Screw your laws, America, we're Republicans.
While Republican presidential contenders shuffle off to Kentucky to pay homage to a single right-wing county clerk who's pretty damn sure her personal interpretation of her personal sub-sect of her personal religion supersedes whatever laws the Supreme Court of the United States has laid down as to how she ought to do her job, the usual "moderate Republicans" continue to fret that this whole episode is making the party once again
look like unapologetic bigots.
National Republicans operatives hoped the issue was settled in June when the Supreme Court ruled to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. [...]
“I think the longer this lingers, the worse it is for the Republican Party and for the conservative movement,” said John Feehery, a longtime Republican strategist and lobbyist. “Civil disobedience never works well for conservatives. And in this case, it smacks of bigotry.”
Now, now, don't soft-sell it. It also smacks of ignorance, incompetence, extremism and good old-fashioned conservative panic attack. It's the whole package—it's a
Fox & Friends fever dream come to life and playing out in the real world.
“If you're looking to fundraise and gin up the conservative base's support, this is a good way to do it,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “At the same time, for mainstream voters re-litigating the same-sex marriage debate isn't helpful because it marginalizes the Republican Party as unaccepting. ... The key here is for Republicans to not look like they're un-accepting of others who lead different lifestyles. The goal is to broaden our base.”
We've been here before, of course. For years now Republican insiders have fretted that their party's obsession with racism, bigotry, religious zealotry and general "righteous" lawlessness has been making them look bad, and yet the Republican base not only continues to persist in all these things but seems to have ratcheted them up after each brow-furrowing plea for them to not do that. The Republicans just want to be a nice, simple party of doing good things for rich people, but decades of dog-whistles to racists and bigots in order to put together a coalition capable of winning has left them with a base of, unsurprisingly, racists and bigots.
Head below the fold for more.
And now Donald Trump, a hyper-narcissistic reality show pitchman whose most noteworthy political opinions are that the black president is secretly not an American and that immigrants are mostly criminals and rapists, is leading the polls.
And the Republican House is hamstrung by repeated demands by their own members that they shut down the government over not just one, but a steady stream of radical demands.
And Republican presidential contenders are flocking to Kentucky to endorse and celebrate the notion that American laws should be freely broken if you say God told you to do it, and are eagerly trooping off to add foreign policy gravitas to a radical anti-Muslim group that thinks secret Muslims have infiltrated any government institution you can name.
So from this perspective—and we are of course not Republican "insiders," and so can only look on these things from afar—it looks like the racist, bigoted, and ever-more-radicalized base has done a fine job of taking over the actual party and populating it with politicians who are as racist, bigoted and radicalized as they are. It looks like the Republican "insiders" are the ones who have been left behind on this one, bleating and tsking that these bouts of extremism are making the party look bad while the whole collected party that surrounds them are pretty sure that insufficiently bigoted and radical Republican insiders are the party's biggest remaining problem.
No matter how many slideshows and "postmortems" party professionals draft, it seems the base isn't listening to their concerns. They know what they want—and they're getting it.