My wife recently asked me: “So why aren’t you writing any more of your political screeds for the blog lately?”

Some readers have written in and asked the same thing: When did I stop hating on Republicans, anyways?

I promise you I haven’t, but generally speaking, I get pretty burnt out on politics after an election year. This time, though, I think it goes deeper than that. The main reason I think I care less about politics today than I did only five months ago is that for years I’ve long expected to see a steep decline in the size of the GOP’s voter base and the party’s influence and I think that’s now pretty much a fait accompli. We’ve seen it happen. 2012 was the very last year that the Republicans still had a decent shot at getting in on a national level and cementing the rules of, ahem, “democracy” to favor themselves—but as we all know, that didn’t happen.

I certainly think there were very valid reasons for fearing the rise of the far right—the brief Tea party moment was admittedly not something that I saw coming—but I’m not feeling that so much anymore.

The Tea party foolishness, Glenn Beck, the birthers and the rapid rise and fall of Sarah Palin can already be seen in the rear-view mirror as the frenzied flailing of a dying elephant. By 2016, a pretty good chunk of the Grand Old Party’s aging baby boomer base will have at least one foot in the grave and by 2020 and 2024, well, forget about it.
 

 
In the very near future, America will be truly unrecognizable to itself, and this will be especially hard on the folks who don’t even live in the present to begin with. Progress cannot be stopped. Entropy is simply not possible in a country this big and with such a radically changing demographic makeup, no matter how certain personality types—low IQ authoritarians, xenophobes, racists, religious busybodies, I’m talking about the GOP base, here, of course—try to force it on everyone else.

I’m just so over it. Aren’t you?

The dam has burst on a lot of issues: immigration reform, LGBT civil rights, cannabis laws, healthcare, and the water is rushing past the reichwingers and they just got drenched.

This is not to say that I’m not still amused by soaking wet Republicans, it’s just that the 2012 election showed, I think definitively, the hard and fast limits to their influence and that the national brand is truly a spent force, one perhaps best left behind as a relic of another era (like plaid golf pants, Brylcreem, Lawrence Welk… or Jim Crow laws).

To my mind, it all looks pretty downhill from here on out for the Republican Party. Any argument that posits a resurgent national GOP moving forward is an argument made by someone who apparently still thinks that the most recent US Census was just a big ole fat gubmint LIE and who probably voted for Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Caucus.
 

 
There simply aren’t enough of them anymore. That’s a demographic fact, Jack. Don’t believe me? Go argue with reality, I don’t care what you think. Get real: The so-called “two party system” is not some immutable law of American political physics that needs to carry on without end, especially not when one of the parties has opted to radically remake itself, taking on the classic features of an extremist fringe group.

Some Republicans kinda got the “voter revulsion” message, but not really. When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus presented the 97-page report of the RNC’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a post-mortem on the GOP’s 2012 losses at the National Press Club on Monday, he said:

“When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party. As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

In short, a sizable majority of the American electorate thinks the Republicans suck eggs and their own internal polling backs that up to the extent that they don’t even try to spin it anymore! (Something remarkable in and of itself).

The report is actually pretty brutal, acknowledging that women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and the mainstream media basically hate Republicans. These, er, “special interest groups” are, for all intents and purposes, immune to the GOP’s charms. They’re not going to just suddenly jump on the Republican train for any reason, this much seems assured.

Not to mention:

“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents…”

Yeah, the young people. They simply aren’t that into inheriting a country with insane wealth inequality, the 1% elite owning half of everything and keeping the productive capital within their own families, tainted meat, bad air and undrinkable water. Try rounding up an electoral majority when women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and young people of all races think you’re shit!.

‘Nuff said, eh GOP?
 

 

“We sound increasingly out of touch.”

That’s putting it mildly. The GOP talk about minority outreach, and then they introduce voter ID bills in their statehouses! It’s even a matter of Republicans appearing not to be able to differentiate fiction from reality anymore, let alone shit from shinola.

I mean, they’re exactly what Bobby Jindal said they—and by extension he, himself—are: “the stupid party.” Many Americans simply perceive the GOP as being closely synonymous with idiocy and they have no trouble articulating this to the GOP’s own pollsters. And like, this somehow appears to be NEWS to them! The stench of stupid is so thick on the modern Republican party brand that it’s going to be a really difficult odor to wash off.

Hands up, who wants to be a member of the stupid party? How about you?
 

 

“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago—meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President.”

