair with a glazed, stoned smirk. How are you supposed to write about this rogue’s gallery with a straight face? Pretending that Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann are qualified to be president is like calling Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf.”

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There is something disturbingly infantile about this process. It’s like watching a wailing baby rejecting one type of food after another, angrily hurling first the apricots, then the beans, then the broccoli off his plate while shrieking, “Don’t want it!” And the presidential campaign is not the only example of such regressive behavior and thought. The reaction of the Tea Party (which for all intents and purposes has become the Republican Party) to the mild and innocuous centrist Barack Obama — a president little different in his governing style, with due allowances being made for changed circumstances, from Dwight D. Eisenhower — is so irrational that it is difficult even to grasp what president it is talking about.

The title of this article struck me, because even before I'd read it, the process of the GOP lurching haphazardly from one pinhead non-Mitt candidate to another seemed precisely like an angry toddler, and about as coherent.