That quote is from an article in today's Washington Post that ought to be a breakthrough against the pernicious phony "balance" in political coverage today. The article is Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. Its authors are Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institute and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. (Ornstein, a centrist, is the "House non-wingnut" at the AEI.)
Nonetheless, it's striking to read something that could be a Recommended Diary on the pages that regularly feature the likes of Krauthammer, Kristol et al.
On Allen West's bizarre McCarthyite charge:
What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
On the GOP:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
The authors trace the source of GOP Radicalism, from Gingrich's scorched earth tactics in the '80s, through the Norquist tax pledge to the outright obstruction and nihlism of the past three years, which was confirmed once again today by the four hour Luntz-Congressional "Oppose Everything" meeting in November 2005.
Mann and Ornstein again:
The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP support for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As co-sponsor Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.”
Read the whole thing and afterward, you will want a (metaphorical) cigarette.