OUCH, OUCH AND DOUBLE OUCH! A knife thrust deep into the Republican heart! Why it’s conservative treason… even if it’s true!

They’ve had no new ideas since the Reagan era, either. Since before most people owned a personal computer. Since there were just three TV networks and PBS for most of America! Why would the smartest, most capable young conservatives of the up and coming generation want to make a career investment in the GOP instead of someplace… you know, not so dumb? How will the party attract talent?
 

 
And furthermore, how will the party raise money when they’ve proven to be such a shitty investment for their deep-pockets donors. Even the Koch brothers seem to be turning their back on the GOP. Who could blame them, they’re ruthless businessmen? They know the score. The ROI the GOP offer blows. Expect them to act accordingly. If Rand Paul would bolt the party for the Libertarians (as his father once did) the Kochs would be right there behind him.

“If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Hahahaha. No shit. Well, then someone had better essplain that to the loudmouthed lamebrain from Texas, Rep. Louie “anchor babies” Gohmert, who insists that the GOP must never give into immigration reform because “they” will never vote for Republicans if offered a pathway to citizenship. It’s a “trap” Democrats have laid for the GOP, in Gohmert’s eyes.

Look, Louie Gohmert’s a fucking idiot, that’s glaringly obvious to everyone but him and his fellow idiots, but if you think about it, he’s actually quite right in this instance. It’s a real damned if they do, damned if they don’t sort of situation these Republicans have put themselves in regarding immigration reform, isn’t it? But they’ve insisted upon it, the Democrats didn’t trap them with anything. This is a giving them an awful lot of credit for what amounts to a Catch 22 that’s been hatching under their noses and in their own districts, literally for DECADES, don’tcha think?
 

 
As New York’s Jonathan Chait wrote about the RNC’s seemingly intractable woes:

The report determinedly avoids confronting the party’s most fundamental problem: Its attachment to an economic agenda that most voters correctly identify as serving the needs of a wealthy minority. Rather than confront the problem, the report is a detailed and generally shrewd plan for working around.

Yup. Tuesday on MSNBC, RNC chair Reince Priebus told Luke Russert that the party’s platform on gay marriage has not changed despite efforts to make the party appear more inclusive:

“I know our party believes marriage is between one man and one woman.”

That’s some “effort,” Reince (if that is, in fact, your real name).
 

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s pathetic idea of an intellectual…

Obviously there’s a gigantic problem with this entire RNC re-branding enterprise: It’s dead on arrival and anyone with a brain capable of critical thought on the level of, say, a peanut, can see the fatal flaw that’s got a flashing neon sign and a bunch of old coots in Revolutionary War uniforms pointing their replica muskets right at it. Republican voters, especially the ones who never went to college, the cranky old farts who are to varying degrees racist, close-minded Christianists, anti-immigrant homophobes and just angry, disapproving people, en générale, will have none of this shit!

And these troglodytes make up about half the party’s registration rolls and everyone knows it. Good luck with the fucking rebranding, boys.
 

 
Writing about the RNC autopsy at the NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall had this to say:

The highly visible presence of the candidates these voters prefer – recall the party’s Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and their bizarre views on rape and abortion — suggests that the Republican Party has a severe, if not toxic, problem: a septic electorate that, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, “can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.”

But let’s leave these trifling inconveniences aside for now, shall we? Suffice to say, there’s a major split occurring in the GOP that’s going to seriously impact their ability to ever get back to a place of national influence. This was already obvious at the start of the primary season. As a national party, they’re no-hopers within a decade, splintering into factions (Tea party and social conservatives, RNC establishment and the wealthy elites, “Ron/Rand Paul Libertarians,” etc) and facing an increasingly insurmountable demographic irrelevancy that will grow by leaps and bounds every four years.
 

 
I don’t think the Republicans can do that much—or at least as much—damage to the country moving forward. It’s clear that there are (at least) two factions of the party who are locked in a civil war. The endgame of everyone taking their toys and going home seems like a forgone conclusion. They’re just not going to be able to work together anymore. You’ve got the wealthy elites who would like the game to stay rigged vs. the Rick Santorum “stupid” folks. They desperately need one another to add up to a nationally viable party. Divided they don’t really amount to much anymore.

They’ve been humbled, their electoral impotency was on full display for the entire country to see on election night.

