Beautiful Horizons: GOPer: "GOP a Zombie Cartoon !"

Lifelong Republican and conservative radio host John Batchelor speaks some unpleasant truths about his party:

The Republican Party has become many bad things—intolerant, inert, fly-blown, incoherent, and delusional—but the worst is that the GOP is no longer young. The GOP, according to a Gallup poll, has lost, forgotten, ignored, just generally scared off the younger voters, non-white voters, and female voters in all demographics.

What is a political party that is vastly white, middle-aged, male, Southern, pious, conservative, aggrieved, impotent, nostalgic, rude—and regarded negatively by more than half the respondents? Time magazine’s Republican political consultant Mike Murphy looks at the demographics and warns of a coming “ice age” for the party. That is grossly optimistic. No longer in second place, the voter self-identification polls place the Republicans well behind the leading independents and the second-place Democrats. The GOP is the equivalent of a shrinking third party on its way to becoming a museum piece beside the Whigs, the Greenbacks, and the Prohibitionists. The GOP is like a zombie cartoon reading the daily headlines of the last four years and asking, “Am I dead?”

The attack of the living dead Republicans does have the camp fascination of a George Romero movie as pieces of brains fall out.

Last week, Deputy Minority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, in some quarters regarded as cunning, boasted soberly not only that, without any polling evidence, “I think we’re got a shot at taking back the House,” but also that the Obama administration was comparable to Putin’s rule in Moscow. Cantor did not explain if he meant that the Obama administration is Soviet socialist, which is balmy, since Moscow is a robber baron paradise these days, or if he meant the Obama administration stands for tyrannical one-party rule, which is dopey, since Cantor appears to think of himself as virile leader of the opposition.

Last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a generalissimo of zombies, fresh from smearing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for “new racism,” presented more startling delusions at a congressional fundraiser in Washington when he claimed that the Republicans were the “majority party.” He offered no facts to counter the Gallup poll’s certainty that the Republicans are a minor minority party. Nor did Gingrich, who increasingly pontificates with the bravado of the vacuous TV anchor from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, Ted Baxter, note that the cash raised in the ballroom of swells was down by a third from last year; nor did he explain his demagogic remark that the Obama administration “has already failed,” with bailouts that are chiefly a continuation of a Republican administration’s panicky policies.

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It is not possible to dismiss Cantor, Gingrich, Cheney, and Limbaugh as only just cult cranks, because the Gallup poll shows that the nation regards them as speaking for the party, and so do the Republicans themselves—Limbaugh at 13 percent, Gingrich at 10 percent, Dick Cheney at 9 percent, far ahead of anyone actually holding or running for office.

Pundits like the nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook assert that the party is in its “wilderness period” and will emerge after a “time-out” like a recalcitrant child of privilege. Partisans like the defensive former Bush speechwriter David Frum are smeared publicly by Limbaugh and his cult for trying to push back at the demagogues as “bombastic” and “a stereotype of self-indulgence;” yet when Frum gets a chance to fight back in Newsweek, he invites the muggers for an open debate. About what? Polite commentators like Peggy Noonan, while nodding cautiously to the demagogues as though they are pet gargoyles, beseeches the party in her Wall Street Journal column to cure its “base-itis,” to open its arms to something that isn’t an opera of bigotry, to cease the self-branding as “mean, thick, and angry.”

None of these mewling half-measures speak to the fact that a once idealistic, decent political party of all the states and all demographics for 150 years has now become a cruel cadre that defines itself like a jihad by what it is against.

Ouch! John Batchelor, wherever you are, I want to buy you a drink.