That last sentence strikes me as really odd.

The true believers aren't the swing votes son

Bundy on CNN right now holding a dead calf.


story still delivering...


zomg he is quoting MLK now...

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Which Golden Era for the working man are we talking about, exactly? The era in which it was perfectly acceptable for a half dozen guys to to die building the Empire State Building or two dozen to die building the Brooklyn Bridge? Yeah, let's go back to that time.

It's really a question of degree. If the Bundy militia had mowed down two dozen government agents, then it would have been a huge black eye to the party, but if they just sniped a couple . . . Hannity et al would have had no problem blaming the government and deifying Bundy.

I dunno stealhaus, I'm a pretty big fan of giving like 20% of my income for police and fire protection, roads to get to work everyday and to drive home and see my family, a military to blow up the terrorists before they blow me up, schools that taught me everything and will teach my kids too, government agencies that keep our society in order so that I can hire a contractor without worrying that he's going to build my house entirely out of asbestos, money that goes to scientific research that makes our technology and healthcare better...It's a pretty small price to pay for having a nation full of awesome stuff that doesn't suck. Or we could go back to paying no taxes and see how far America falls economically to the rest of the world, that sounds pretty damn awesome. As much as I enjoy the infrastructure of your average Eastern European country, I think I prefer what we have instead.

Businessmen already rule the country. Look where that's gotten us.

Welp, not really the approach I would have taken.

I think one of the main reasons for this is that there are now legitimate schisms in the party. Basically the party has lost on gay marriage and will lose inevitably on immigration. (They've had victories on Affirmative Action and gun control, though.) The adults are ready to move on, but the true believers aren't and, crucially, there's no real fight right now that they can work together on except fear-mongering the debt and Obummercare. In a sense all these folks are desperate for something to unite them. Obama-hatred will only get you so far.

It sounds cliche, but the big problem here is Fox News.

First, you have this incredibly dominant media presence. So many Republicans over 50 watch Fox News that it's like a satellite signal beamed directly into their shared consciousness. There's no competition to speak of, so Fox sets the agenda.

Second, the people running Fox are either a) legitimately stupid or b) more interested in making money from the stupid than driving a national agenda*. It's probably both, e.g. Hannity=stupid, Megyn Kelly=sell-out. This is a network that featured Dick Morris in multiple prime time segments for years when anyone competent should have known what a sleazy hack he was at one glance.

So there's this delusion gap and I don't think the smart guys in the GOP room know how to close it.

* Oh, the sweet irony that the GOP's unified message is getting splintered by the Free Market™.

I think you're being very naive in assuming that FOX viewers will hold the network accountable for its derp. If this Bundy guy goes nuts and people die, Hannity and company will quietly walk away and resume normal operations next week. No one stopped watching FOX when it was utterly wrong about the 2012 election, or about Obamacare enrollment.

Sure, people outside the derposphere will be appalled, but those people already have a dim view of guys like Hannity.

I think his point is that the adults need to cut the cord. Legitimate GOP politicians need to stop running to the defense of whatever racist idiot happens to have been turned into a hero by the media machine that day.

These dumb old white people are always going to vote Republican, period. There is no political cost to cutting them loose. I mean, is it really that hard to just say nothing about them? The business guys who benefit enormously from GOP cronyism are insane not to demand that the establishment stop this ****.

From the perspective of a politician, especially an up-and-coming one, if a stance has a 95% chance of getting him some influence and a 5% chance of complete political armageddon, it's probably an excellent bet. The worst that can happen is he gets run out of political office.

Told you they were lazy!

I think we still fail to consistently appreciate how much of a driving force a black president is in all of this. Like a lot of people didn't realize how much their world hinged on the notion that that could never ever happen, and once it did their playbook makes no sense whatsoever.

Then throw in a big dash of the internet being fantastically interested in and effective at taking people to task for saying the kinds of things dumb hateful people do when backed into a corner and you've just got this exponentially increasing mass of documented public ignorance. (which also helps drown out those acts of idiocy that might otherwise get the left raked over the coals by presenting a more target rich environment).

Had their been any violence, I think there would have been an inordinate amount of focus on "who fired the first shot." People are crazy results oriented when it comes to life and as stupid as this sounds, it probably would have swung the whole thing in one direction or the other. Like if one of the fed snipers shot someone, it would have been a ****storm about the government overreach and unnecessary use of force despite the fact that the militia had no real reason to be there in the first place (assuming that the obsession with snipers in this forum has some carry over into the consciousness of the general population of people who were engaged in this story). If one of the militia members shoots first, then it's just damage control and probably the worst possible outcome for the right because it makes them look like reckless gun nuts, even though showing up with assault rifles to defend some scofflaws cattle should be enough evidence.

This was a safe outcome for the right because they get to wash their hands of it (despite the fact that most of Bundys supporters probably won't be deterred by a little hate speech), but it did kind of negate any advantage they may have taken from it.

Forgive my lack of any real knowledge but didn't the GOP run this same game on the christians and the moral majority types? I sort of vaguely remember a panic that it was going to be all creationism in public schools and nought but back street abortions but once they won it didn't work out that way so much. Maybe they republicans have just got one more pot syndrome. Just win once with these crazies and we can drop them. That was the plan from the outset we should stick to it.

The reality the working poor move to Texas. Your average Eastern European county has roots in socialism and communism, thus even higher taxes. Our streets are lace with homeless. You don't see the poor on the internet because they are too busy paying taxes to teachers and rent to landowners. Tax money does not go to fix the roads anymore, it goes to support a welfare, teacher, union state.