Furthermore. there are boundaries now that they know they can’t cross. Those boundaries weren’t there before, but they are now. Public opinion can be employed much easier as a prophylactic against the worst Republican power grabs (like this talk of changing Electoral College rules, something that everyone is already wise to). Of course, I’m not suggesting completely ignoring what the GOP gets up to—I’m not usually someone to underestimate the power of stupid people in a group—but their best days are behind them, and I think that’s a pretty uncontroversial thing to say at this point, without any caveats coming readily to mind.
 

 
I’m noticing that this attitude is increasingly, and I think correctly, becoming the default position of the mainstream media, that the uh… I guess threat of low IQ authoritarian Republicanism has diminished considerably. Bill Maher touched on this topic on his Real Time program on HBO last week when he mocked Christian bluenose group One Million Moms (the churchladies who protest the Skittles and Geico commercials for promoting bestiality) who have not one million Twitter followers, but fewer than 3000.

When Bill Maher is brushing off silly reichwingers as a source of comedy, like a canary flying out of a coalmine, hey, he’s probably onto something: They’re a joke.

It’s a pretty steep fall from Andrew Breitbart to Ben Shapiro to put it a different way.

The 2012 election was a real “man behind the curtain” moment for the Grand OLD Party and its increasingly tenuous relationship to modern America and the up and coming generation. The slow, agonizing death of the Republican Party seems all but certain, done in by hubris, idiocy, greed, hypocrisy, terrible ideas, loathsome shit-for-brains politicians, moronic uninformed voters, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the list can go on and on and on. They suck, but fuck ‘em, they’re not really worth nearly as much energy being expended in their direction.

Maybe it’s simply time to push past them and leave these nitwits behind to play in their sandbox of stupidity. The zeitgeist is not with the Republican Party and I think the big story of American politics in 2013 is that most people are starting to realize this.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

The Republicans are way, way, more screwed than they thought!

Republican explains to other Republicans why the GOP is so totally fucked

 
This ridiculous footage was shot over the weekend at the conservative Republican convention, CPAC, during a seminar titled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” led by a black conservative by the name of K. Carl Smith. (As Bill Maher pointed out Friday on his HBO show Real Time, if you’re “sick and tired” of being called a racist, chances are that you ARE a racist, but nevermind that rather obvious logic for a moment).

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was present at the seminar and wrote that Smith “mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves ‘Frederick Douglass Republicans.’” (Now THAT’S rebranding for ya, ain’t it?)

Watch what happens when CPAC attendee, Scott Terry of North Carolina, speaks. It’s mind-boggling. This asshole—who was with a buddy in a Confederate flag tee-shirt—shocked even his fellow CPAC attendees with his “food and shelter” remark about slavery. I don’t think that was easy to do in a place like CPAC—in particular to offend the kinds of clowns who’d sign up for something called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”—but somehow Scott Terry managed it.

Scott Terry is “proud” of “his people”! So proud that he felt the need to go to a meeting about perceived racism in the conservative movement and explain how as a white, Southern male, HE’S BEING DISENFRANCHISED by all this talk of minority outreach!

Genius!
 

 
Professional silly person Glenn Beck discusses the death of America in one of his most over the top performances in quite a while.

YouTube commenter Greg Rowe succinctly describes Beck’s shtick:

He gets a little blackboard and draws out a pathetic syllogism

Hitler was a vegetarian

Many liberals are vegetarians

Hitler killed Jews

Ergo: Liberals killed 6 000 000 Jews

And suddenly all of his pea-brained followers are running out to buy guns and ammo over the realization that liberals and Nazis are really the same.

Glenn Beck—the guy’s fuckin’ nuts and his audience are drooling idiots—but he’s still quite the showman, I’ll give him that. Notice how well his show is directed (a big improvement over the production values of his Fox News show). His camera operator must be the best in the business.
 

 
Via Right Wing Watch

 
On her Facebook page, apparently the only outlet open to her since Fox News showed her the door, Sarah Palin stepped into a steaming pile of rhetorical dogshit on the topic of the so-called “sequester.”

On Tuesday, in a post, non-ironically titled: “D.C.: Cut the Drama. Do Your Job,” the reality TV drama queen who quit halfway through her own job as Alaska governor had this to say:

If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.

Oh boy. Nice way to “wee-wee” up the low IQ rubes who still care about the opinions of a certain snowbilly grifter. It’s so hard to tell if she’s just plain stupid, or in fact really crafty, like Glenn Beck is. The thing is, in Palin’s case, I’m not sure that there is a discernible difference. I don’t look at Beck and think “dumb” (“Asshole” is a word that comes more readily to mind. “Crazy,” too, but never dumb). Glenn Beck is just cynical but Sarah Palin’s stupidity, her obvious idiocy, is THE ACTUAL REASON that Tea party-types (still) find her so “refreshing.”

