The Herd

Don’t mistake me for someone who cares that an elderly Mormon reactionary no longer gets to be a senator. But some of the poll crunchers and Beltway pontiffs argue that the peremptory toss of Senator Bennett into the trashcan by the Utah Republicans doesn’t mean anything because the GOP will hold the seat against any Democrat not openly endorsed by God and campaigning from a heavenly chariot. I don’t see it that way.

The tea partyers are a convenient bunch of white rabble for the Republicans to whip into a frenzy over health insurance reform, Latina judges or climate change bills. But now the masses are riding bareback into the manor house and setting fire to the French antique furniture. This has to be making the Brahmins’ stomachs mighty queasy.

Today’s story is that the Maine Republicans have similarly been seized by the Beck-ites who think Obama is a foreigner and Sarah Palin speaks to God. Once again, the reassuring line is that party platforms don’t mean anything, and so who cares if the wackos insert language calling for Jesus to start The Rapture on March 23rd?

Recent history does instruct us that we laugh at political goofiness at our peril and that the weirdest, most far-fetched fairy tales always carry the danger of lighting a bonfire in biped hearts that can be extremely costly to put out. Nonetheless, I permit myself to smirk over this display of grinning zealotry, encouraged by the Republican Party leadership for 30 years and now eagerly turning upon its erstwhile masters ready to rip out their insides and feed on their entrails.

Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, Dobson, Falwell, Robertson & all that gang pander to anti-intellectualism, dismiss disagreement and make up ‘facts’. They delight in running like a pack of wolves; in fact, they remind me of the most juvenile tendencies of our ‘60s enthusiasms, the same disregard for strategic alliances and a similar impatience with doubt. As long as bad old liberals and ACORN were the only targets, that was fine, but now it’s the Republican old-boy network itself that has got in their way. How grand!