Much Worse Than Cocooning

You have to give David Frum credit for trying. Frum served as a Bush speechwriter and wrote a horrible book with Richard Perle, but he does seem to be trying to get a grip on what's wrong with the Republican Party.

Our party has been crippled by an all-pervading assumption at the center that if you just don’t talk about bad news, it will go away: whether it’s an extravagant wardrobe decision - or a bad job creation record. Our leaders cocoon themselves, refuse to hear unwelcome news, and reward yesmanship.

But that doesn't come close to getting it.

The Republican Party and its conservative base go way beyond "cocooning." In fact, they've become deeply committed to maintaining an alternative reality. For the Republicans, it all gets down to the conviction that "Bush was right" and imagining a weirdly distorted world in which such a conviction was justified.

In terms of the war in Iraq, this means that "the invasion was right" despite the lack of WMD's, the failure to understand Shiite/Sunni sectarianism, and the bizarre idea that Iraq would become a beacon of liberty in the Middle East.

That's not to mention the 4,000 American combat deaths.

"Bush was right" also means that Republicans believe that Guantanamo, torture, and extraordinary rendition have been the only thing that's been keeping the country safe for the last seven years.

What the Republicans have been saying about Obama's turning back from Bush's terror policies has been so off the wall that Matthew Yglesias declares himself "gobsmacked" by all the nonsense.

Here's a few examples of the weird stuff Yglesias hass been hearing from the right.

The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means
Obama should keep innocent people detained.
The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.
Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.
The “Guantanamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.
Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

It goes on.

"Bush was right" means that "deregulation was right' even though the failure to regulate the financial industry has put the country on the edge of a depression.

It also means denying the vast amount of research on climate change, not giving a damn about the environment, and being opposed to most kinds of social progress.

"Bush was right" mantra also declares that the only way to combat sexually transmitted diseases is abstinence and that pharmacies shouldn't make contraceptives available to women.

In other words, they want to turn back the dial to the fifties.

The problem for the Republicans is that they remain committed to their alternative universe even though their views are rejected and ridiculed by an increasing majority of the American public.

That's a lot worse than cocooning.