That's a line from the third episode of the second season of The West Wing. It comes at the end of one of Jed Bartlet's famous rants, directed at a prim and proper female radio host who was obviously modeled after "Dr." Laura Schlessinger.
But as I was watching the episode on DVD tonight, the thought struck me that it's a fairly accurate description of what the modern Republican Party has become in the last couple of decades. The GOP and its candidates like to refer back to the glory days (well, in their minds, anyway) of Ronald Reagan; sometimes they even go as far back as Lincoln. But all the while, the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has been under siege, and is now in thrall to, people that neither Lincoln nor Eisenhower would likely have pissed on had they been on fire. Don't believe me? Consider this, from a letter that Lincoln wrote to his best friend Joshua Speed in August 1855:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, --to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
The Know-Nothings, by the by, got their start as a precursor-cum-competitor of the Republican Party. I'm sure the founder(s) of the Know-Nothings would be smiling, to see so many of their nativist, racist doctrines being embraced so tightly by the Republicans of today--as exemplified, for example, by retiring former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's decision to endorse the candidacy of dairy magnate James Oberweis Überweiß to replace him. Überweiß has run for statewide office several times before--and lost rather spectacularly each time--and I tend to suspect that at least one of the reasons he hasn't been able to win election in this state is because he's absolutely batshit crazy when it comes to scarybrownpeople (who, he believes, are coming up in droves from Mexico and points southward and taking the jobs of "real" Amerkins). I can't imagine that sentiment plays terribly well in places like Aurora, where the Hispanic population is (a) significant and (b) on the rise. But neither, it seems, can one expect to win the Republican nomination these days--at any level--without mouthing the hateful shibboleths about illegal immigrants, border security, and the like.
Once upon a time, we valued things like reason and logic and common sense in this country. We were capable of parsing and understanding complex arguments. Take President Lincoln, for instance. Students of history, at least, know that when he sat back down after delivering what we now know as the Gettysburg Address, he felt it was a rotten speech in comparison to the two-hour discourse by Edward Everett that preceded it. Sermons in church often went on as long, or longer--and no one felt burdened by the effort of sustaining attention over that span of time. When Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas for the 1858 Senate race, the format they agreed to was that one candidate would speak for an hour, after which the other would speak for an hour and a half, and then the first candidate would get 30 minutes to rebut. They alternated speaking first so that neither one had a particular advantage over the whole series.
Fast-forward to today, and we are routinely told that children (and adults) can't even be expected to sit still for more than 20 minutes at a time. People in my church (and I've been guilty of this myself on occasion, though usually only when the homily is truly atrocious or the homilist is meandering around the rhetorical ground without any discernible goal in mind) start fidgeting if the homily goes more than about 12 minutes. "Debates" (if, indeed, they can still reasonably be called that in the era of sound bytes and focus groups) nowadays rarely last for more than an hour, and the candidates are expected to be able to answer a question or to distill their messages into 30-, 60-, or, if they are extraordinarily lucky, 90-second sound bytes that are expected to be meaningful, memorable, and on-topic--and all too rarely succeed at being any one of those three things, much less all three together.
It defies logic and reason for the Republicans to be so dead-set against immigrants. Not only are all of the candidates making these ludicrous statements (and all or most of the mouth-breathing idiots applauding them) descended from immigrants themselves, but in their eagerness to denounce the "illegals," they conveniently forget that even if a person is not in this country legally, s/he nevertheless contributes to it in myriad ways. (Yes, illegal immigrants do, in fact, pay taxes--sales taxes at the very least, and often others as well.) Ironically, the Republicans seem content to give up the contributions--tangible and intangible--made by illegal immigrants, simply because they are not behaving legally.
I say "ironically" there because the attitude the Republicans take toward illegal immigrants is diametrically the opposite of the one they take toward their own peccadilloes. Anyone with brown skin is expected to play strictly by the rules and to shut up and take what is given them. Conversely, anyone with an "R" in parentheses after his or her name is pretty much free to do whatever the hell s/he wants no matter what the law or custom or the rules say, and no one dares to question him/her.
Bush and Cheney are the perfect examples of this kind of nonsensical behavior. How many times have they claimed to stand above the law, and to be entitled to do more or less whatever they want, despite centuries of tradition, black-letter law, and our own foundational documents that say otherwise? How many different rationales, all of them apparently trumped-up, sexed-up, or outright falsehoods, have they offered for our going to war in Iraq (and for our continuing to fight that war)? How many times have they excoriated someone from the Democratic Party for doing or saying something that, had it been done or said by someone in their own party, they would have lauded to the skies?
One really does get the impression that these people are living in some sort of fantasy world where, as long as they believe it or say it, it is so--all the evidence in the world to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, they're entitled to make up whatever evidence they want or need, and to discount any that points in a direction different from the one they intend to follow. They don't want to know anything that they don't absolutely have to, and they want what they (think they) know to match their preconceived notions. They will neither hear nor brook any criticism, and should some come their way, they will savage the bearer of the bad tidings rather than acknowledge their errors. Is it any wonder, then, that after seven years of the Hedgemony, the world is in the parlous state we can see around us? Our leaders spend more time worrying about trivialities, polling numbers, focus-group reports, and raising the money they'll need to ensconce themselves the more firmly in the seats of power than they are in actually doing their jobs or paying attention to the real and serious issues that confront us.
I would absolutely love to live under the administration of President Josiah Bartlet of West Wing fame. I can at least do so in fantasy for short periods of time thanks to the miracles of modern technology we call DVDs and DVRs and digital cable. But it would be better--for me and for this nation--if I didn't have to retreat into a fantasy world to find rationality, experience, wisdom, and compassion in the leaders of my nation.
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