The Lowest Common Denominator

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Now this is the best news the Democrats have had in a while - Dick Morris says: GOP will win House and Senate. Now Morris has not been right about anything for years if ever.  That's why he's seen only on FOX - he's never right but he does tell the FOX viewers what they want to hear.  Now the Republicans will pick up some seats in November because Obama and the Democrats will be punished for the economy.  But the Republican base represents those who are Proud of Being Ignorant.

The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully
unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe
global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs,
and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay. 

That
the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A
Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom,
is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at
times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say
more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert
attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to
believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War. 

This
is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we
still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is
the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim
sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor
a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the
movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even
now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real
American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God,
this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair
tonic, is for you.

Former conservative and Republican Charles Johnson agrees.

Well said. The GOP is the party of creationists and climate change deniers; nearly every major GOP politician is anti-science, because they know they won�t get any votes if they don�t toe the right wing line. And increasingly, the barely suppressed racism inherent in this atavistic world view is bubbling to the surface, as we see today in Virginia.

And yes much of it is about race but not so much about slavery but about a need to be better than someone.  A black coworker made that more difficult, a black supervisor increased the difficulty but a black President was simply unbearable.  The base longs for that "utopia" that was the pre Civil War South where you always knew you were better than someone.  That base may result in some gains this year but you can't have a long lasting political movement based on the lowest common denominator.

More here: A Brief History of Sham

What is enervating is not merely that Conservatives lie, constantly, and
about almost everything: it is that they lie so fucking
in-comp-e-tent-ly.

This is because they long ago became a cult,
living inside a hermetically sealed bell jar, forever rebreathing Rush
Limbaugh�s beer farts and regurgitating RNC talking points back and
forth into each other mouths.

Like the slaveholding goons out of
whose cultural Petri dish they crawled, they have built themselves an
impenetrable welter of self-referential, self-deluding,
self-aggrandizing lies behind which they hide: People who claim to know
(with an Absolute Caps+LOCK Categorical Authority that only comes from a
steady diet of Glenn Beck's ass pudding) the Secret Motives behind
every Liberal thought and opinion and the secret Marxist plots and
conspiracies behind the Kenyan Usurper's every "seemingly" Centrist
move...are the same people who clearly haven't got the first fucking
clue about their own movement's ridiculously well-documented history,
leadership or ideology.