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Quietly and miserably, like an anxious mother tiptoeing away from an autistic child who has fallen asleep with his helmet on, the Republican Party continues its hopeless search for a viable nominee while backpedaling from its own disaster in Iraq. The candidates, all of them -- I exclude here Congressman Ron Paul, who is an uninvited guest to this ball -- are fourth-rate buffoons, not one of them qualified to hold down the last ten minutes of a weekday open-mike night in a Skokie comedy club. They are divided into two categories: those who try to avoid talking about Iraq by saying nothing at all, and those who try to avoid talking about Iraq by talking loudly about something else.
One Monday a few weeks back in Newark, New Jersey, I met one of the members of the latter group, Rep. Tom Tancredo. The vengeful Colorado midget's rap is immigration, i.e., convincing Middle America that the War on Terrorism is actually taking place in Mexico. But when he shows up in the ugliest city in America to gloat about three kids allegedly murdered by illegals from Latin America, he is greeted by a crowd of pro-immigrant protesters chanting, "Tancredo! You liar! We'll set your ass on fire!" They're yelling so loudly that no one can hear Tancredo speak from a distance beyond two feet.
The actor Paul Winfield was once asked what was the artistic key to his performance as Don King in a made-for-HBO movie about Mike Tyson. Winfield shrugged and held up his spiky Don King wig. His was a one-trick performance. Tancredo also has only one trick on the campaign trail. Whenever he mentions the words "illegal aliens," he follows them with the word "including." As in:
"Sanctuary cities," he says in Newark, "are safe havens for all illegal aliens, including gang members, drug dealers, rapists and murderers, further exposing the law-abiding citizens of such a city to greater crime." In other words, who cares about Iraq when you might get raped by a Mexican busboy?
In the face of the awesome political catastrophe that has befallen the Republican Party in the form of George W. Bush, the response of its new leaders has not been to re-examine their perverted values, their vicious tactics or even their position on Bush's singularly idiotic and supremely characteristic policy mistake, the Iraq War. Instead, the party is closing its eyes and trying, Dorothy-like, to wish its way back to Kansas, back to the good old days of mean-spirited, blame-the-darkies politics of Newt Gingrich, a time when electoral blowouts could be won by offering frightened Americans a chance to pull a lever against gays, atheists and the collective rest of onrushing modern reality.
If this were ten years ago, when America was safely suckling on the Internet bubble and restricting its overseas dabbling to military exhibition games like Kosovo, this back-to-the-good-old-days bullshit would be mere vileness. But thanks to the GOP's excellent leader, Mr. Bush, America is no longer in any position to hide from reality. We are now fully and catastrophically engaged in reality. And reality is kicking our ass, in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else in this world that hates us more and more with each and every passing day. The party's response is to blow that off, pretend it's not happening. Six years after 9/11, Bush's would-be replacements are still reading My Pet Goat. Their solution to the Iraq dilemma is to keep talking tough, as if our kids were not getting arms shot off from Basra to Tal Afar, as if bin Laden weren't still scoring record recruiting numbers in between bong hits on Al Jazeera.
Tancredo's idea for repairing America's relations with the Islamic Middle East is to threaten to nuke the innocent holy cities of Mecca and Medina. "That's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do," he said recently. At the tail end of his Newark appearance, as a means of trying to get him to say something, anything, about the Middle East, I ask Tancredo about that comment.
"That's for a different press conference," he grumbles, and slithers away.
***
Polls may be the devil's currency, near the top of the list of campaign evils, but in this case they tell the whole story. A recent CBS News poll indicates that thirty-one percent of Americans want to begin pulling at least some troops out of Iraq right away. Another thirty percent want to completely withdraw from Iraq, right now. That's nearly two-thirds of the country that wants to start bringing troops home.
Among young people, the numbers are even more striking. According to another poll, voters ages eighteen to twenty-nine now trust the Democrats more than the Republicans on every single issue surveyed, including the War on Terror. A mind-boggling sixty-six percent of young people are against giving the president's Iraq War plan a chance. Even among young Republicans, nearly four in ten favor an immediate withdrawal.
Anyone with an IQ above ten can see what these polls mean; what they should tell the Republican Party is that it simply cannot win a general election unless it changes its tune on Iraq. Instead, after two decades of Reagan-esque macho campaigning, decades in which Republican electoral success so spooked both the national media and the Democratic Party that it became axiomatic that only the toughest-talking and most warmongering politicians had even the slightest chance at the presidency, the Republicans find themselves cornered by their own conventional wisdom. Indeed, they are experiencing a sort of mirror image of the electoral/ideological malaise that has stricken their opponents in recent years.
See more stories tagged with: election 2008, gop, iraq
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
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