Republican Fiasco Only Deepens

It's been stated before but let's state it again: today's Republican Party is controlled by right wing conservatives who are bereft of ideas; the radical agenda of Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush is a disaster for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Unless you're an oil executive or someone in the defense industry or sitting on a huge family fortune, Bush and his friends have done nothing for most Americans in the last six years.

In the spring of 2004, when our finances were in better shape, my wife and I donated $50 to the Kerry campaign. Since then, we've been flooded with mailers from various Democratic groups. I have friends who get uptight when they get such mailers but I consider the mailers a minor price of democracy and don't mind all that much, except on one point. We've gotten so many mailers that the cost of sending those mailers probably now exceeds what we sent in the first place. Still, I read about half the mailers to see how well people are making their sales pitch. I got a mailer yesterday from the Bill Richardson campaign and I admit I very much like the ad on the outside of the envelope:

The war in Iraq is not the disease.
Iraq is a symptom.

The disease is arrogance.

That puts it about as accurately as anything I've seen.

These are bad times and it's worth taking care of ourselves now and then. I'm grateful that most of the time about all I need to do on some days is go out and look at the moon hanging over the hills or over the valley depending on the time of night and the phase of the moon. After a few minutes, it clears my head. Sometimes, needing more, I just need to listen to some music for a half hour or read a book about as far away from these times as possible. All of us need to renew ourselves from time to time. This is going to be a long fight and there will be harder days ahead as we attempt to repair our democracy.

I've noticed a problem on progressive blogs over the last few weeks but I'm not sure what to do about it since my own feelings aren't much different. The disgust with both Washington politicians and the inability of the media to understand what a disaster we're in on a wide range of issues is taking a toll on all of us. Here's Juan Cole of Informed Comment; I simply can't fault what he says though it's harsher than what he would have said two years ago:

The Karl Rove doctrine that when you dig yourself into a ditch, the best strategy is to dig deeper, has finally met the test of reality-based politics. It isn't going to be pretty.

These guys got away with these hawkish fantasies because they bamboozled the poor evangelicals into believing they would support public morality, and bamboozled poor conservatives into thinking they would uphold small government. Instead, they are hitching their wagons to a multi-trillion dollar quagmire abroad and don't give a rat's ass about evangelical values.

I've been reading about the Republican presidential candidates and it's hard not to cringe. They're not any better than Bush and they can't make up their minds whether to defend Bush or distance themselves from him. McCain, of course, is impossible to take seriously anymore and his poll numbers make that clear. But the other frontrunners, Romney and Giuliani, aren't any better.

Romney, of course, has been all over the map and doesn't seem to be trying at all to be reasonably honest. Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly takes issues with Romney fictional version of the months leading up to Bush's war in Iraq where Romney seems to say that the UN inspectors did not go to Iraq when in fact they did just that and didn't find anything:

WTF? Does this kind of stuff run in the family? (Yes, I know I've already made that joke once before.)

Question: does Romney genuinely not know that both the IAEA and Hans Blix's team had hundreds of inspectors in Iraq prior to the war? And that those inspectors found nothing?

Or does he know it perfectly well and has simply calculated that no one in the media cares enough about this stuff to make a big deal out of a howler like this? In any sane world, this kind of thing would be enough to disqualify a candidate from running for dogcatcher, let alone president of the United States.

And on and on it goes.

One of the first victims of a failing democracy is the truth. Juan Cole and Kevin Drum speak the truth but, like the rest of us, their disgust is growing over what they see. If we are to preserve our democracy, progressive bloggers and others are going to have to continue holding their noses and keep pushing for that truth. The reality of those who control the Republican Party is that they care far more about power than they do about their fellow Americans. They know they can't win on the issues that concern most Americans and everything we see follows from that simply observation. A political operative like Karl Rove knows this and it explains his many methods and his complete lack of conscience.

We have no choice but to push on.