http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gabler2-2009oct02,0,7817347.story

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents.

It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles. Theoretically, you can learn how to improve your message or how to match wits with adversaries, and a lot of liberal hand-wringing has been dedicated to doing just that. But it is becoming increasingly clear that liberals haven't just been succumbing to superior message control, or even to a superior political narrative (conservatives' frontier individualism versus liberals' communitarianism). They are up against something far more intractable and far more difficult to defeat. They are up against religion.

Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief.

I don't mean "religious belief" literally. This transformation is less a function of the alliance between Protestant evangelicals, their fellow travelers and the right (though that alliance has had its effect) than it is a function of a belief in one's own rightness so unshakable that it is not subject to political caveats. In short, what we have in America today is a political fundamentalism, with all the characteristics of religious fundamentalism and very few of the characteristics of politics.

So for a Republican politician, would this be equivalent to being locked in a minivan with a dozen Hare Krishnas and finding out that the accelerator is stuck, the brakes don't work and, oh yeah, you just passed a "Bridge Out Ahead" sign?

Another thing I try to do when not bashing these fruitbats is feign empathy and try to feed their disgust with the GOP leadership ...country club republicans out to use them

The take-away is that there is ZERO point in courting Republican votes for ANYTHING. If the Repukes are hostage to the batshit crazies, then trying to compromise with them is to let the WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY be held hostage by Glenn fucking Beck.

Kudos to whoever chose the photo! Very tasteful :=P

I've always thought that they don't have a problem with Obama being black so much as they see him as "un-American" because of his name, because they think he's Arab or Muslim, because his father was African, because he lived overseas, etc. They might be more comfortable with a 100-percent African-American -- i.e. a black person who is descended from American slaves, was born and raised in the mainland U.S. etc. At least then, in their minds, they'd know that this person was American. And when they think of "racism" they think of prejudice against African-Americans, not prejudice against someone they perceive of as Arab or Muslim.

So it's not racism so much as xenophobia. Not that that's any better.

er, THEIR "way of life"

The Rethuglicans are in part reaping what they have sown: they have connived in whipping up their base by hatred to the point that what the base demands in the primary will ensure that the Rethuglican politicians will have difficulty winning in the general.

Whew! I made a vow, after CNN started ranting on PO after his first 100 days in office, that I wouldn't/couldn't watch their right wing lies anymore. I concluded that Lou Dobbs and John King had bought the station with the aid of the Get Our President loonies, but I broke my vow and a few minutes ago I visited their site and luckily I escaped with my reason still intact. I have had to correct so many errors in my posting, I can only imagine that those who follow Faux lies daily, must be totally brain dead. I just read a post there from a Canadian (like me), who complained that his son had an accident, had to wait to be treated at the hospital, and is now pissed that he owes $550.00 for the ambulance charge. I wanted to respond that when the loonie conservatives gained power in Ontario (toronto blue jays) in the 80's, they wanted American style health care, you know the type that is anti-immigrant, and they started gutting the hospitals. From the hospital I worked at, they immediately closed 200 beds, severely slashed all funding for hospitals, the result being that now we are trying our hardest to fix the mess they left the province (state) in. Sounds familiar?. Conservatives the world over are driven by the same principle i.e., if I'm okay, then who cares about you.