Yeah, Rachel Maddow seems surprised that Michele Bachmann has moved from being viewed as "a fringe member of the GOP" to being the mainstream face of the GOP.
Watch poor, behind-the-learning-curve Rachel Maddow mug her way through the video clip at the bottom of this post. As she catches up to the reality of what's going on in the GOP these days, Rachel is doing her smirky, "can believe this nonsense" facial expressions.
And what's going on? Instead of seeing the most extreme conservatives driven out of the Republican Party, we're seeing the most extreme conservatives take over the Republican Party. And newscasters and political pundits like Maddow are surprised by that. Really, they are--even though they're supposed be experts on politics, they affect "surprise" that this is happening. (continued)
I don't mean to single out Maddow as an example of "clueless on this issue." I'd bet the majority of political pundits and informed liberals and progressives are just as clueless as poor Rachel seems to be, reading this information of the teleprompter.
There's a bias in the liberal and progressive world, there's a bias in the academic, post-Enlightenment world. The basis is towards the rational and the empirical: reason and the intelligent use of experience to make decisions will triumph over ignorance in the end. And that is what we are all taught in school.
The problem is that it's not necessarily true. And people like Rachel Maddow react with these snarky surprised expressions when they find out the irrational is suddenly ascendant, when we are forced to admit the irrational to the policy making table.
That's not supposed to happen. When crazy ideas surface (like "the birther" movement, the teabagging ideas on government and taxes, the threat of armed resistance against the elected government)--they're supposed to dry up and blow away, die of ridicule, and get buried on the fringe of political life.
That's not happening. Instead, we're seeing those fringe ideas take over one of the only two viable political parties in the United States. Conservative pundits who would have dismissed Michele Bachmann as some kind of nut twenty years ago, are now embracing her publicly (see the piece George Will ran on her.)
Here on the liberal and progressive blogs, I try to tell people how important this development is. In a national or regional election, the viable choices are between the Dem and the Republican. The right wing extremist strategy (driven by national theocrats, in part) is to take over one of the only two viable brands.
So if the voters become disaffected with the Dems, they have no place else to go except the GOP--which has been deliberately taken over by the most extreme elements. Do you see the trap, for most voters? You and I will never vote for the GOP, but millions and millions of voters around the country--solely because they're pissed off at local Democrats, or because the economy isn't what it used to be, or because there's some scandal about an intern or something.
And if that happens, the Republican gets in--and the Republican is crackpot, a lawless crackpot that makes Newt Gingrich look law-abiding.
You see the dynamic that the extremists on the right as setting up here? So many people didn't see that strategy. So many TV liberals and progressives did so much sneering about how the GOP was doomed if it failed to expel the fringe.
And now the fringe is taking over, and they're poised to capture Virginia and NY-23 in the name of the fringe.
So what was everyone sneering at, when I told them that just because people like Bachmann are crazy--it doesn't follow that they're "marginal and unimportant"?