“She’s just like us…” (yeah, that’s right, she is, she’s a fucking idiot). You can’t fake it!

Politico had this to say about Palin’s outlandish claim:

Palin - who wrote on her Facebook page on Tuesday, “We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest” - joins conservatives Alex Jones of InfoWars.com, who wrote about the ammo buy last year, and radio host Mark Levin, who said on his radio program earlier this month that the government is “arming up” because society is “unraveling.”

“Law enforcement and national security agencies — they play out multiple scenarios. They simulate multiple scenarios. I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating: the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses,” Levin said on his radio program.

You’d think that after five years of being a walking, talking, Facebooking definition of a fucking idiot that Sarah Palin might, you know, be slightly more circumspect about her information sources, especially when they’re coming straight from anonymous ALL CAPS forwarded emails, WorldNut Daily, originated with Alex Jones or have already been debunked on Snopes.com, but no…

That’s why she’s Sarah Palin. She dares to be dumb. It works for her!

Below, “One of us! One of us! One of us…”
 

 
Christian radio host Janet Mefferd cuts to the heart of the gay rights matter and says out loud what many will not: Many conservative Christians simply do no want to be forced to look at gay people.

Whether the homosexual activists like it or not, and I know this isn’t politically correct to say this, but not everybody wants to see that. I know that that’s offensive to the activist crowd, they want us all to see it, they want us all to approve of it, they want us all to call it blessed and okay and rejoice and have parties and throw confetti in the air over this whole thing. But the fact of the matter is it’s a moral issue. You will always have Christians who will disagree with this and why should the rights of the activists trump the rights of Christians?

By this same logic why should the rights of the black people have trumped the rights of Southern slave owners?

Got an answer for that one, Janet?

I’m sure you do. I’m equally sure that it’s fucking stupid and decidedly unscientific.

(And what about people who are offended by low IQ idiots like Janet Mefford, don’t we have any rights?)

Advice to Janet Mefferd from the Holy Book itself:

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

That’s right, Janet, gouge your own eyes out if you’re offended by gay people. The Bible IS the inerrant word of God, isn’t it? Out they go!

Barring that, stay at home and keep the door locked and the TV off. The 21st century is gonna really suck for you otherwise, doll.

Send a message to Janet Mefferd on Twitter.

Via Right Wing Watch/Joe.My.God.

 
Alien Or Satan is a short film by Norwegian artist Prins Preben. Part joke, part examination of what is interpreted to be Occult / Extra-terrestrial. As Prins tells Dangerous Minds:

The film examines a lost human facing what may be described as the hidden or the unknown. It has a kind of perspective of what emotions we see as “occult/hidden”. It’s like two directions…Hell the core of flames in the middle of the Earth. And Space a more cold and endless place….both a “kind of hidden.” And of course, Lucifer is both celestial and alien.

Prins Preben on Facebook.
 

 
A thing of oblique beauty, no?

Brought to you by the obviously irony-free crazy people at The David Horowitz Freedom Center.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

“What if the Attorney General, and listen the reason I say this might happen is because if you remember the first report put out by the Director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, when the President became President of the United States, she put out a paper talking about the people who are the categories of people who might be homegrown terrorists.

In that list she put people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, people who believe in pro-life issues, people who don’t believe in having illegal aliens here, they put a lot of good, decent categories of people in that paper.

Well here’s what number four says, the Attorney General can put who he wants to on the list of people who are too dangerous to get guns. What if he decides radio talk show hosts who don’t believe in gay marriage, they’re dangerous, so they shouldn’t get guns? What about pastors who preach against abortion and homosexuality? They’re too dangerous to get guns? That could happen.”

—“American Family Association” radio host Buster Wilson.

Wilson is the same fucking idiot who tried to get conservative Christians to boycott Google over their “Legalize Love Campaign” and who announced this boycott on Google-owned YouTube. The phrase “Dumber than a bag of wet hair” probably wasn’t coined to describe Buster Wilson, but it could have been.

Back in August, chucklehead Buster blamed Hurricane Issac on a New Orleans LGBT festival!

