p.m. carpenter's commentary

Republicans Gone Wild

There is now no better, or more accurate, way to say it: The Republican Party has gone nuts – absolutely, certifiably, sycophantically nuts.

It went officially bananas upon declaring, in the small hours of Monday morning, a national emergency in the sad yet exhaustively adjudicated case of Terri Schiavo. That much was obvious when the party chucked its last vestiges of states-rights principles and respect for separation of powers into the anything-for-the-religious-right pot of electoral gold.

Republicans’ blatant whoring at the altar of slaughtered ideals and political opportunism was so conspicuous as to make its examination here only tiresomely redundant. So let’s not bother.

What we should bother ourselves with, however, is the truly bothersome and, it seems, growing emotional instability of these congressional Republicans, which any rational onlooker might characterize as this: folks on the verge – thus we are on the verge, given that they are in charge – of a political nervous breakdown; the result of too much heady success from too much groveling to too many narrow interests.

The stress of so much power coupled with insatiable ambition is showing.

One of their own, Representative Donald Manzullo of Illinois, inched close to party self-diagnosis when he opined, "I have been here 13 years and I have never seen anything like this before." And that’s coming from a man who’s lived through the manufactured government-shutdown hysteria, the manufactured impeachment hysteria, the manufactured Iraq hysteria and all the other manufactured hysterias to which we as a nation have been subjected since the Grand Old Party began its studied re-ascendancy.

And looking back, one can see that its ascendancy was in no small part due to its study of orchestrated hysteria. The skies have regularly fallen and Democracy put at grave risk because Hillary misplaced a file or Bill got his jollies or John tossed a medal or the you-know-who elite banned Christmas or ... you take your pick. You can set your watch by the GOP barraging us with some newly revealed, outrageous liberal escapade – each and every one manufactured to distract from the less than publishable goal of unfettered political power.

We’re not to notice as the ruling party deepens a grotesquely mounting national debt in its pursuit of assassinating social programs, or as it finances a class-warfaring plutocracy to sustain a graft-driven political machine, or promotes the fantasy of a democratically reforming Middle East to justify a fraudulent invasion. To notice is only to buy into the vast liberal media’s propagandistic ways.

We are, however, expected to salute when the ruling party, positively dripping with selflessness, snaps into action over an exceedingly personal, private and local legal matter. (Naturally we should disregard its own memorandum as to what "a great political issue" it is. See above: liberal media.)

We are expected to salute because the scam has worked for the charlatans so many times before. But this time the great majority of Americans – 70 percent according to an ABC News poll – noticed what was not intended to be noticed: the naked hypocrisy, the sheer opportunism, the downright shabby spectacle of it all.

The scene from Sunday-night, Monday-morning’s House floor "debate" was reminiscent of Fredric March as Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) on the witness stand in "Inherit the Wind" – a bunch of imbecilic blowhards puffing with feigned moralistic fervor, all of it devoted to buying favoritism on the cheap with torch-burning zealots. The only difference was, Matthew Harrison Brady actually believed in what he was selling.

Just to balance out the farce with drama was Barney Frank as Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow), asking, in effect, as Henry Drummond did: "What, are you guys nuts?"

Yep.

Notwithstanding the satisfaction that comes from seeing reprobates get what they deserve in the form of a disapproving public, is there not something almost sad about watching today’s GOP, a party with a long and noble tradition, make such a fool of itself?

Naw.

Not after what it’s put us through.

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This column originally appeared on BuzzFlash.com, March 23, 2005.

pmcarpenter@buzzflash.com

posted by P.M. Carpenter @ 11:56 AM