GOP: Your Toe Tags Are Ready
Dear Republicans: Your toe tags are ready
P.M. Carpenter
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
It was yesterday, midafternoon as I recall, and I almost noted the time, like a physician in an emergency room registering for the ages a terminal patient's last minute on Earth. Because there I was, face to face with a Jack Cafferty diagnosis for the Republican Party, which, Jack had written on a CNNPolitics.com chart, "is becoming a cartoon."
I confess I don't watch Mr. Cafferty; for that matter I don't watch CNN, excepting Fareed Zakaria's excellent geopolitical romp every Sunday afternoon. But I do recall having watched him in years past, and a more curmudgeonly, old-school conservative coot one would have been hard-pressed to find.
Yet there he was, online, ridiculing the Grand Old Party as cartoonish. That struck me -- emotionally, not intellectually -- as lights out. If Jack Cafferty thinks the Republican Party is a joke, then it's probably worse than that: it's probably toast. I almost threw a sheet over the laptop.
Given the epic banality of CNN, Mr. Cafferty's reasoning was scandalously intelligent. First, he wrote, the party's leading personnel is a farce: Bobby Jindal is an "embarrassment"; Sarah Palin is "tawdry"; Michael Steele, "pathetic" -- "down on his knees apologizing to the helium-filled poster boy of the conservative right," by whom Cafferty meant, of course, the inflammatorily gaseous Rush Limbaugh.
Cafferty's disgust, however, went deeper than vis-a-vis those surface faces, who are, after all, but the empty-suit phenomena of the GOP's astonishing vacuity. "If the Republicans are ever to emerge from the long dark night they have created for themselves," he observed, "it will have to be without pandering to the right wing nuts that comprise [the Limbaugh-infested] radio audience," not to mention they're "blowing it big time" by "go[ing] blithely along as though nothing has happened."
In closing -- in Cafferty's own pulling over of the sheet -- he whipped out the i-word: "The Republican Party is marching double-time down the road to irrelevance and they don't even know it." My emphasis, his prognosis.
As I said, it was the source that startled, not the conclusion. For if the party of Reagan has lost its angry-white-guy Jack Caffertys, then the party of Reagan is, simply, a lost cause.
I also confess I may have been a trifle oversensitive to Cafferty's scribbled obituary, or near obituary, since moments earlier I had read the latest dirge from the NYT's David Brooks, whose political peregrination in record time has sped from unabashed Republican to reconfirmed Burkean conservative to, now, plain old moderate.
I almost felt sorry for him, this expatriate of the betrayed Cause. His frustration positively oozed: How in God's name can Republicans be so "totally misguided"; why in God's name can't they "embrace an entirely different approach"?
Brooks even wrote out a sensible prescription to treat the GOP's seemingly terminal stupidity; he itemized at least a five-step political recovery plan, ranging from an informed focus on economics to "mak[ing] it clear that the emergency has to be followed by an era of [fiscal] balance." Did you catch that verbal phrase? -- "has to be followed by." That was the informed part.
His closing, like Cafferty's, invoked the lugubrious chuckle: "Do I expect them to shift course...? Not really."
Here, Brooks had monumental reason for expressing a disgust that approached indifference. Because those zany Beltway Republicans demonstrated again just yesterday that they take their economics cues from no less than Grover Cleveland.
I happened to be watching MSNBC, when on popped Indiana's Mike Pence -- the chairman, mind you, of the House Republican Conference -- essentially endorsing minority leader John Boehner's shockingly ignorant thesis that in tough times like these, the federal government should -- have you heard? -- restrain spending. That's what the man said. Even more shocking, perhaps, was that the crack network interviewer failed to helplessly double over in appalled laughter. But that's another story.
The end of this one is that if Republicans don't regain some semblance of seriousness soon, then it will indeed be toe-tagging time for the Grand Old Party.
I think this is kinda sad really. I hope this country never loses the
two Party system.