As one YouTube user commented on the clip below:

Tell me then, genius, why did the power of the most high manifest itself by destroying tiny Joplin in a state that’s 77% Christian? Why does he flood massive areas of Mississippi—the most Christian state—every year? Why is it that he makes NYC the centre of the global economy & LA the centre of global culture, yet does nothing to stop their decadence? A hurricane flattened Joplin, it didn’t even dent Manhattan. Sounds like your god is incompetent.

This guy is out of his mind. More at Right Wing Watch.
 

 
If you guessed something about how the moon landing was faked or if you think it has to do with reptilians, the JFK assassination or fluoride sapping our precious bodily fluids, keep guessing…

In a new nationwide survey of American voters, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project took a look Americans’ belief in political conspiracy theories. The researchers asked respondents about four relatively common-held conspiracy theories: Birtherism (which 36% of all Americans believe in); that the government had advance warning about 9/11 (25% believe that to be true); that Obama stole the recent election (only 19% believe this one, which is surprising); and that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election via rigging the vote (23% believe this).

It was hardly news to read that 64% of registered Republicans voters were “birthers” but so many of them still are? Nearly two-thirds of GOP voters—64% of ‘em—believe that it’s “probably true” that Barack Obama is lying about his birthplace. Remarkable! It’s like it hasn’t abated at all.

Via Alternet:

Belief in conspiracy theories is not unique to Republicans — 56 percent of Democrats believe in one of the four popular myths researchers asked about — but it is more common. Among registered GOPers, 75 percent said at least one of the four theories was likely true.  Moreover, researchers noted: “Generally, the more people know about current events, the less likely they are to believe in conspiracy theories — but not among Republicans, where more knowledge leads to greater belief in political conspiracies.”

THAT’S pretty revealing, isn’t it? Read that last bit, in bold, a second time before continuing, won’t you?

“There are several possible explanations for this,” said Fairleigh Dickinson political scientist Dan Cassino, who helped conduct the poll. “It could be that more conspiracy-minded Republicans seek out more information, or that the information some Republicans seek out just tends to reinforce these myths.”

I can name a bunch of “possible explanations” off the top of my head: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Fox and Friends, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Donald Trump and so forth. If you fill your head with shit all day, don’t be surprised when you turn into a complete shithead.

...Republicans are more likely to believe that Obama stole the 2012 election, while Democrats are more likely to think the same about 2004. Thirty-seven percent of Democrats think Bush or his supporters engaged in significant voter fraud to win that year, compared to just 9 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of independents.

9/11 conspiracy theories were also more popular among Democrats, with 36 percent believing that Bush knew the towers would be attacked, while young African-Americans are particularly likely to believe this myth — fully 59 percent believe it.

Dan Cassino from Fairleigh Dickinson has a plausible reason why “birtherism” is still so prevalent (aside, of course, from standard run-of-the-mill American idiocy):

“This conspiracy theory is much more widely believed mostly because it’s been discussed so often. People tend to believe that where there’s smoke, there’s fire – so the more smoke they see, the more likely they are to believe that something is going on.”

I think that’s being a little too kind, but he does have a point. As Robert Anton Wilson once told me “People just tend to believe the last darned thing they heard.”

Below, the “Conspiracy Theory Rock” animation by Robert Smigel that was “mysteriously” cut from SNL, obviously at the behest of Lorne Michaels’ puppet masters!
 

 
The thing is, when Alex Jones is making his headcase, rageaholic videos where he reveals his acute paranoia that someone wants to bump him off, when this guy DOES die from a heart attack—I mean LOOK AT HIM, HE’S ONLY 38!!!—his followers, like Andrew Breitbart’s legions, will think it was the New World Order, or Obama, what killed Alex, NOT HIS OWN BI-POLAR BATSHIT BAD-CRAZINESS.

Even Glenn Beck thinks Jones is crazy.

Jones is so anti-meds that he’ll probably die of an aneurysm long before anyone gets around to assassinating him. Imagine what his poor wife must have thought, seeing her husband have a humiliating public meltdown (the type I am sure that she is all too accustomed to witnessing) in front on CNN’s cameras.

If you can’t hold your shit together on a live television show—and Jones didn’t even try with Piers Morgan, he was unhinged from the start—you shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near one, for fuck’s sake.
 

 
Bonus: Alex Jones Never Exaggerates: A pure distillation of Alex Jones’ essence, this plays like an Everything is Terrible “trash compactor”:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Alex Jones is such a fucking tool

Alex Jones: Glenn Beck is stealing my conspiracy theories

H/T to poryorick and J to the G