Even GOP Insiders Say the Party Has Lost Touch With Reality

Liberal political comedian Bill Maher once made a sagacious comment on his show "Real Time," about the state of the Republican party. He said the Democrats had moved to the right and the Republicans have moved into the mental ward.

Funny words, but it is increasingly evident that they were also very accurate. Putting it bluntly, Republicans, we have a problem.  Of course you would think that as someone of the opposite political persuasion, my views towards the GOP would be diametrically opposed. But it's not just that, the tone of commentary from the Republican party has increasingly become unhinged. I am not talking about simple political disagreements; I am talking about outright hostility, breaks from reality and even calls to violence.

One could trace this behavior to the election of Barack Obama, who tapped into many white people's fears of becoming a racial minority.  Obama's election was the visible representation that white men are losing their hegemony over America. (They actually aren't, but they believe they are.) But it goes back further than this. I trace it back to the Clinton years, where we saw the growth of talk radio demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing propaganda machine FOX News.

The Clinton years saw people accusing the president of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And also saw a thinly-veiled coup that attempted to push a legitimately-elected president out of office. Although the anti-Clinton initiative largely failed, it left a vast right-wing noise machine ready to go into action against the next Democratic president, Barack Obama.

As Maher said, the American right-wing has moved so far to the right, that it is a hair's breadth away from being fascist. But apart from that, mainstream Republican voices are also beginning to sound as deranged and strident as the voices on talk radio.

In recent months we have seen Rep. Allen West accuse Democrats of harboring communists in their midst, Rep. Steve King compare immigrants to dogs and the never ending birther farce, which has seen Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney cozying up to discredited carnival barker, Donald Trump. And even though the president has shown two forms of his birth certificate, Trump is still trying to resurrect his Quixotic birther crusade.

It seems that many of these Republican politicians are copying tactics used by Rush Limbaugh. But what they don't realize is that Limbaugh has a different goal from them. Limbaugh's goal is to get higher ratings by making outrageous comments. However, sounding outrageous doesn't win you elections, nor help you govern, as pointed out by former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. Elected representatives are expected to show statesmanship, and that means cutting deals and compromising, which has become a dirty word in Republican circles.

You can't govern effectively, if you see the opposing party, the Democrats, as treasonous miscreants worthy of death.

It's not just me who has expressed concerns about the Republican party. David Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, has decried the Republican's "alternate reality." Frum's views are so controversial that he has been banned from FOX News, probably because they are the source of much of this disinformation.

FOX News may bill itself as a "fair and balanced news" station, but is anything but that. FOX is a slickly-packaged propaganda delivery device. Its job is to get people to believe whatever comes out of the mouths of Republican operatives, even it's the opposite of the truth.

Here are some examples of some of the "facts" that are put forward by FOX News:

• George W. Bush was responsible for the death of Osama Bin Laden, when actually Bush stated that he didn't think much about Bin Laden and also shut down the CIA unit that was dedicated to hunting the terrorist mastermind. Bush also failed to capture Bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora, by refusing to listen to CIA officers and commanders on the ground who requested additional troops.  
• The Obama administration is anti business, when in reality American companies are seeing record profits, mainly because they have slashed payrolls and forced the remaining workers to work like slaves.  
• The Democrats have launched a war on women, when Republicans are the ones who have passed more than 1,000 anti abortion/reproductive rights laws since 2010. It is also Republicans in Arizona who passed a law that would allow employers to quiz female employees about their reproductive and sexual habits.
• Obama approved the bank bailout, when actually the $700 billion Toxic Asset Relief Program was approved by President George W. Bush in the fall of 2008.
• We had to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11. In reality Saddam Hussein was a secular Muslim, who hated Bin Laden, as much as we did.

Is it any wonder that a new survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University again confirmed that regular viewers of FOX News actually knew less about current events than people who didn't watch the news at all!

The news is supposed to provide the public with information that will enable them to make smart decisions, but FOX News works in the reverse of that order. It gets gullible Americans to believe incorrect information so they will vote against their interests. 

So now we have a miseducated public repeating false views like they are the gospel truth, and politicians following the views of a morally-bankrupt demagogue, who has never won an election in his life.  Is it any wonder that former Reagan official Michael Fumento recently penned a column where he described the GOP as suffering from "mass hysteria." Earth to GOP, please come back to reality.