As we struggle to absorb the latest vile smear that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has voiced about our President, that Obama is somehow exhibiting "Kenyan, anticolonial behavior," consider his comments but a foretaste of the rhetoric and vitriol to come as Republicans, anxious to regain the House at any cost, flee moderate ground for fear of being steamrolled by their increasingly loopy extremists in the Tea Party Express.
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension," the ever-opportunistic Gingrich told the National Review Online, "that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."
Where to begin with a statement like this, made by a prominent politician in 2010 North America? There was a time, not so long ago, when such slander and bigotry would have been career-ending. Horrified Republican moderates, disgusted by their colleague's smear and its guaranteed repetition across the media and blogosphere, would have rushed to declare, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?"
But we live in a political climate in which it's apparently acceptable, even advantageous, to smear religious moderates as Nazis. Where former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin can brazenly state that the Obama administration is making Americans' lives "very, very, very dangerous" even after she urged her supporters to "reload" while literally adding gun targets to Democratic offices supporting better and less-costly healthcare coverage for more Americans. She said such things with the aim, supposedly, of rebuilding "honor" in the country! And if you still think that words such as "reload," accompanied by such targets, were just a coincidence and that Palin doesn't know what she's doing in fomenting extremist violence, you may not have been paying enough attention to the meltdown affecting the Republican Party--a meltdown that Palin is doing her best to instigate.
As Paul Krugman wisely has been pointing out for months in his New York Times column, we should all be very concerned by the effect that the Tea Party Express is having on moderate Republicans, who are either too brazen or too spineless to stand up to the falsehoods, the xenophobia, and the general know-nothingism, to declare an end to them. Disagree with President Obama's policies as you may, just as vast numbers of Democrats foresaw the havoc and financial instability that the combined effect of President Bush's deregulation policies and war in Iraq would have on global markets, the housing market, and America's budget woes.
But when a former speaker of the House rejects all known facts about President Obama and represents his convincing victory in both Houses in 2008 as a "wonderful con," as Gingrich did last weekend, we are on new and troubling political terrain. One only has to recall the ugly Republican primary in Florida and what John McCain said and did over his initially tough re-election campaign in Arizona to see, first, what kinds of permanent scars are left on our political landscape and, second, how similarly spineless or opportunistic Republicans will court the vilest slander and most outrageous lies if it's finally to their political advantage. What they may not be counting on is disgusted recoil from independents and Republican moderates who finally have had enough of the lies.
If the GOP goes the way of the polar icecaps and melts under the heat of American anxiety and anger, consider our political future one in which the Democrats, already struggling for bipartisanship with the "Party of No," will soon have to try to engage with fanatics and fundamentalists proud of their beliefs but unable intellectually to govern a diverse, complex, and increasingly fractious republic. If that's our political future, as certainly looks possible in November, then we all have reason to be extremely concerned.
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