Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
I would presume that this nicely explains why there is a "Tea Party," as opposed to simply the Republican Opposition.
Update to the "Oregon's Entry" post: Remarkably, some right side commenters actually think Mr. Robinson bested Ms Maddow in the interview. It's true that he managed to talk over her questions repeatedly, and to accuse her of "sarcasm" a number of times. He also was able to ignore the fact that she was quoting his own statements and asking for clarification of them. If this is "besting," then the parallel universes become that much more perfectly parallel I guess. Robinson did little more that sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "la-la-la-la." Ms Maddow didn't "make" him answer her questions. But the underlying presumption here--on the part of the right wing analysis--is that in such a conversation, it's all about a triumph of the will (to coin a phrase). And this is perhaps because that view--that "it's all about a triumph of the will"--is the basic view out of which the right operates, day in and day out. Well, ok. But I would point out that such a point of view is the end of conversation, and a way universalizing the dictum that military action is diplomacy by other means. Or as Mussolini put it, when queried about his program if elected: "My first act as head of state will be to kill you."
Such a world is wonderland. The experiment has been executed by a number of totalitarian states, notably the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, China, and Japan, during our bloody century past. You tell me. Is it reasonable to ask a candidate if they still believe that AIDs doesn't exist when they've so stated that opinion, or what the meaning might be of their maintaining in print a book arguing that black people as a race are intellectually inferior, or if they really believe that the theory of human assisted climate change is a "hoax." Seems to me that these are fair and reasonable questions to ask of a candidate for public office (particularly the US Congress). Seems to me that a candidate who just goes "la-la-la-la" as a response hasn't actually "won" the field. I don't think that's just my arbitrary point of view either, to be "balanced" by some erstwhile Mussolini who disagrees. But this is the place the great conversation has come, it would seem.
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