The Dog is a strong believer in the need for a Loyal Opposition, if for no other reason than it is good to have to defend your ideas and policy in the face of criticism. When you have to explain why the details of your policy are doing the most with the least required resources it exposes weaknesses in your planning. If one is a reasonable adult, the response is to take those weaknesses and work on them. Sometimes there is no time or the weaknesses are structural and have to be lived with in order to get the benefits of the policy, but it is always worthwhile having to go through the exercise.

The problem with this system is that you do not get to pick your opposition. You have to assume the loyal part (since attributing motive is an activity best left to palm readers and prosecutors) but that says nothing of them being willfully blind and self destructive. Dr. King said:

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

To the Dog this seems to sum up the modern Republican Party in a nut shell. Over the last 20 years they have made a virtue of ignorance as they resisted, at every turn, scientific evidence of climate change, as they worked to degrade the importance of expertise and elevate the idea that emotion should trump reason. It started as a populist appeal to the working class white voters, a way to make the meritocracy of the Democratic Party ideal seem elitist. “What do those damned eggheads know about real people?” was the basic theme. Sadly it worked.

Envy is an ugly emotion and like all ugly emotions, when it is given permission to grow, it takes off in a nearly geometric progression. This particular emotion gives way to a lot of self-delusion, letting one believe, in the face of evidence that you are just as good at something as someone that has spent a lifetime perfecting that act. On an objective level every human is unique, with their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone would like to be great at everything, but the fact is that we can not all be great at all the same things. Guys with broad shoulders, short legs and no jumping ability are just never going to be good at basketball. You will never see one in the NBA. Does that make him any less valuable? No, on a football field (American football, not soccer) he is a real asset with his low center of gravity and strong ability to push with those short legs.

Unfortunately the Republican Party abandoned this little piece of common wisdom. They said that you do not have to be very smart and focused to aspire for public office. They made it clear that the only real requirement (to them) is the ability to loyally follow the Party line. If you can string a few words together and not be too curious, then you are the person for them! In fact if you became to much of thinker in their party, you would quickly be accused of the greatest of their sins, not being a true conservative. This lead them to a majority where they had fabulous voting discipline but little in the way of Statesmen, Patriots or even original thinking in public service. In the end it is what led to their downfall. They ran and elected the man the most epitomized this philosophy for the Presidency.

With their hands on all the levers of power it quickly became clear that they did not have the least capability to run the nation, even in a fashion that would favor them in the long run. It takes the American people a long time to get the fact that something is seriously wrong, but once they do, they are not shy about taking action at the ballot box to remedy the situation. In 2006 and 2008 the Know Nothing Party followed the play book that had won for them before and in each case they got their asses handed to them.

Most organizations would have the mental acuity to see that they had lost the faith of the voters; that the ideas that they parrot in unison were not working anymore, and then change. Sadly (for them at least) they have run the people that would be able to make that analysis out of their party. Just witness the fight for the RNC Chairmanship where one of the things that the candidates thought was most critical to their party was the number of guns each owned! As the nations economy makes yet another turn around its vicious cycle, they were arguing over who was most like Regan (forgetting the Regan raised taxes, twice!)!

It leaves us with an opposition that while loyal is so steeped in the idea that ideological principals are all you ever need that they are all but sleepwalkers in terms of policy. They have replaced thought with unswerving loyalty to ideology. If things were not so dire it would be very satisfying to watch them destroy their own party. Make no mistake they are killing the Republican Party by their actions. When you have Sen. Specter is quoted as saying that he does not think he can vote for AG nominee Holder because (wait for it) he is concerned about his independence from the President! When you have House Minority Leader Boehner {A quick digression here: What the hell is up with his tan? This is the end of January, in North America. There are some folks that will have a tan, but his level of leathery-ness is truly frightening. What is he being exposed to that would do that to his skin? He looks like a potato chip that has been left on over a grill for an hour} objecting to reducing the red tape that is involved in getting a waver by the States for providing low income families with contraception (which would save the States over 400 million in the next ten years); when you have 30 Colorado General Assembly members nearly wetting themselves over the idea of holding Gitmo prisoners in the single most secure prison in the United States, the Canon City Super Max facility (which holds the terrorist that bombed both the World Trade Center and the Murrah Federal building); when you have Sen. McCain proposing that tax cuts are all we need to get out of this financial mess, how can you possibly take this party seriously?

This is the problem; when your loyal opposition is no longer in any way in touch with reality, when they have distanced themselves from expertise at all levels, it is nearly impossible for them to be honest partners in governance. Sadly we will have to live with this for at least the next two years, when hopefully they will run the same type of campaigns and get the same resounding “NOT YOU!!” from the American people. It might be the end, the real end of modern Republicanism, but for the nation it could not come soon enough.