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Honestly, I didn’t expect the conservative freefall to happen virtually overnight, but the movement really has come apart at the seams. The "Big Tent" party, the Party of "personal responsibility", has devolved into a giant sandbox filled with bed-wetting, Nazi-fretting, hissy-fitting, pants-shitting, name-calling, bill-stalling, spiteful schoolchildren. 

The One Who is Shrill put it thusly:

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

I would have said that the Republicans were behaving more like bratty 8 year-olds, but I’ll work with Mr. Krugman here. Like obnoxious, sullen, pimply-faced adolescents, the conservatives are going to spend the next four years locked in their collective bedroom with the "ADULTS STAY OUT!" sign on the door, running up the phone bills while they bitch and moan to their friends about how unfair and how stupid, ugly, and authoritarian their parents are.

The Virginia gubernatorial race took an ugly turn this past weekend when a prominent endorser for Republican Bob McDonnell mocked the slight stutter of Democrat candidate Creigh Deeds.

At a rally for McDonnell’s campaign, Sheila Johnson was taped discussing the importance of communication skills in the state’s next governor.

"We need someone who can really communicate," she said. "And Bob McDonnell can communicate. The other people that I talk to, especially his o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-opponent… could not articulate what needed to be done."

How seemly. How mature. How gracious. I think someone needs to be grounded for at least a month.

Also like typical, narcissistic, melodramatic tweens, the conservatives have a bizarre, hyper-aggrandized image of themselves:

I’m interrupting my career. It’s not like I want my new career in politics. But I’m willing to interrupt it the same way that somebody interrupted their career and joined World War II and went off to fight the Nazis. 

And yes, there’s always that one kid whom the rest of the pack assiduously avoids, the one who always seems to be sporting a case of ringworm, and who prefers to socialize with the voices in her head:

In a 24-page filing littered with all-caps, bold, and underlined text, Birther attorney Orly Taitz is demanding that a federal judge recuse himself in a case that has morphed from a soldier’s attempt to resist Barack Obama’s orders to what Taitz sees as a prosecution of herself.

All this would be terribly amusing, but for one small matter: each time the conservatives who control the Republican Party act like Veruca Salt on steroids, the Democrats, despite their solid majorities in both Houses, respond each time like permissive parents who try to mollify tantrum-throwing tweens by acceding to their every demand. Let the Republican Party continue its lightning descent into puerility and irrelevance. Consider it tough love. . . or tough shit.

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