Oh, And...

Showcased this morning by Brilliant at Breakfast and Shakesville so far this morning that I've seen:  Bob Herbert's column in the NY Times this morning.

The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship. [Emphasis added.]

The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.

If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.

With a freer hand, the Republicans would have done more damage. George W. Bush tried to undermine Social Security. John McCain was willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and thought Phil Gramm would have made a crackerjack Treasury secretary. (For those who may not remember, Mr. Gramm was a deregulation zealot who told us during the presidential campaign that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”)

A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.

Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.

I was reading "The Vanishing Liberal" by Kevin Baker (that so wants to be typoed) in Harper's this morning (hard copy—I subscribe), which asserts that the right did not become populist; the oft-repeated lies about liberals convinced Democrats that liberals no longer spoke for the people.

I suspect other factors, but that's me (I also last week finally got hold of a copy of The Last Days of the Late Great State of California, which firmed up my knowledge about California in the '50s and '60s and about Ronald Reagan in particular; I'd thought that Governor "Pat" Brown had term-limited out [because I was under the impression then that California governors were only allowed to serve two terms, even before that actually became law], not that he'd lost, and Mr. Reagan was Not One Of The Good Guys, not by a long chalk; anyway, that campaign has shall we say resonances even today, even though the culminating and well-imagined disaster in the book has not [yet] happened).