Daily Kos Contrasts Old-School GOP With New ‘Bats**t Crazy’ Version

Liberals like to opine that righty Republicans of the fairly recent past, such as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., or even Ronald Reagan, were nowhere near as wild-eyed as the Tea Party crowd. In a Tuesday Daily Kos post by the mononymous Hunter, it was Bob Dole (granted, no one’s idea of a movement conservative) who represented the party’s rational “old guard” against the “clearly batshit insane” congressional GOPers.

Hunter’s peg was the possibility of a second Senate vote on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. Dole visited the Senate chamber earlier this week to rally support for the treaty, which fell short of ratification in 2012 because most Republicans voted against it.

From Hunter’s post (emphasis added):

Few things make for stranger theater than watching the old guard of the Republican Party try to reason with the clearly batshit insane ranks that rose up to take their place.For Republican ex-presidential candidate Bob Dole, ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a no-brainer, a world effort to codify the standards to which nations should be held in regards to their disabled citizens. There's nothing much controversial in there, and it's largely based on United States law to begin with. When it got to the Senate in 2012, Bob Dole was on the Senate floor in a wheelchair pushing his former colleagues to ratify it, but it failed dismally because the forces of batshit crazy are far, far stronger than an ex-presidential candidate could hope to be…

…When I was at CPAC there was an entire panel on this and other schemes of the United Nations to something-something, and there the audience was told by the supposed actual lawyers and experts that these conventions would allow the United Nations to come and take your children if they did not feel they were being cared for or educated properly. This is what Rick Santorum and the rest of the pants-wetting, Agenda 21-obsessed right absolutely believes will happen, once again because the entire movement is based on one asinine conspiracy theory after another, all self-tailored for maximum froth and panic, and it was this contingent of the right that convinced Republican senators to kill the treaty the first time around. I'm not kidding. They think treaties like this are a pretext to the United Nations invading us (with our own army, apparently) and taking our children for re-education and turning us all into vegetarians and communists and subservient to our endangered manatee overlords…

The Senate is hoping to revisit and ratify the convention this year, and that has unleashed the very same mechanism of batshit crazy versus not batshit crazy…

…The problem is that the current majority of Republicans are batshit insane, period, too obsessed with conspiracy and secret imagined plots to ratify treaties or pass laws or even keep the federal government reliably open...[T]he sooner we all fess up and admit that's what's going on the sooner the Republican Party will repair itself.