Afternoon Joe, Ctd.

A reader writes:

I think, as I suspect that you do, that Mr. Scarborough is off on this. After all, if this were, "an opportunity to stick it to an incompetent GOP Establishment", there would be associated with it attacks on the Bush-Cheney legacy, a recognition that Reagan and Bush actually increased deficits, and a rejection of the sort of populist, conspiracism which drove the "Contract with America" crowd to office, and hence, to the record profligacy of the Bush Jr. years.

Instead, what we see is a glorifying of those people who most embody these patterns of thought (like Glenn Beck) within the Republican, now re-branded as big c "Conservative", ethos.

For all their rhetoric and puffed-up pride, this is little more than what Boehner and the Republican leadership claimed to be necessary after the Democratic victories of 2008; a re-branding in nothing but name and a purging of moderate elements for not "fighting hard enough". To these true believers, failure is never the result of rejection by society; it is the result of betrayal, indiscipline, and the shadowy, nefarious plotting of the global, cosmopolitan cabal of Jews, gays, non-Anglos, and effete, back-stabbing, white intellectuals.

This derangement has proceeded so far that, in the words of Dick Armey himself, to place the welfare of one's district before the dictates of the Party's Glorious Social Revolution is to be "parochial"! Such views are hardly the makeup of a return to small, locally-interested government. For Mr. Scarborough to ignore such central aspects of this movement in his analysis of its motives and nature reduces his statements regarding it, in truth, to little more than propaganda.