Where is the RNC Chairman on this, or has he totally conceded that he doesn't have the power to say something like: "This nonsense is harmful to the nation, so stop!" and have it actually mean something within his party?
He conceded when he allowed himself to be publicly spanked by Rush Limbaugh, then followed up with what amounted to "Thank you, sir, may I have another".
The only clear voice I'm hearing on this issue at the moment from party heavyweights is coming from Colin Powell, who has also directly criticized the GOP leadership for not publicly disavowing this (and other) nonsense.
As a result, Powell is being called a RINO and there are loud shouts from the gallery for him to follow Specter out of the party.
It's chickens coming home to roost, I'm afraid.
I trace it back to Dubya's campaign strategy when he worked for his father. He advised Bush Sr., correctly, that they could increase their market share if they pulled resources away from courting the Catholic vote and instead aggressively pursued the fundamentalist/evangelical vote.
And of course, post-Clinton, the Bush-Rove team pressed this strategy even harder, and coupled it with deplorable campaign tactics such as swiftboating and the whisper campaigns.
McCain avoided these excesses at first, but all of that went out the window when he brought Rove protege Steve Schmidt on board as campaign manager. Schmidt, unfortunately, had all of Rove's amoral zeal for dirty tricks but none of his sensitivity for the lay of the political landscape. Amazingly, he pushed a cookie-cutter strategy borrowed from the Dubya campaigns, and McCain, to his great discredit, gave the green light.
So they went and got Palin, who had no right being on the ticket for any national office in the first place, and set her loose to "energize the base". Her rallies -- rather sparsely but quite enthusiastically attended -- were, as we know, a running horror show of lies, distortions, and pandering to the basest emotions of the conspiracy-theorist lunatic fringe of the party, where shouts of "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" from the bleachers were accepted without so much as the flutter of an eyelash.
It was hard to believe what I was hearing when she told her little mobs that, under Obama, their property would cease to be theirs and would instead be owned by the government.
Independents and a lot of moderate Republicans headed for the exits and McCain was handed an embarrassing loss.
So there they were. Out of the White House and a minority in both chambers.
On a party level, clearly the way out of that hole was to get busy re-building coalitions, and the most immediate targets of that effort were obviously the moderate and swing voters they had lost because of Palin, and the business constituency that had long been a key component of their former winning coalitions. And they took at least one step in that direction by giving Palin the Judas treatment in the media.
But since the failure of Lehman Brothers had caused the global economy to seize up, courting the business community meant approving some sort of bailout.
At this point, most of the Republicans left in office owed their seats to the torch and pitchfork crowd. So although it made sense, as a party, to take the risky step of backing away from the fringers and attempting a radical restructuring, the majority of office holders knew that doing so would be suicide for them.
So we were treated to a Republican chorus of "Let 'em fail" and an alternate stimulus bill consisting entirely of tax cuts.
As if that were not bad enough, a little media tiff with Limbaugh, egged on by high-profile Democrats, blew up into a full scale showdown. The party leadership blinked, leaving Rush crowing like a rooster on top of the hill.
The party was now beholden to the mob.
As if more proof were needed, we were subsequently treated to the dog and pony show which was the Sotomayor hearings where what could have been spun as a Republican victory -- a restrained jurist who would not move the court to the left -- became instead a potential sacrifice of many remaining hispanic votes in 2010 and 2012. Instead of proclaiming that Obama had decided to dance to their tune, they went on the attack, dragged out the "activist judge" slur (a favorite hot-button charge) and in the end even senators who had intended to vote for Sotomayor could not get away with it.
And that's where we are now.
So I think the reason we're not hearing voices of rationality and restraint from GOP poobahs is that they're no longer in control. They're subject now to the whims of their remaining constituents, who feed on a steady diet of Limbaugh, Norquist, and Beck.
Powell does not have to put up with that junk, so he's free to call it as he sees it. But few other players in the party have that luxury now.
