Nut Picking

 There are some absurd ideas on the Left and especially Far Left. I concede that.

However, the sheer firehose of insanity coming out of the Right these days is mindblowing.

Let's take freshman representative Madison Cawthorn. Jon Chait has catalogued the many scandals that this whackaloon has already managed to blithely stumble into in his brief time in Congress. In the past, these levels of scandal would sink any politician. Trump managed to inject a stunning disregard for normally career-ending scandals when he bull his way past the many scandals in 2016, like the Access Hollywood tape. You have Democrats who - rightly - asked Al Franken to resign, and the GOP who refuses to condemn people like Cawthorn, Marjorie Traitor Green or Paul Gosar.

Even the so-called intellectuals of the Right are prone to just moronic statements. Here is Dan McLaughlin arguing against public education from a facile and ahistorical viewpoint. As respondents note, New England had tax supported public schools in the early 17th century, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 actually set aside the sale of public lands in what is now the Midwest to fund schools. The Lincoln administration passed the Morrill Land Grant act that also set aside funds for public universities. 

There is a plausible argument that the Reagan (and Nixon) Revolution of the 1980s was founded on certain ideas. A lot of those ideas were wrong (the Laffer Curve and Supply Side economics) or odious (racism masquerading as "states rights"). But they were ideas. There was a compelling argument that America in 1979 had too much burdensome regulation and that taxes were too high to allow for investment in new businesses. There is an equally compelling argument against those positions, but that's what politics should be. 

The facts of Reagan's tax cuts created unsustainable deficit spending, and so George H. W. Bush raised taxes. He and Bill Clinton re-introduced some fiscal sanity to government and the economy truly exploded. Those are facts. Another fact is that Bush's decision to bend to facts in 1991 when he raised taxes helped lead to his defeat in 1992. Another fact is that you cannot get a single Republican to agree to raise taxes (unless you're Rick Scott), even if it would be economically healthy.

The Republican Party is now deeply enthrall to people who believe China hacked "Venezuelan" voting machines to throw the election to Joe Biden, and these are not at the margins.

Here is my knee-quaking fear: We are about to start the January 6th hearings. We are going to discover that many, many high ranking Republicans were in on the chaos of that day or in the fever dreams that led up to it. This will range from people like Green actively helping the coup attempt to people like McConnell tacitly humoring these falsehoods and giving them oxygen to survive. We will have documented evidence of treasonous activities by Trump, the members of his staff and administration and large numbers of the GOP caucus.

And it won't make a damned bit of difference, because the average American voter can't understand that they are paying $4.00 a gallon for gasoline, because Putin invaded Ukraine. Nor can they admit that one of our two parties has gone insane.