March 26, 2010 05:45 AM UTC

Republicans, Fleas and Friedrich Nietzsche

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• by: ClubTwitty

If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas. -folk idiom

There is a reason some old saws stick.  Today’s GOP–should they be interested in self-reflection and correction–might consider this bit of common wisdom.

The constant depiction on Fox “News” of Democrats, President Obama, and “progressives” as the enemy, traitorous, intentionally focused on destroying America is gasoline to the burning crazy that runs as an undercurrent through fringe American politics.  

The anger and hatred being manipulated by GOP operatives like Dick Armey is volatile and unpredictable.  The GOP is playing with fire.  Now even those among them who dare the heresy of prescient warning are put to the spit.

And what the Republicans have nurtured and grown might yet become a lunatic, beyond the GOP’s control but a creature that they dare not chastise.  It may win over the crazies–many of whom have a checkered past with voting regularly–but it could both shrink the party membership and drive away the middle.  

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The crazy that the GOP has stoked is hitting home.  

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Colorado Rep. Betsy Markey is among more than 10 Democrats in Congress who have received threats over voting for passage of the hotly contested health care reform bill.

A man called Markey’s congressional office the day before the Sunday vote and told an assistant that “[you] better hope I don’t run into you in a dark alley with a knife, a club or a gun,” MSNBC reported Wednesday.

The FBI is investigating threats against the lawmakers after acts of vandalism that included shattered windows at four Democratic offices in New York, Arizona and Kansas and a severed gas line at the Virginia home of a Democratic lawmaker’s brother, MSNBC reported.

Although the recently passed health care law is a flash point for anger, the GOP leadership better be cautious if they think the vitriol they have inspired cannot rear up to bite their generous hand.

DENVER – Colorado tea party activists have picketed President Barack Obama and sparked excitement in state caucuses in which their anti-establishment ranks boosted little-known conservatives.

Now they’re asking how they can change Colorado politics when, by their own admission, they resist organization and don’t take orders well.

It’s a dilemma for a movement of dozens of conservative groups that reject Democratic plans in Washington. Tea partiers are right-of-center and opposed to any government expansion. They blame incumbents from both parties for what they see as dangerous growth in public spending, and they are pushing for a seismic political shake-up this fall by ousting incumbents.

“They’re all frickin’ worthless as far as we’re concerned,” said Paul Donohue, organizer of a tea party group in Castle Rock.

Donohue, a 45-year-old financial adviser, bitterly denounces incumbents even though he serves on the nonpartisan Castle Rock town council.

For a ‘base’ the Baggers seem unenthused about their ordained candidates, from Governor to Senator to 3rd District Congressman.  Nor is even a small modicum of rational constraint, a necessary quality for a dependable base, evident in the loose movement of GOP and other fringe elements that self-identifies as tea-partiers, a concentration of whom can always be found fomenting revolution on the web at GJSentinel.com:

Congratulation Marxists, one and all. In one day’s voting, Congress, driven by its speaker and abetted by the president and the Senate majority leader, has morphed itself into a Politburo and has done more to overthrow the old U.S. government of, by and for the people than the USSR could have hoped for in their 30 years of cold war.

Under the guise of health care reform, the Obama-Reed-Pelosi machine has begun the end of state autonomy and much of the personal freedom individual Americans relied on to create the greatest country in history.

We can see that the ‘Tea Party’ is neither dependable nor rational.  Based on comments, quotes, and other pronouncements from self-identified partiers, they are also woefully ill-informed, although they often imagine otherwise:

From the Constitution [sic], I quote, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” This states how we are able to stop the government, but clearly some people have forgotten the words of our fore fathers or have not taken the time to read it…

The Tea Party base is not monolithic:

In a recent New Yorker, Ben McGrath implies the Tea Party is noth­ing more than a hodge-podge of para­noid, right-wing pop­ulists. Like­wise, Jonathan Raban’s expose in The New York Review of Books  describes the con­ven­tion in Nashville as a “loose con­geries of unlike minds” united only by a com­mon “con­tempt” of Obama. Both arti­cles observe that many of the mem­bers sub­scribed to a wide range of counter-narratives con­cern­ing Amer­i­can power, such as the “birther” insis­tence that Obama isn’t an Amer­i­can, or the “truther” insis­tence that there are seri­ous holes in the story of the 9/11 com­mis­sion. There are evan­gel­i­cal wings and lib­er­tar­ian advo­cates. And then there is the sur­pris­ing fact that the Tea Party move­ment is so old, and the unsur­pris­ing fact that it is so white.

The Tea Party’s fractious, uninformed, angry and undependable base leads it to hold strange collective opinions:

Tea Party activists, who are becoming a force in U.S. politics, want the federal government out of their lives except when it comes to creating jobs.

More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level.

At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

They also look to the government to rein in Wall Street, with almost half saying the government should do something about executive bonuses.

For now the GOP, nationally and in Colorado, seem eager to align with the Tea Partiers.  

Thousands of Tea Party activists are expected to descend on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s tiny hometown of Searchlight, Nev., on Saturday for an anti-Washington rally headlined by former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Scores of Republican candidates and elected officials – including Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons and those angling to challenge four-term Democrat Reid in the fall – plan to be on hand to work the crowd at the so-called “Showdown in Searchlight.”

But amid growing reports of threats against House members and last weekend’s Tea Party ugliness in Washington, D.C. – where some activists lobbed racist and anti-gay epithets at Democrats on their way to vote on health care legislation – the gathering has taken on a larger significance.

It promises to be an important moment not only for the Tea Party movement, which has been showing signs of turmoil over its future direction, but also for a national Republican Party yearning to harness the energy of Tea Partiers but wary of being linked with its more extreme adherents.

…”This weekend will be critical for the Tea Party and conservatives,” says David Yepsen of Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

“If the television images that come out of this gathering are of a bunch of nuts, the American people are going to say that these people aren’t fit to lead the government,” Yepsen says. “Republicans have to be mindful of what they’re walking into.”

Maybe that will work out for them.  Me, I’d pay more heed to what the old folks, and the philosopher, had to say.