How true, how true. This column pretty much encapsulates the GOP drive for what I call the "MORON" vote. Yes, they have successfully gotten it, but now it's swallowing them up.
The sad thing is, can the Democrats win again without sinking this low?????
http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/mulshine/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1125204739140520.xml&coll=1
Chávez first came to public attention in Venezuela in another incident that had great comic overtones. In 1992 Chávez, who was at the time a lieutenant colonel in the military, led a plot that involved stationing a tank within range of the home of the president's mistress. It was known by all that President Carlos Andrés Pérez frequently visited his girlfriend. If he had done so on the evening in question, his presidency would have ended with a bang.
Instead, in classic Latin tradition, the president got word of the plot and rallied his supporters. Chávez was promptly put in the jug with a television, a computer and probably visits from his own mistress -- though that was not reported in the papers.
It's hijinks of that sort that have made politics in Latin America a laughingstock. But I invite you to ponder how we Americans must look to the rest of the world these days. It's not merely that Robertson is a loudmouth and a blowhard who actually managed to give a public-relations boost to the dictator he was denouncing. It's that this clown of a TV preacher was and is a powerful figure in the Republican Party.
As a loyal Republican I hate to bring this up, but in the not-so-distant past the leader of the 700 Club was a serious contender for the Republican nomination for president. In fact, he actually edged out George H.W. Bush in the first contest of the 1988 primary season. Robertson finished second in the Iowa caucuses that year, ahead of the sitting vice president. Robertson had quite a run in that primary season. He was a force to be reckoned with almost to the end, even though it was known to all that he claimed the power to speak in tongues and redirect hurricanes.
This is the price the Republican Party has paid for success in the red states. The lower one descends in latitude, it seems, the more humor one finds in the political process. I like a good laugh as much as the next guy. But I do find it a bit disconcerting that this once-serious political party is now providing comic relief for the banana republics instead of the other way around.
Back in the days of "Bananas," we did indeed have some entertaining rabble-rousers in American politics. But they tended to be Democrats. Alabama Gov. George Wallace, for example, ran in both the 1968 and 1972 Democratic presidential primaries and got the kind of support that now goes to Robertson.
These days, however, the nuts are Republicans. Or maybe I should say the Republicans are nuts. This is the penalty for swallowing the South. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken described the South as "almost as sterile artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara Desert." He went on to comment: "There are single acres in Europe that harbor more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America."
That remains true, but this is a democracy. The vote of a new- Earth creationist carries the same weight as the vote of the man who cracked the DNA code. I suppose one can hardly blame the GOP for sinking to this level in pursuit of votes. But if this is where our national political life is headed, then I recommend that we simply descend a few degrees closer to the Equator and adopt the Latin American model wholesale. Our political life suffers for the absence of beauty queens and presidential mistresses, openly acknowledged. If we're going to go bananas, we might as well go all the way.