Alexander Burns and Jake Sherman of Politico have a piece up about how hard it is for the Republican leadership to deal with their clueless caucus. How can you stay on message when you have a constant parade of morons making idiotic statements about rape and terror babies and masturbating fetuses?
Now, Politico insists that they are a non-partisan outfit, so you know that they have to find counterexamples from the Democratic side of the aisle. They need to make a list of crazy or hateful remarks from Democrats that can at least approach the questioning of the president’s birth certificate or calling migrant workers “wetbacks,” or worrying about the imposition of Sharia Law. So, what did Burns and Sherman come up with?
It’s not that Democrats don’t have people in their ranks who say stupid stuff. It’s just that they’re never going to upstage a sitting president the way a congressman who sets himself on fire (rhetorically speaking) can upstage House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean calling the Benghazi uproar a “laughable joke,” or coulda-been Senate candidate Ashley Judd comparing mountaintop removal mining to rape, just doesn’t send the same ripples when Barack Obama’s the unquestioned spokesman for the party.
I think they meant “figuratively speaking,” but whatever. Neither Howard Dean nor Ashley Judd are officeholders. Neither has any current official role in the Democratic Party. Ashley Judd merely thought about running for office. Howard Dean’s comment, taken in context, wasn’t even remotely crazy. It was a simple statement of fact. The Republicans have been mercilessly exploiting the Benghazi tragedy and have set themselves on fire over the issue countless times.
As long as we’re not restricting ourselves to current lawmakers or officials, I don’t see why they couldn’t have dug up some 9/11 Truther stuff from Cynthia McKinney or raised the issue of Dennis Kucinich’s interest in Chemtrails and his encounter with a UFO. The truth of the matter is that Democrats simply don’t say crazy, nutty stuff on a regular basis that the party leadership has to condemn or tolerate through gritted teeth. Even Ashley Judd’s comment seems reasonable to me, if you acknowledge that it is possible to “rape” the environment by removing mountaintops and pouring toxic sludge into our rivers and streams. What Dean and Judd are guilty of, if they are guilty of anything, is of saying something truthful that can be exploited if taken out of context.
That is not remotely similar to what Todd Akin did. Louie Gohmert, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Trent Franks, Phil Gingrey, and E.W. Jackson are insane. This is no corollary caucus of nutcase buffoons on the Democratic side. At worst, there is a caucus of progressives who have unrealistic expectations about what is politically possible and who hold some political opinions that are not in the mainstream of American politics. Some of them may be a little idealistic or a little ignorant, but they aren’t crazy and they don’t say crazy things. It’s even rare that any of them say anything that the Democratic leadership feels compelled to respond to.
According to Progressive Punch, the five House Democrats with the most liberal lifetime voting records are Yvette Clark, Raul Grijalva, Jan Schakowsky, Keith Ellison, and Linda Sanchez. Can you remember any of them ever saying anything that defies logic and the natural laws of the universe?
The five most conservative House Republicans are unknown commodities. That’s because Bachmann and King and Broun and Franks and Gingrey aren’t even close to the most conservative members of the House. They aren’t the craziest or the most mean-spirited. They aren’t even on the outer fringe. All of them have more moderate lifetime voting records than Eric Cantor. They just talk loud.
To prove my point, the Republicans’ most recent vice-presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, opposes any rape exception for his proposed abortion ban because “the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.” In other words, there can never be a circumstance in which the woman’s interests come before the zygote’s interests.
That’s an unpopular position, which is why we keep hearing lame efforts to rationalize it. Rape is rare. Pregnancy from rape is even rarer. Late first trimester and early second trimester rape abortions
are rarer still. Just because Paul Ryan didn’t rationalize his position doesn’t mean he holds a different one.
This kind of thinking about women’s rights and autonomy is mainstream in the Republican Party. And the same kind of nuttery can be seen in their beliefs about climate science, plate tectonics, evolution, racial issues, Benghazi, the IRS, and the Kenyan Usurper.
It’s a fact of life that the GOP has gone crazy.
