By Brian Beutler
I know that blogging has not quite wound its way into my DNA just yet, but Ezra asked me to help him take a vacation, and what better way to start than by suggesting you all read his boss's op-ed, which suggests four explanations for the curious fact that the Republicans have been so brazenly corrupt and out of touch in the months after the election:
What gives with the Republicans? How have they -- not just in the White House but in Congress, too -- become so detached from reality?
There are, I think, four possible, partial explanations. The first is Rudy-ex-machina-- the hope that the party will nominate somebody who is not perceived to be part of their current mess and who will sweep them back into power no matter how big a hole they may now be digging for him. The second is a strategy to make it impossible for the Democrats to pass any legislation, and then run against the do-nothing Democrats.
The third is that the alternative reality conveyed by the Republican media -- Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk -- has created a Republican activist base that is genuinely not reality-based, and from which the current generation of Republican pols is disproportionately drawn. And the fourth, pertaining specifically to the inability of the administration to stop politicizing government, is that good government is just not in their DNA. Bush and Rove are no more inclined to create a government based on such impartial values as law and science than they are to set up collective farms.
Allow me to suggest a fifth reason, which is, I suppose, related to Harold's point about the Republican base. The Republicans have spent--depending upon when you start the clock--as few as six or as many as a dozen years advancing a broken system of government and holding their oversight priorities in contempt. Now they're busted, and--like children--plan to pretend that nothing mischievous has been going on. They're worried that they'll lose that base if, on the heels of their first major political loss, they put their hands in the air and say, "yep, it was all a scam."
Cross posted at Brian Beutler.
