Limbaugh's ignorant rant puts a gun to GOP head...

“Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs actually…”

The overt craziness of the GOP presidential candidates over the last year, combined with their various initiatives to suppress voter registration and participation, roll back the 19^th amendment and reestablish pre-1920 dominion over women, build an ersatz “Great Wall” along the southern border and all manner of irrational and suicidal behavior, can be explained in the swiftly changing demographics in the country.  The GOP – party of Lincoln and the saintly Ronald Reagan – finds itself collapsing in on itself through a profound shift from the conservative but fundamentally loyal political philosophy of William F Buckley, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater and – cut out my tongue – Dick Nixon to a shrill, ultra right reactionary bunch of paranoid white people yearning for Dwight Eisenhower to return and for things to be somehow the way they think they were in their most dangerous delusions.

Buckley laid out his particular pungent conservatism in the first issue of the National Review; 

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. “

 This preference for a laizze faire approach in which government’s role is reduced to maintaining an army, collecting (very limited) taxes and getting the hell out of the way sounds grand indeed, particularly as a reaction to what many considered the excesses of the New Deal and, later, Johnson’s Great Society.   Faced with a large percentage of the world in which two of its most frightening military powers in China and the Soviet Union were communist much of the voting public embraced the notion of personal liberty and minimal interference from government.   It all made sense.

 Though that basic notion of libertarianism still prevails as a guiding principle of the republican party, it really finds its voice in  only one of the candidates – Ron Paul – and his enthusiastic embrace of it has marginalized him within a party less interested in freedom from government than it would like everyone to believe.   The modern republican party, overwhelmingly white, relatively well off and Christian is now looking over its shoulder at an America that is browner, poorer and less religious and quickly growing into a larger and larger percentage of the electorate.  The GOP as it is presently constituted is doomed by demographics so the smartest squirrels among them are stocking upnuts for a long cold winter.

Denying Obama a second term may be their last hurrah for a long, long time.  If they can’t get someone elected to the Oval Office – and they seem to be picking Mitt frickin’ Romney, of all people – win the senate and maintain their majority in the House this year, they are looking at a dark period of increasing irrelevance.  And surveying the landscape it seems clear that they don’t like their chances very much. 

The presidential candidates have spent the last month yammering about birth control, abortion, religious freedom and demonstrating their ignorance of the constitution they all claim to worship.  Rick Santorum can’t seem to keep himself from getting all red-faced and apoplectic about anyone who doesn’t hew to the same twisted belief system he espouses.   He was on Faux News this morning and was flayed and then grilled by Chris Wallace of all people.  When that happens you have to know the fix is in and powerful interests within the party of trying to run you out of town.  He stammered his way through a painful series of questions trying to explain his moral hubris unsuccessfully and was summarily dismissed.  Gingrich is almost an afterthought now as he struggles against the demons of his bloated ego and genetic belligerence while sounding like a delirious college junior who hit the bong one time too many, lurching from colonies on the moon to bombing Iran to a laboriously overwrought condemnation of all things Obama and our impending destruction as a nation if he’s re-elected.  And he’s hoping to god he wins Georgia tomorrow.

 Meanwhile state legislatures dominated by tea-party bug-eyed freaks and the losers who couldn’t get a date in high school are furiously trying to ram through 19^th century legislation aimed at keeping women in their place, supported by notorious gas bags like Rush Blowhard and Bill Orally.  They are using their moment in the sun after the 2010 mid-term elections to get as much regressive legislation in place as possible before the ship sinks in November.   Like those dogs that freak out before an earthquake, they sense doom.   They are feeling it’s their last chance to put in place policies which the public doesn’t support so they might as well shoot for every half baked idea in the tea party canon – union busting, anti-immigrant policies, dismantling of 40 years of environmental policy, and especially reducing the size of government.   But their 15 minutes appears to be ending.

As local governments grapple with the aftermath of a brutal recession, communities across the nation have cut back on spending.  Riled up, “throw the bums out” voters elected politicians who pledged to balance budgets, but now that the effects are being felt, some of those voters are changing their minds as they helplessly watch the slow, incremental suffocation of their towns cut off from the oxygen of government participation in the economy.   They ultimately will have to answer this question: Is balancing a budget in hard times a necessity, as House Speaker John A. Boner has said, or is cutting to the bone right now just too much to ask of a small town?  What sounded like a good idea two years ago has now come home to roost.  High minded ideas about cutting the government aren’t quite as attractive when that means you lose your job, the nearest hospital is in the next town and there aren’t enough firemen to keep your house from burning down.

This helps explain Mitt Romney continuing to win.  He reminds me of a drunk and clueless Will Ferrell in Old School, naked and streaking through the quad with no one behind him.  Mitt’s idea of appealing to a room full of blue collar workers in Michigan was to roll up his sleeves and talk about his wife’s two Cadillacs – you know – like one of them.  But the attacks on Santorum and marginalizing of both Paul and Gingrich by the GOP establishment – hell, even Eric Cantor has endorsed Romney - means that it has become as clear to them as it is to others; to put in place their unholy bundle of unpopular programs and policies they need to win big in November.  To do that they need to make sure that nut bags like Santorum don’t win the nomination.  And they need to make sure the audience keeps watching their left hand while their right hand lifts their wallet and car keys.