Notes from the past few days

In Arizona, electors voting for President took the opportunity of their Mitt Romney votes to repeat the ongoing bullshit canard about the President’s birth certificate.  Including the head of the Arizona GOP.

In Tennessee, the state legislature is pushing a bill to arm teachers, air-marshal style, in schools.

One national columnist is advocating that the proper response to school shootings is to train people (presumably including students) to rush the gunman.

In Michigan – holy shit, Michigan – you have a “right-to-work” union-busting law being rammed through at the same time as a law that would allow more guns in schools, which is only now getting vetoed in the wake of Sandy Hook. Meanwhile, the former Michigan GOP head – and current financial head of the RNC – is arguing that the GOP can win Michigan because there’s no political machine to pull the black people out of the pool hall and bus them around to vote more than once.

In South Carolina, one member of the legislature is pushing a bill that would criminalize compliance with the Affordable Care Act – nullification, to coin a phrase, of Obamacare.

And of course, any number of Republicans – Mike Huckabee at the fore, apparently giving up on ever running for office – suggesting that the reason we have mass shootings now is because we don’t have school prayer.

I can’t remember who it was – I want to say Anne Applebaum – but it’s the truest phrase: there is no double-entry bookkeeping.  The conceit that this is some kind of fringe, that this is all a shuck, that this is the GOP doing a minstrel show for its hicks in the sticks – it’s incorrect.  This is what these people actually believe.  This is what the Republican Party is about at the end of 2012.  There’s not going to be any making these people see reason.  As far as they’re concerned, they are seeing reason, and it’s the rest of the country which is deluded and naive and idiotic.

This is the price the Republican party paid for Nixonland.  They thought they could harness the South and use it to wrest a political majority from the Democrats.  Instead, they were consumed by it.  The problem is, they went along with it, and too many people are still pulling the lever thinking that a little redneckery is the price of keeping taxes down – or that giving corporations a free hand is the price of keeping the dusky folk in their place.

The older I get, the better I was.  And I was right.  Now all we have is containment…and the hope that in time that will be enough.

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