Showing posts with label smartest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smartest. Show all posts

Friday, August 24, 2012

Thinking. . .

 ". . . how did Todd Akin get nominated for the Senate in the first place? How did Christine O’Donnell in Delaware? How did Donald Trump surge to the top of the early presidential polls after his birther blather became public? Why do so many Republicans have so much trouble with evolution? Climate change? The non-difference between forcible and statutory rape?

This is not to say that Republicans are, by natural bent, stupid. Indeed, many of the smartest, most erudite, most creative policy thinkers I’ve encountered over the past 40 years are Republicans or conservatives. They’ve been the source of some of the best policy proposals I’ve seen–including the individual mandate for health care, cap and trade (to limit sodium sulfur-dioxide), school choice, work requirements for welfare recipients. In foreign policy, they’ve been well-represented by realists like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bob Zoellick and their boss, George H.W. Bush.

(MORE: Best Tweets About Todd Akin’s ‘Legitimate Rape’ Comment)

But the Republican Party that produced such thinkers is, as we all know, gone now. And what we have is a party that too often acquiesces–with rolled eyes and grimaces, to be sure–in the know-nothing idiocy of a plurality of its base. There was a period when the Democrats suffered from a similar malady–the days of racial quotas, overweening sociological tolerance of criminality and the belief that the U.S. is almost always wrong when it uses force overseas. The Democrats still have some outliers who believe such things. But Bill Clinton showed that Democrats could reform themselves; Barack Obama’s reliance on ideas that were originally Republican or bipartisan in much of his domestic agenda is a reflection of the permanence of that change. . . "

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/21/why-akin-matters/?iid=obnetwork#ixzz24QhQyxWi




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