Friday, October 7, 2005

The ideology of failure

I quote Gene Lyons a lot.  Because he's really good.  And he gets surprisingly little attention in Left Blogostan.  On Wednesday, he was writing about Political correctness, GOP-style Dunklin Daily Democrat 10/05/05.  He has the Republicans' number:

Many are waking to the reality that a one-party Republican regime has left us stuck with a government of ideologues and cronies, who when things get tough, sound awfully like Marxist apparatchiks chanting the party line. ...

New York Times columnist David Brooks even resorted to the old Soviet device of calling White House critics mentally ill, describing Democrats as "psychologically aggrieved," "wrapped in their own rage," and displaying "anger in almost clinical form."

I guess nobody he loved drowned [in Katrina].

Lyons laments that the Republicans have created their own reality, but unfortunately "the rest of us have to live there, too."

He thinks Dear Leader Bush's inability to admit mistakes is even worse than his reliance on ideology.  But that's bad enough in itself:

The Bush administration's fundamental problem is that it has substituted ideology for practicality and loyalty for competence at every turn. It's running the country like a business, all right. Unfortunately, that business is Enron, combining fantastical theories and astonishing greed. Because the Republicans also control both houses of Congress and have voted in lockstep on virtually every key issue, partisan dogma has taken precedence above all competing values.

And, not unlike Enron, their own arrogance and dishonesty is catching up with them big-time.

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