Kossacks, of course, love to trash prominent Republicans -- freshman Texas senator Ted Cruz came in for some notable abuse this past week -- but they by no means neglect the party's rank and file and in some cases identify them as the root of the GOP's supposed madness.
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym. Daily Kos Week in Review will return in two weeks. Happy Easter!
Hunter: In the GOP, it's greedy versus nutty...
...[T]he current conservative schism seems, if anything, underestimated. It is a split between young and old...and between corporate (e.g. "fiscal libertarian") conservatives, who care only about fiscal things, and "tea party" conservatives who care about taxes and a further litany of very crazy things quite often rooted in extreme conspiracy theories...
The problem presented by that is the very one we see in the House, even now: the policies that the crazy base demands are not policies that are conducive to effective, or competent, or even barely functional government, and the crazy base won't accept anything else as an answer...
...[B]igotry is baked into the modern GOP. It cannot be unwound without drastically changing who and what the party is. And just like their problems with conservative media, the solutions just won't fly when the party base won't allow them.
brooklynbadboy: ...all of whom alienate the intelligent
[L]ook beyond the problems Republicans have with their message, candidates, and campaign operations. They have a much bigger problem with the new American culture of the 21st Century. It isn't hard to understand why a young female Silicon Valley code hacker or an old social scientist from a major research university would not want to work for a party that thinks the dinosaurs are a hoax and that there are acceptable ways to rape women. Nobody wants anything to do with these people.
The fact is, the Republican Party's problem is the base of the Republican Party. The crazy, intolerant, psycho base voters who show up in the primary...
The Geogre: On the right, a nostalgic fantasy
...Today's conservatives are not usually conservative at all. They do not seek to conserve or preserve existing laws, but rather to recreate a mythical period of nuclear families and ethnic certainty and prosperity. Today's conservatives are, generally, radicals. When someone stands forth and proclaims an effort to go back to a hypothetical period of free markets without laws that is presumed, on the basis of Locke, to have existed, that person is just as much of a radical as a Marxist proposing to tear up the government to go back to "primitive communism" that is presumed to exist based on observations of American Indians reported in the German periodicals of the 19th century. In other words, there is absolutely nothing "conservative" about Paul Ryan that isn't conservative about Huey Long...
xxdr zombiexx: Bring on a Cruz candidacy
...The 2012 GOP 'presidential field' was ridiculous, horrible, and a line-up of batshit-crazy and/or dumber-than-hammers dimwits, every last one of them losers. Wealthy, but losers nonetheless.
And now, thjis group of nincompoops, which should be feeling some PTSD-like effects from the ongoing ass-kicking reality has been handing them, has doubled down - literally - pouring on the crazy with this moronic epiphany about this loudmouthed teabagger that will be lucky to make it to a second term, let alone a presidential race...
Since Reagan, the GOP focuses on 'electing or installing by any means necessary' brain-dead human replicas that are marched out for essentially entertainment purposes while a Politburo-like apparatus runs the country from behind closed and locked doors. They don't have [l]eaders, they have hood ornaments...
...[Cruz's] goal is the same as all other republicans: shut down America, implement Handmaid's Tale as policy...
