The soft bigotry of low expectations
by digby
Like Ed Kilgore, I’ve been a little discombobulated by the reviews of the GOP debate last night which hold that it was such a nice surprise to see that the field isn’t crazy after all. According to who?
Ed cites this piece by Jake Weisberg and notes:
In other words, the candidates did not howl at the moon, and did not go out of the way to associate themselves with a dangerously specific and unpopular Medicare proposal.
They did, however, with the exception of Herman Cain’s brief endorsement of food safety inspections, uniformly reject any positive government role in domestic affairs, and more specifically, any legitimate government role in the economy, other than keeping money tight and getting rid of its own regulations. If anyone thought government could do anything at all to help the unemployed other than give more tax dollars and power to the people who had laid them off and/or foreclosed on their mortgages, they kept it to themselves. They engaged in an orgy of angry union-bashing that was entirely unlike anything that’s ever happened in a debate among people running for president. And the sort of reticence Weisberg perceived on cultural issues basically meant that candidates who favor criminalization of abortion and re-stigmatization of gay people say they won’t make it a major campaign issue. And why should they? They all agree on these extremist positions.
I guess they expected them all to wear tri-corner hats and start screaming about birth certificates and when they didn’t, their ideological lunacy suddenly seems to be “moderate.” What a racket.
Kilgore attributes this to the fact that the Republicans are now unified around ideological lunacy and so have calmed down. And that’s a very creepy thought:
When the political center of a party, or a country, is in the process of shifting, there’s a lot of noise and conflict. When it settles in its new place, however, it gets very quiet. To a very great extent, that’s what has happened in the GOP. It is not a sign of “sanity” or “moderation;” simply one of consensus.
Michelle Bachman is an extremist and a dumb one at that. But she is also a professional politician, unlike the grifter Palin to whom she is often compared and who literally cannot communicate clearly at all. So yes, she came across as lucid last night, which surprised people. (Newt, on the other hand, gave Palin a run for her money in the word salad department.)
But make no mistake, all of them are extremists, even the vaunted “moderate” Mitt, who, if he wins will be at the total mercy of the wing nuts in the congress. These people are waaaay outside what we considered to be the mainstream of the GOP just a few years ago. The reason they seem calm is that the fight over that is over.
And according the Village rules, that makes Ben Nelson a leftist. Hell, that makes Orrin Hatch a leftist.
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