Republicans Really Need A Facial

TW: The Republicans have a serious problem. Their party is being defined as a cast of undesirables by a fleet of obnoxious, toxic media stars. The combination of W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Sarah Palin and now Micelle Bachman as brought to us by Rush, Hannity and Glenn Beck is creating a witches brew.

Barack Obama and the Dems are not perfect but the not so loyal opposition is failing to provide even a modicum of considered, serious, viable alternatives. This piece by Klein frames the challenge. He makes an indirect comparison between Rush and Paul Krugman. Yes, Krugman is strident and outspoken, and even porcine. But Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist with massive economic credentials, more importantly his name recognition is likely not even half of Rush's. Rush is an entertainer and a primary face of the Republican party, Krugman is an academic little known beyond the pages of the NYT.

Meanwhile, Bachmann, Gingrich et al. appear regularly on Fox making increasingly outlandish and largely irrelevant accusations and claims. Glenn Beck and Bachmann are touting a one-world currency conspiracy more or less out of thin air. Crazy pols are not new. Racist and virulent anti-communist congressmen fomenting illusory conspiracies were no rarity through the 1960's. But there was no Internet, you tube or Fox News back then to push such rubbish to the fore.

This toxic combination of political caricatures and foaming media personalities bodes ill for the Republicans and the country. We need a serious opposition to help tone policies, not crazy harangues.

From Joe Klein at Time:
"I've known Newt Gingrich for about 20 years now and I've always enjoyed him intellectually, but detested him politically. The reason for the latter is his now-anachronistic first resort to anger; again and again, he cheapens public discourse through exaggeration and wild claims. One imagines that if John McCain were President and Paul Krugman had said, out of the box, that he wanted McCain to fail, Gingrich would be leading the charge, calling Krugman "unpatriotic" and even, perhaps, traitorous.

As it is, I won't call Newt--or the other conservative hyperbolic baloney slicers--unpatriotic. Just graceless, boorish. And completely, demagogically out of touch with the national mood--which is concerned, serious and resistant to right-wing bullpucky. The latest was Newt's completely over-the-top reaction to Tim Geithner's new regulatory plan on the vile Hannity's program the other night:

We are seeing the biggest power grab by politicians in American history. The idea that they would propose that the treasury could intervene and take over system assets gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.
You don't want to do what they want, they take over your company. You do what they want, Congress retroactively, and this is what made last week's lynch mob like a third world government when the Congress literally got out of control, panicked, panicked because people were mad at it, and it turned out that the Congress had passed the authorization in the stimulus bill for to pay those bonuses.
The Congress had approved it, the people at were acting what they thought was the rules set by the government. Suddenly they're being attacked,they are retroactively losing their money. Why would anybody want to invest in a country.

Actually, what we're seeing is a reasoned public reaction to the fact that the financial services industry was given free rein--by Republicans and Democrats (I'm still looking at you, Larry Summers)--to engage in the most outrageous schemes since the 1920s. Millions and millions of people have had their retirement plans shredded by these banker-mopes, millions have lost their jobs. But those are people who do not inhabit the Beltway-right-wing-lecture-circuit planet that Newt and various others live on. Their unwillingness to protect average Americans from the untrammeled rapacity of an unregulated market is a disgrace.

So far, Geithner--and yes, Summers--have shown excellent balance, a respect for the free market system plus an awareness that the public needs to be protected from the sharks. Gingrich et al will remain banished somewhere in the outer darkness--and the Fox News cave-ghetto--until they realize that the Obama Administration's economic plans are not at all extreme, but a reflection of the broad American middle. Just ask Paul Krugman."