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Monday, May 21, 2012

My way or ... not

I think the Republican party writ large has fallen into the same rabbit hole that religious crusaders consistently refuse to acknowledge: pushing extremists doesn't always go your way.

For years now, the religious crusaders have been weeping and wailing and  loudly lamenting that "the liberals kicked God out of public schools" and therefore we're all doomed to fail. Putting aside the large bag of nonsense that goes along with that on every front (including the fact that it was a Catholic bishop who first sued New York's public schools to stop teaching religion because they used a Protestant Bible), there's a primary issue that they never seem willing to see. If you put God back in the schools, you might have accept someone else's God. Christians are somewhat famous for their infighting, and there's no sign that they're slowing down. So whose God goes in? To which schools? By what practice? These folks seem to forget that they might actually win and have their kids forced to say Jewish prayers, or Catholic ones, or (heaven forefend!) Muslim prayers. Five times a day facing Mecca? Not what we had in mind .... but that's the risk. You might win. And then you might have to face your own status as a noisy minority rather than the Ultimate Bearers of All Truth. Then government intervention in religion starts to look a little less appealing.

Enter the Tea Party. It seems to me that even the GOP was taken by surprise by the TP. The problem is, the GOP has been priming the pumps for decades. This is the party of the Long Game. They've been sliding the bar to the right by increments over the past several administrations, opposing public education, opposing the middle classes, and developing their own fact bubble of GOP media where truth is decided by the Spinmeisters of the party. The place where everything is scary and every opinion is synonymous with your personal convictions and therefore unshakeable.

Oops. They set up a segment of the population to be ready for war on any front and unwilling to think critically about it. And then they tripped on themselves. That speech from the trading floor in Chicago wasn't revolutionary, it was just the lit match to the dry prairie the GOP had prepared. All of a sudden those undereducated, overfrightened, uninformed masses were on fire and ready for battle. Except not FOR the Republicans. The winds of change blew them into an unseen canyon where the party apparatus was not standing by to reap the benefits of the conflagration. Now the GOP seems to have overplayed its hand and is struggling mightily to get out of the corner and back to the plan. They may have intended to get here, but for the majority of the people, this was too much too fast. And with faces like Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin, the Tea Party is a national joke - not a political direction change. Most of us believe this will blow itself out once the otherwise disenfranchised voters realize that their votes (or lack of) DO matter. Which may be good for the GOP, but so far seems to be working better for the Democrats. The GOP reputation is shot - and it was more of a "gun cleaning accident" than a murder.

The moral of the story? When you play with fire, sometimes it's your own house that goes up in flames.

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