A Republican view of the Republican Party

Via Michael Tomasky in The Guardian, John Batchelor:

Vigilant Democrats worry today that the Republican Party is only playing possum, or that it can be revived by extraordinary means such as a Martian invasion. In fact, the GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality. What remains to call themselves Republicans are baldly badly educated or just prankish Confederate re-enactors—chubby men in gray and butternut suits with gold buttons and feather-tipped hats, clanking down stairs with shiny sabers. A handful of them are just boors from the South who look poorly on horseback and wave unread Bibles while calling for Billy Sunday to rise like the gold market….

There is much to explicate about Rove and Bush in the White House—their fearful temperament, their petty theories of governance, their inability to shoot straight so that, at firing at the lunatic bin Laden, they hit the cretin Saddam Hussein. But in terms of the death of the Republican Party, there is nothing original. The Rovian Bush midway was followed by the cartoon candidacy of John McCain, who spent months imitating both Popeye the Sailor and Sarah Palin’s Uncle Sam. That McCain didn’t claim to be more than an aviator, and that Palin didn’t claim to be more than a moose hunter, demonstrated that neither had need of, nor interest, in the Republican Party’s history or meaning….

I am on radio, on what is called right-wing radio, and it is easy for me to see that my loudest colleagues, who compulsively repeat the cant of Conservatism for Dummies, are not sincere students of the Republican Party but rather barkers, hookers, establishmentarian jesters, cultists, and, in the worst instance, just thatch-headed whiners….

The truth about the House Republicans—cowards, sycophants, and snobs just like 1930’s lot—is illustrated by the fact that 85 of them voted for the ludicrous AIG bonus-confiscation bill written on the back of a parking ticket.

It’s not dead. The malefactors of great wealth are always hovering over the zombified mass of lies and resentments and prejudices that we call the Republican Party, waiting to breathe a simulacrum of life into it. But it’s down, and it needs to be kept down long enough for the nation to recover.