Where ya been, fella?
This has been batted around as a big thing, by some, but I'm
less excited by it:
The GOP’s extreme positions, particularly on comprehensive immigration reform, have led the co-chairman of the Polk County Republican party in Iowa to resign his position and register as an independent. Chad Brown told the Des Moines Register that Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) unrelenting offensive comments about immigrants, including calling young immigrants drug mules, led him to leave his post.
“No one’s really stood out to really fight him on those. I think they’re hateful statements,” he said. […]
Brown also said he disagrees with the GOP’s position on gun violence and climate change denial, which he called a “war on science and common sense.”
If it took you this long to figure out that nobody in your party was inclined to stand up against "hateful statements," I'm not sure how much applause really needs to be dished out here, and an oh-by-the-way observation that your party is also batshit crazy on a bunch of other fronts makes it even more difficult. What do you say to the people who muster the will to leave the burning building only when their own hair burns off? Good show on eventually deciding not to be burned to a crisp, my dear boy, here's a cookie for figuring it out?
If only there was a national Republican leader or pseudo-leader who might point out that the party has gone off the anti-science, anti-common-sense, anti-decency cliff when it comes to a whole host of issued. Instead, the big news is when a local county co-chair figures it out. Nobody else does because … why, exactly? Is the obsession with hurting poor people such a cheap thrill that a host of other whackadoodle things can be begrudgingly tolerated, so long as little Jimmy does not get food stamps this month? Does the Republican Party get a cut from every box of ammo sold? Is the problem with recognizing climate change simply one of the insurance industries not forking over quite the same political cash the energy industries do, and if we reversed that, would the science of the thing suddenly turn non-controversial again?
This is why I am always skeptical of party-switchers and other deep political epiphanies, whether they be on something like the ongoing dissolution of a meaningful Republican Party or on something like the Iraq War perhaps in hindsight not being that great of an idea after all. The timing. Someone announces to the world what exactly their maximum threshold of meanness, crookedness or stupidity finally turns out to be, saying no more of that: All right, fine, congratulations, but the corollary is that you have asserted that all the other meanness, crookedness or stupidity was not enough to push you over the edge, and the rest of us would have to be a bit dense to not to make a note of that as well. It still gives you higher marks than all the people around you who did not figure those things out yet, yes, but that's not really the biggest trophy in the cabinet now, is it?
Somewhere in Iowa (well, we know exactly where in Iowa, I am merely being polite) there is a group of Republican voters who have not had enough of Steve King, and didn't the last time out, or the time before that, and if you think maybe that is a good yardstick on how mean or crooked or stupid you can be and still have a majority of the Republican base willing to tolerate it, you would be damn right about that. While I congratulate Chad Brown here for pinning down the final moment when it all went a half-degree too sideways even for him, it only serves to emphasize how very alone he is, among his fellow party movement-builders, in thinking so.