My Canadian counterpart has been writing some really insightful posts about the morass that is the GOP these days. You should head on over to his site and read his stuff.
First off-he points out expertly what a complete idiot Allen West is, and how once again-for a supposedly educated officer-he has very little accurate knowledge of his own nation's history. Of course I expect nothing but untruth from the poster child-but the Canadian Counterpart does an expert job of ripping his thesis that Congress is full of "card carrying Commies" to shreds.
Which brings me to Representative Allen West of Florida's 22nd congressional district. Being of a military background, Congressman West doesn't do things halfway. Where people like Palin and Hannity are proudly ignorant, West fetishizes stupidity in a way that normal adults would stop at nothing to hide, but modern politics rewards. Add to that the fact that he's an unrepentant fucking war criminal and you have a natural leader of the Tea Party.
Well, over the last couple of weeks, young Allen has come to embrace his inner McCarthyite with endlessly entertaining results.
On Tuesday, Rep. Allen West spoke at a town hall in Florida. During his appearance, he told the crowd he’s “heard” that up to 80 House Democrats are members of the Communist Party.
The Palm Beach Post reported on the event, adding that West “wouldn’t name names” to back up his assertion. Currently, there are 190 Democrats in the House.
That's notable in so far as even McCarthy himself never went that far. He said that communists subverted the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, not that they were welcomed into them. Nor did McCarthy ever go so far as to say outright that nearly half of the Democratic congressional caucus were actually members of the Communist Party of the United States.
Of course, West's assertion was so blatantly and laughably ridiculous that it couldn't be ignored, except by Fox News and the Tea Party blogosphere, both of whom are as spectacularly dumb as West himself. The only people who took him seriously was the actual Communist Party of the United States, which is insulted that anyone would associate it with something as spineless as the Democrats.
In a subsequent post-he goes on to document the debt that is owed by the Tea Party to those it despises, those same progressives West attacked,
Because they proudly have no idea what they're talking about, West, Glenn Beck and the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members equate early 20th century progressivism socialism and communism. This couldn't be more ironic in so far as the institutions that allowed for the rise of the Tea Party were created by those very progressives a century earlier. Without the progressives, the modern populists would have been crushed in the gears of the political machinery that governed the United States at the time.
As much as populists love talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, they don't understand either very well. For example, the Second Amendment was written the way it was (beginning with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") because the Founders were unanimous in their belief that the new nation shouldn't have a standing military. This comes up several times in the Federalist Papers.
Being isolationist, they understood that a nation cannot have a standing army without deploying it on a regular basis. They created the United States as a retreat from the rest of the world, not as a military competitor in it. For that reason, the people would be armed and loosely organized in militias that could respond to any threat and disband when the crisis passed.
Aside from being isolationist, the Founders weren't especially democratic. They were all classical scholars and had studied pure Athenian democracy, ultimately finding it unworkable. For those reasons, they created a number of significant checks on the will of the people, including but not limited to, a division of powers between the political branches, the establishment of an independent judiciary and a Senate that was appointed by the state legislatures. In the strictest classical definitions of the words, they were republicans, not democrats.
Of course, there's no telling any of this to your average Tea Party member or Sean Hannity fan. Their famous love of tri-corner hats aside, they actually know very little about the political and constitutional history of the country they can't stop proclaiming their love of.
Its quality writing-well worth your time.