Innovation changes yearly. I can't imagine life without the car, computer, airplanes, rockets, or internet. It was not government that built those things but trade individuals and corporations. With or without government safety would also increase, not only do the companies not want to pay for lawsuits the employees would naturally move to safer companies. The most dangerous job is government astronaut where the original shuttle mission had a 20% chance of death (btw there is a great ted talk on this). Governments killed 100 million in 1 war last century and will probably kill a few billion this century the way weak liberals keep talking tough about Russia and Putin.

Government workers live like kings they have the best gyms, eat the best food, and own the best houses and do basically nothing except cause hinderance and spend other peoples money. The roads were built by taxpayers not government workers. The Koch brothers made Obamacare possible by paying for the whole thing. Yet the greedy selfish liberals take credit.

This is a greedy, selfish post. Nothing but prejudice. Ignorance like this is why infrastructure and human services go short-funded, while there is an abundance of wealth in existence.

Steel,

One of us is looking at the world in a funhouse mirror and one of us is not. So long as that is the case, there is no point in us debating the shape of the table, much less what we should put on the table for dinner.

Of course. The GOP has been running this game since the late 60s. What I would say is this: what happened these past few weeks is something akin to like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum singing the praises of Eric Rudolph as he's building bombs to blow up abortion clinics or the Olympic Park or whatever, and doing it on national TV, in an effort to make sure they've shored up their bonafides with fundamentalist Christians. I think that's like the equivalent recklessness on display by Hannity, Rand Paul, FNC et al with Bundy. They put alot on the line to make sure they're got every last angry white person turned into FNC 18 hours a day instead of their normal 14, to make sure every last bitcoin your normal Alex Jones fan might spend on survivalist gear instead goes to RAND PAC.

I know adios had a sarcastic response that like Hannity and Rand Paul aren't actually important but Hannity has like a huge audience, Rand Paul is probably a top tier candidate for the GOP in 2016, Rick Perry was putting his toe in the water with Bundy, plenty of others in the right-wing media space were leaping to this guy, these aren't like total powerless schlubs, these are actual important people in movement conservatism.

And so in that light, I think it's kind of a risky thing for party leadership to let important people stick their necks out like that and take the party brand with them along for the ride without doing much to stand in the way.

When I watch shows like Bill Maher, Maddow, or anything on CNBC all I see is a bunch of Zombies, no different than what you see on World War Z or any other Zombie movie. They are almost as dangerous.

But it is true one of us is looking at a funhouse mirror, but I try to look at facts and reality.

I am absolutely not ashamed to admit the same.

I wanted to print it and give it to the country, tea party "I would revolt against this president" social studies teacher, but then realized he'd follow me around for the rest of the day wanting to talk.

I think that explains like some flyover country sheriff or some faceless Arizona state senators goin' for it with Bundy, fine.

Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Senator Heller from Nevada, most of FNC, etc., if I'm a big GOP donor hoping to takeover Congress this fall and see my agenda through, I'm probably kind of wary of those cats putting their chips and taking the party brand equity with them, placing them on Bundy's number on the roulette table and hoping it doesn't land on green. I admit that some of the memes about FNC and the GOP and the symbiotic relationship between the two, and how much FNC is responsible for protecting the GOP image and how much GOP image-crafting is dependent on FNC -- all of that is worthy of some study. So I could maybe even buy an out for Hannity and the rest of FNC, maybe they're like not responsible for protecting the GOP's image, OK. But like Rand Paul and Rick Perry and Dean Heller almost certainly are by definition.

If you turn around and say Rand Paul and Dean Heller or whatever play by their own rules, they are out there to build their brand and their image with the Alex Jones crowd, GOP-interests-writ-large-be-damned, if it all goes bad and these Bundy guys go Wyatt Earp and shoot up the joint lol oops I'll just retire, I think you and I are having a heated agreement here. That's like kind of what happened, and it's precisely, like precisely what a good party apparatus and good party discipline exist to prevent. It's wreckless for Senators and governors and prospective Presidential candidates building up big PACS, consuming limited monetary resources and Fox News and Meet the Press mug time or whatever to behave like that, like well I take this risk of political Armageddon collecting every last nutjob bitcoin, if it all goes poor I fade into Bolivian with Mike Tyson -- a well-functioning political movement interested in winning power in a country with 350 million people within the confines of a two party system -- you're supposed to have party and movement leadership and discipline to make sure that isn't happening.

good lord this is awe-inspiring.

THAT'S what he came up with? like I said, anyone that didn't set down their phone/flip closed their laptops and giggle to themselves reading that is probably wondering why he stopped short of telling the REAL TRUTH..

man, only thing that could make this better is he flips off his mask and the whole time he's a blind black guy and no one ever told him he was black and then some other guy's head explodes like a pumpkin on camera in reaction...

I think we're on the same page here, but I would speculate that the ability of the party apparatus to enforce discipline depends a great deal on its ability to promise politicians and donors a reasonable prospect of success for following the party line. The Republican Party is Tragically Dying, remember? There's no prize in getting John Boehner to think you're a good political prospect. It's especially true for the best young politicians. Why spend years being junior and respectable when you can be nuts and reckless and get lots of attention and maybe power right away. As you said, Rand Paul is a potential presidential candidate and his only real credential is being the son of a noted racist crazy person.