As the country pulls toward the middle, the GOP willfully pulls further to the right. From HP:
If anything, "mainstream Republican leaders are pushing the party too far to the left," said Sid Dinerstein, GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Fla. The House plan for Medicare is the only one that makes sense, he said, and GOP candidates "should become articulate and knowledgeable in talking about it."
Louisiana's Republican chairman, Roger F. Villere Jr., agrees.
"The conservative issues are the correct issues," he said. The presidential candidates should embrace the House stand, he said, and persuade voters they care more about saving Medicare than the Democrats do.
There's fact, there's opinion based on fact, and then there's the new republican party - a party that aggressively thrives on opinion based on opinion.
If they were not the second most powerful party in our country it wouldn't matter what the hell they think. But they are and it does.
This party - and the willfully ignorant, angry, confused and sometimes hateful people who make it up - have become worse by the decade. And this time, in this moment, they are absolutely, infuriatingly bad.
We used to live in a country where intelligence and the desire to learn actually had merit. We used to be a place that wanted to be right rather than pick positions and opinions that are so wrong they can only be laughed at. And much of our public DOES consider these goals worthy.
But a large minority (hopefully a minority) doesn't. They think they're right because they think everyone else has to be wrong. They hate a President not because of his policy but because of his color (sure, they base it on policy but their musings don't hold up to scrutiny, like everything else they say).
They are the same people who believed Oliver North was a hero. The same one's who think global warming is a myth. The same one's who believe in creationism. Who still think there are WMD's in Iraq. Who still think Bush had anything to do with finding and killing Bin Laden. Who believe that taxes must be cut so they can become millionaires too. Who believe that all democrats are still militant hippies 45 years after the Summer of Love. Who believe that looking back two years - or even remembering history in order to assess the present - is a useless task.
They are the republican party of today. They are idiots. They are dangerous. They are not right in any way except their label. They really should all crawl back under the rock they came from but, having no ability to look behind themselves, will probably bump into a different rock and cause an avalanche instead.