Out of Touch By BOB HERBERT Published: May 1, 2009 The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Bob Herbert
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its
phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it's now trapped in the patently
pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and
more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their
jobs in the next year. So what's the Republican response? To build a wall of
obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to
stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower
taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
It's not a party; it's a cult. I'm no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a
Republican, I wouldn't be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance.
This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt ("I'm trying to rise from
the ashes") Gingrich, and the dark force who can't seem to exit the public
stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.
It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering
anything - anything at all - that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in
a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for
its role in bringing that crisis about.
Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in
charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the
Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire
economy.
Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it.
The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years
(all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought
destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.
And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a
national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of
policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families
wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.
It's a party that doesn't seem to care about anything other than devotion to a
set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like
rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the
wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme
may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called
conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.
When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans,
the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the
catastrophic ordeal of Detroit's automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama,
the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, "The
financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their
problem."
And Phil Gramm, John McCain's top financial adviser during the presidential
campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he
said the country was experiencing "a mental recession."
After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these
true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters
who hadn't sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn't help but recognize that
the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.
It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration
policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned
on television that the Democrats' moves to stem the banking crisis "gives them
the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship."
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama
as "the world's best salesman of socialism." And Mike Huckabee, a former
Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the
administration's economic policies: "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff."
This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country.
John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office
and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele,
chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and
attention span that you'd expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.
"I love the Oscars," he told GQ. "I'm looking for who's got what dress on, you
know?"
All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is
silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself
and re-engage with the real world.
Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the elected office held
by Jim DeMint. He is a senator from South Carolina, not the state's governor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
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