GOP in Fantasyland - Frank Rich
Fantasyland
Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too.
By Frank Rich Published Nov 9, 2012
Mitt Romney is already slithering into the mists of history, or at least La Jolla, gone and soon to be forgotten. A weightless figure unloved and distrusted by even his own supporters, he was always destined, win or lose, to be a transitory front man for a radical-right GOP intent on barreling full-speed down the Randian path laid out by its true 2012 standard-bearer, Paul Ryan. But as was said of another unsuccessful salesman who worked the New England territory, attention must be paid to Mitt as the door slams behind him in the aftermath of Barack Obamas brilliant victory. Though Romney has no political heirs in his own party or elsewhere, he does leave behind a cultural legacy of sorts. He raised Truthiness to a level of chutzpah beyond Stephen Colberts fertile imagination, and on the grandest scale. That a presidential hopeful so cavalierly mendacious could get so close to the White House, winning some 48 percent of the popular vote, is no small accomplishment. The American weakness that Romney both apotheosized and exploited in achieving this featour post-fact syndrome where anyone on the public stage can make up anything and usually get away with itwont disappear with him. A slicker liar could have won, and still might.
Aall politicians lie, and some of them, as Bob Kerrey famously said of Bill Clinton in 1996, are unusually good at it. Every campaign (certainly including Obamas) puts up ads that stretch or obliterate the truth. But Romneys record was exceptional by any standard. The blogger Steve Benen, who meticulously curated and documented Mitts false statements during 2012, clocked a total of 917 as Election Day arrived. Those lies, which reached a crescendo with the last-ditch ads accusing a bailed-out Chrysler of planning to ship American jobs to China, are not to be confused with the Romney flip-flops. The Etch-A-Sketches were a phenomenon of their own; if the left and right agreed about anything this year, it was that trying to pin down where Mitt really stood on any subject was a fools errand. His biography was no less Jell-O-like: There were the still-opaque dealings at Bain, and those Olympics, and a single (disowned) term in public service, and his churchgoingand what else had he been up to for 65 years? We never did see those tax returns. We never did learn the numbers that might validate the Romney-Ryan budget. Given that Romney had about as much of a human touch with voters as an ATM, it sometimes seemed as if a hologram were running for president. Yet some 57 million Americans took him seriously enough to drag themselves to the polls and vote for a duplicitous cipher. Not all of this can be attributed to the unhinged Obama hatred typified by Mary Matalins postelection characterization of the president as a political narcissistic sociopath.
As GOP politicians and pundits pile on Romney in defeat, they often argue that he was done in by not being severely conservative enough; if only hed let Ryan be Ryan, voters would have been won over by right-wing orthodoxy offering a clear-cut alternative to Obamas alleged socialism. In truth, Romney was a perfect embodiment of the current GOP. As much as the Republican Party is a radical party, and a nearly all-white party, it has also become the Fantasyland Party. Its an isolated and gated community impervious to any intrusions of reality from the real America it solipsistically claims to represent. This years instantly famous declaration by the Romney pollster Neil Newhouse that were not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers crystallized the mantra of the entire GOP. The Republican faithful at strata both low and high, from Rushs dittoheads to the think-tank-affiliated intellectuals, have long since stopped acknowledging any empirical evidence that disputes their insular worldview, no matter how grounded that evidence might be in (God forbid) science or any other verifiable reality, like, say, Census reports or elementary mathematics. No wonder Romney shunned the word Harvard, which awarded him two degrees, even more assiduously than he did Mormon.
At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that rejects Keynesian economics, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Ladens death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense. Its the GOP that demands the rewriting of history (and history textbooks), still denying that Barry Goldwaters opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Richard Nixons southern strategy transformed the party of Lincoln into a haven for racists. Such is the conservative version of history that when the website Right Wing News surveyed 43 popular conservative bloggers to determine the worst figures in American history two years ago, Jimmy Carter, Obama, and FDR led the tally, all well ahead of Benedict Arnold, Timothy McVeigh, and John Wilkes Booth.
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http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/14458-gop-in-fantasyland
NRaleighLiberal
(60,015 posts)Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)Those two parties will be 1) the centrist Democrats and 2) the left-wing Democrats.
blue sky at night
(3,242 posts)this article pretty much nails it, want to spread this one far and wide but who is going to listen on the darkside?? I guess if they can't learn from their mistakes they are beyond reach. Thanks for the link I followed it and read the entire piece.
andym
(5,444 posts)The humanities departments at universities have been teaching post-modernist thought for years.
One of the key postmodernist ideas is that there is no truth or facts, just "discourse" to persuade others in a quest for power.
Post-modernism has been called leftist by the right, how ironic that it is the GOP has taken this idea to heart.
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)ffr
(22,671 posts)The people that make up the GOP are not keen on definitions nor are they keen on history. They detect their internal de-evolution, yet project it outwards. They are their own worst enemy.
flamingdem
(39,313 posts)Carolina
(6,960 posts)not only ate his mierde but spit it up and tried to feed it to us!
If only we had a real 4th estate again.
pipewrench
(194 posts)"Otherwise, Noonans fellow conservative honchos might not have taken until November 6, 2012, to recognize that you cant alienate every minority group in the country (blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays)not to mention the majority group, womenand hope to win a national election."
perfect and to the point.
StrictlyRockers
(3,855 posts)"Thus is the post-fact worldview of todays GOP boiled down to its essence. It assumes that any data on paper must be distorted, and yet doesnt look at what is in front of its very own eyes either. Otherwise, Noonan might have wondered if the neighborhood in Florida with Romney signs, not Obama ones, was not representative of either Florida or the country but was instead a white enclave."
nixonwasbetterthanW
(1,317 posts)Their collective smugness knows no parallel.
And yet All three of them have in the recent past not been oblivious as observers of culture and politics. Right wing, for certain, but rarely in defiance of facts. That this trio of heretofore intelligent conservatives could not "think outside the bubble" and at least predict a jumpball election speaks volumes about the inwardness of their viewpoint. I would hope never to be in a position in which I chose to ignore data just because the information doesn't match my hoped-for perspective.