Pundit Country

Call me old fashioned, but I like it when smart people call out craven fools for incendiary rhetoric. Having said, that, I really wish he’d stop referring to the health care reform legislation in the past tense.

There isn’t really much to say here with Paul Krugman’s excellent, yet obvious analysis of the general description of the GOP’s tactics over the last few months. It all sums up to this.

But more important, the episode [Conservatives reactions to the U.S. losing its Olympics bid after a personal appeal from President Obama] illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

…

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Another point Krugman fails to make, but others have, is that the Republican party not only shut its moderates out of the party, but also its intellectuals. Think about it. Name the last truly nuanced critique you read or even heard about from a conservative. I can’t think of any in the last 10 years. It’s been all vitriol all the time.

And it will likely remain that way until either the party self-implodes, a third party arises using the wisdom from the right’s intellectual forgotten, or the part leaders realize they are going top keep losing elections until they turn themselves around (the least probable scenario).

*semi-weekly to be defined as “whenever the hell I get around to it” (links courtesy of Right Wing Watch and Hatewatch).

For the period ending October 4, 2009:

• Truth Wins Out: Focus on the Family Seeks to Exempt Alabama Gays from Antibullying Protection.
• Amanda Hess: Ex-Gay Group Calls Hate Crime Laws “Anti-Ex-Gay.”
• Family Research Council released its anti-ENDA testimony, in which it claims that “homosexuality is [not] biologically determined” and “‘transgender’ people have a mental illness.”
• Group marches for ‘white civil rights’ after Limbaugh hyped bus beating as a hate crime against whites.
• The LA Times takes a look at the “personhood” efforts, which is now coming to Missouri as well.
• The Pacific Justice Institute has filed suit against a California school district over it’s LGBT anti-bullying efforts, claiming it is really a effort to indoctrinate school children into the gay lifestyle.
• David Hart reports that the anti-LGBT group National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is desperately trying to connect the fight over marriage equality to ACORN.
• Media Matters chronicles the on-going right-wing crusade against Kevin Jennings.
• Think Progress: Rep. Steve King Says Same-Sex Marriage Is “A Purely Socialist Concept.”
• The Alliance Defense Fund has announced its second Pulpit Freedom Sunday, to be held on September 27 in order to challenge IRS restrictions on what pastors and priests can say.
• Randall Terry and company are now targeting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
• Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute warns that bullying and harassment prevention programs are “one of the central ways to get pro-homosexual information and resources into public schools.”
• You really should read the excerpt from the forthcoming book by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer published in GQ.
• Everything you need to know about the Tea Party movement can be learned for Mark Williams’ pathetic appearance on AC360.
• FAIR (not the media watchdog group) Embraces Racist Founder.
• Rick Santorum: running for president?
• Think Progress: Neal Boortz compares President Obama to a child molester.
• Adele M. Stan: “Make no mistake; the Tea Party movement is the new religious right. The megaphone of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family media empire has been replaced by FOX News Channel and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.”
• Alan Turing gets a long overdue apology from the British government … the sort of which, had it happened here, the Religious Right would have vehemently opposed.
• Joseph Farah says that President Obama should be impeached for the “audacious plot of the White House to harvest personal e-mail addresses from Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites for political purposes.” Of course, none of that is true.
• The effort to place a “Personhood Amendment” on the Florida ballot would likely end up outlawing birth control.
• Dave Weigel recently wrote a great piece on the rising influence of WorldNetDaily.
• Student Hate Group in Michigan gets new faculty advisor.