"A Feckless Attempt at Mass Justification"

It's fun and easy to just sit back and watch the republican party implode, to run an office pool on how many hours they can go before the next act of self-destruction.

But there are deeper meanings to the GOP's death throes, lessons to be learned from the manner of its passing, insights to be gained from observing this slow-motion suicide.

Leslie Savan in The Nation profiles the GOP in winter.

What sort of psychological bent would lead people to want to be part of a dead-end political party like the GOP?

Clearly, fear--stirring it as well as succumbing to it--is central to such a psyche, and Republicans are swinging that big spiked mace as wildly as if it were the night before a bitterly contested election.

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The strange thing is that Repubs are still producing this kind of National Security theater, complete with cardiac arrest-soundtrack, even though it's failed time and again over the past two years in campaign ads for Tom Tancredo, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and just about every other doomed GOP hopeful.

At some point the vaunted Republican noise machine stopped being about winning elections and became instead a feckless attempt at mass justification, popping out one lame excuse after another for the party's failures. And it was a short leap from there to simply hitting rewind on the rightwing's longtime romance with a Lost Cause.

SNIP

Why are these marble men so determined to resurrect dead, failed ideas? It isn't simply because they don't have new ones (which they don't). There's also a psychological payoff to committing yourself to a bankrupt idea--whether it's the odd notion that cutting taxes will save us from our economic crisis of liquidity, or the disproved theory that abstinence-only education will decrease teen pregnancies.

The sad fact is, fidelity to a Lost Cause valorizes you, it imitates honor.

SNIP

The beauty part about a Lost Cause is that you don't have to struggle to find practical political solutions--that would require compromise and make you impure. Instead, you only have to make gestures and think magically.

Read the whole thing.

But don't get too comfortable; the wounded, rabid, cornered rat that is the GOP is still lethally dangerous, and will gladly spend its last breath stopping Barack Obama from rebuilding the nation Smirky/Darth trashed.