Ever since this Sunday, when Missouri Congressman and Senatorial candidate Todd Akin made his lunatic statements about women's magical abilities to "shut down" the fertilization process in cases of "legitimate rape," the vast majority of the GOP, from establishment figures to Tea Party favorites, to the Presidential ticket, have been working themselves into a frenzy trying to distance themselves from that comment, and by extension, the sentiment behind it. They've been calling on Akin to withdraw from the race, clearly terrified that he will poison not only the Senatorial race and any chance they have of regaining the majority, but the chances that Romney would win Missouri as well.
The fact of the matter, however, is that there is virtually no daylight between what Akin said, however inartfully, and GOP policy positions. The official GOP Platform for 2012 advocates for a total national ban on abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. They are putting forth the idea of a Constitutional Amendment as a means of achieving that objective, if they can't get Roe v. Wade overturned by SCOTUS. This would, of course, join the ranks of that other Constitutional Amendment they would like to see, banning same-sex marriage across the land. In the last century we can point to one time where the U.S. Constitution was used to LIMIT, rather than to expand rights, and we all remember how well that turned out.
If anybody thinks that Akin is an outlier here, I refer you to the fact Akin has had a very close ally in the House of Representatives on just these issues, in the person of none other than Paul Ryan, the presumptive nominee for Vice President. Not only were the two of them (along with a large number of GOP members of the House) co-sponsors of a bill that would re-define rape, making a distinction between "forcible" rape and, I gather, "non-forcible rape," an oxymoron if ever I've heard one, but they worked hand in hand on the infamous "personhood" bill, which would grant to a fertilized ovum the status of a human being, potentially criminalizing everything from abortion to using an IUD. This is a federal version of a bill that was so extreme not even the uber-right state of Mississippi was willing to pass it. Never mind that it is scientifically ludicrous.
These ideas are, simply put, well outside the mainstream of rational thought, and frankly crazy. The assertions about how a woman's body works are wholly unscientific and more than a little ridiculous. But why should we expect any sort of rational thought from a party that has consistently denied climate science and even seeks to roll back the clock on our understanding of evolution? This is a party that revels in, and extols the virtues of, ignorance. To choose science over "faith," in their minds, is immoral and practically treasonous.
Science, unfortunately, is not the only intellectual discipline that the GOP seems to despise. They also are failing miserably at math. Somehow or other, with the assistance of a lazy media that allows itself to be duped into repeating useless and meaningless tropes, Paul Ryan and his magical budget have been put forward as "serious" and a genuine attempt to balance the budget and reduce both the national deficit and the national debt. The problem is that, even if one takes the most optimistic assumptions on which the Ryan plan relies, and which most economists and political scientists, even those on the right, assert are improbable at best and likely impossible, and even by Ryan's own projections, the budget wouldn't be balanced for "30 or 40 years." When pressed for details on how all of this magic (massive tax cuts for the wealthy, increased defense spending, massive cuts not only to services for the poor, elderly, and sick, but to virtually every other part of the federal government) would work, the answer from both Ryan and Romney is "we'll work that out in time -- trust us." The fact is, it CAN'T work. It's mathematically impossible.
So given its total rejection of science, miserable failures with math and economic theory (supply side economics, pushed since Reagan, have been shown simply not to work in practice), how has the GOP managed to fare so well electorally? I believe this can be traced back to 1968, and Richard Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy." Prior to that time, the South was dominated by the Democratic Party. To be sure, many of these Southern Democrats were socially conservative bible-belters, but they had seen how Democratic fiscal policies had worked for them, and stuck with that Party. Nixon and his Machiavellian team came in and used the politics of racial division to convince Southern voters to vote against their own financial interests, and the GOP never looked back.
Ronald Reagan doubled down on this strategy with his foul, racist "welfare queen" language, and forever allied GOP politics with the use of the bogeyman - an evil "other" that is trying to steal your way of life, cheat you, betray the Republic, and laugh in the face of God.Virtually every other major campaign has used this strategy to some extent or another. If it wasn't African Americans (welfare queens, Willie Horton) it was the gays, the baby-killers, the Muslims, the Latinos, the socialists - whatever they thought would stick. It seems the lessons we as a country should have learned from the disaster of McCarthyism just didn't resonate long or hard enough, and we're still mired in this nonsense 60 years later.
All of this might have been a lot more difficult to pull off, in the age of the Internet, when we have ready access to virtually unlimited information, which should by all rights help to dispel the ignorance and fear on which the GOP hopes to capitalize. The problem is that for as much fact as can be found on the Internet, even more fiction can be. At the same time, journalism and factual reporting took a major hit when Fox News entered the picture and cast itself as an actual "news" organization, when it was, from the outset, purely a propaganda arm of the GOP, having absolutely no qualms about "reporting" absolute drivel, lies, and nonsense and passing it along as "fact." They have deftly played upon the very fears and ignorance that the GOP peddles, and the results are clear. Study after study has shown that people who get their news primarily from Fox actually know LESS, factually, than people who don't follow the news at all. In order to achieve that you have to go beyond simply failing to inform, and deliberately MISinform.
And this is how we find ourselves here. While the Democratic Party and President Obama have many failings, the GOP is now so completely off the rails that they should be laughed off any national stage, and yet they're in control of the U.S. House of Representatives as well as the majority of state legislatures, and are running scarily close to having a reasonable shot at both gaining control of the Senate and winning the Presidency. They're putting forward a wholly reckless economic plan, and casting Obama and his plan as a "failure," when any shortcomings in the results of that plan are directly attributable to their own obstructionism. It's the classic tactic of a schoolyard bully - make a mess, force the other guy to clean it up, then keep slapping the broom out of his hands while calling him an incompetent for not being able to get it done.
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