Eating Their Own

The Atlantic collects an interesting sampling of opinion from far right pundits on the possibility of Newt Gingrich running for the Republican Prez Nom in 2012. It seems they hate him. They think he's too liberal. Seriously.

Newt deserves the abuse - he is reaping what he's sown - but the GOP is coming apart at the seams. They are eating their own. The evangelical, tea-bagging, conspiracy touting, wingnuts are off the deep end and destroying one of the two major parties of our two party system.

I consider myself fiercely independent - left-leaning, but unaffiliated with any party. I like it that way. I don't believe in party lines and good ideas can come from anywhere. It's hard to be independent however, balancing arguments from both sides, when there is basically only one party. The Dems, though not loved much more than their counterparts, are at least cohesive. I dread the idea of a failed GOP. I dread the idea that a party that produced the likes of Senator Alan Simpson could instead find its voice amongst the Malkins and the Becks and the Bachmans. I didn't often agree with Simpson but I always thought he was reasonable, that he could be swayed with intelligent argument and above all remain cordial and respectful of those with whom he disagreed.

The GOP as it exists today has nothing to do with intelligence, nothing to do with reason, and as for respectful and cordial - forget it. It is cannabalistic in the extreme, feeding on its own anger and the flesh of those that dare slip out of line. It has become a vicious, anti-everything mob that offers no reasonable alternatives and instead waits breathlessly for the next mindless twitter from Palin, or marching orders from Limbaugh. It's leaders no longer lead. It's remaining thinkers like Snow are marginalized and abused. It is dying an agonizing and bitter death. I am reminded of a passage from Eric Larsen's An American Memory where he discusses his father, but could just as easily be describing the GOP:

How much anger there was in my father: something in him made him wish to destroy himself, to destroy others as well, to pull down the world around him and trample it in angry spite... My father agonistes: his emotional life a ganglionlike bondage of knots that grew tighter and more unrelieving with the struggle. There were times - in winter, on the farm, in the bottom of despair - when I imagine, had my father been an animal, that he would have devoured us one at a time, then shrunk into his lair to gnaw slowly with sullen and furious spite at his own limbs and flesh.

This is the party of Lincoln today, and one imagines it will only get worse before it gets better.