I have come to the conclusion, after seeing that Newt Gingrich called the Obama Administration a "failure", that the Republicans are no longer pretending to offer anything substantive to our public discourse. While the hard-core right, Bush Administration dead-enders, fans of Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the talk-radio crazies, and the rest continue to pretend they will be vindicated by events - most of which involve our national collapse - the reality is somewhat different.
When a member of Congress can say the following, we have reached then end of the line as far as taking these jokers seriously is concerned.
The right wing, however, has seized the opportunity to launch baseless, fearmongering attacks, with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) leading the way:This is the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.
There's not even the pretense of saying anything serious. This isn't even fear-mongering because no one except the pissy-pants crowd cowers in fear of TERORRISTS!!!!
Of course, we also have the meaningless SOCIALISM nonsense on everything from the GM bankruptcy to health care reform to Frank Gaffney's oft-cited op-ed in the Washington Times calling Obama a Muslim, and it just proves that, however much they are assisted by the national media, the right and the Republicans are now just nakedly empty of anything to offer. Since the harshest substantive critics of the Obama Administration are on the left, and this seems to be the ones to whom they react far more than the right, I think it is driving the remnants of serious loyal opposition into silence.
We are left the John Boehners and the Michael Steeles of this world (who called members of the Obama Administration "numbnuts" last week) and, of course, the king and queen of the Republican Party, Newt and Sarah Palin. If any two individuals represented what is wrong with the Republican Party at this point in time more than they, I don't know who they are. The tongue bath Palin received from Sean Hannity earlier this week is just an example of how devoid of any substance the right is. One idiot asking another idiot her opinion on socialism adds absolutely nothing to our national discourse.
In the near future, I am quite sure we will have to put up with these folks giving us their meaningless, fact-free opinions on all sorts of matters. The nice thing is they have neither power nor constituency any more, so they are just a whole lot of hot air.
