No Surprise Here, Cont.

So my previous post dealt with Tom Ridge, primarily, but it also covered the party of nihilism that the GOP has become. In answer to Joe Klein's fantastic essay comes this tripe from Matt Welch over at Reason. Welch calls Klein to task by pointing out this tasty bit of logic:

If, as the growing media narrative contends, the Republicans have devolved into a rump party of half-sane white southerners wracked by racial anxiety, why does it keep rewarding anti-racist anti-populists at the top of its presidential ticket (including, notably, the ticket that ran against a liberal Democrat black candidate), while rejecting every dime-store Tancredo with prejudice? When does this allegedly mainstream Republican pathology begin showing up in the numbers, or in the personages of those who lead the party?

The main problem with this thinking, of which there are many, is that it's just made up bullshit. McCain wasn't nominated because he was anti-racist and anti-populist. If ever there was a candidate who engineered his positions to appeal to the base of his party, it was McCain. McCain vigorously opposed torture until he became a candidate. McCain was ambivalent about abortion and gay marriage until he became a candidate. McCain opposed Bush's wartime tax cuts until he became a candidate. McCain even co-sponsored climate change and immigration bills that he then opposed once he became a candidate! Finally, McCain, the victim of Rove/Atwater-style character assassination during the 2000 primary season, hired those same assassins to run his own campaign in 2008.

And I don't need to raise the specter of Palin as a foreigner-hating xenophobe. It's just that self-evident.

The fact that Tom Tancredo didn't get nominated was because no one knew who the fuck he was. He is also a crappy politician who was an ineffective communicator and a one-issue candidate. His views on immigration were shared by the GOP base: "Hate those goddamn furriners, send every last one of 'em back to Meh-hee-co! Them and their babies too!" So if Tancredo had actually been better and had more connections in the party, he might have fared better than as a fringe candidate.

And, from the comments after Welch's piece, comes this typical GOP response from a True Believer:

I'm starting to think that the God's Own Party faith fueled money train is going to roll on into town. Huckabee/Palin or maybe Barbour/ Huckabee in 2012. They are gonna swing hard right in response to the left trying to go hard left. The republicans are going to realize they started getting their asses handed to them when they eased up on the God rules.

This is what the GOP base is thinking. They are such nihilists that they are committed to self-destruction in pursuit of their regressive belief system.

I rest my case.