iOS app Android app More  Carl Pope   The Party of Crazy
Posted: 07/19/11 12:25 PM ET  Washington, DC -- Paul Krugman
last week argued that commentators who are suddenly lamenting
the "insanity" of the Republican Party are culpable, because
they didn't call the craziness out when it began to surface.
He's right, in the sense that the American Right began to unmoor
itself from reality long before the Tea Party, or even Barack
Obama's nomination. One of the lamentably ignored alarm bells
came with an "undisclosed" Bush administration official who
dismissed his opponents in 2002 on the grounds they were
"reality based."  By that he meant "people who believe solutions
emerge from study of discernible reality." The aide went on that
"that's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire,
and when we act, we create our own reality."  While these
comments generated a certain amount of mockery in the
blogosphere, most political, economic, and media leaders
shrugged it off. The obvious resonance with Fascist th