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Friday, September 23, 2011

The Debates Are Introducing America to What the Republicans Have Become

Traditionally, the importance of Presidential debates during the primary season is that they provide the initial exposure of candidates to a national audience, at a time when they are appealing to their own party's base voters.

The three Republican debates that have taken place since Rick Perry entered the race have been extraordinary, among other reasons, because in the aftermath of each one of these debates the story has been less about the Nation's introduction to the Republican Party's contenders for the White House than about the Nation's re-introduction to the Republican Party itself.

Again and again the national conversation following each debate has been preoccupied with a vision of what the Republican Party has become, through a story about the way the Republican audience reacted to some question or some response and so revealed in themselves something profoundly ugly and frightening.

In the aftermath of the Reagan Library debate America cringed in discomfort at the gleeful cheers that met Rick Perry's boast about the large number of people his state has executed. In the aftermath of the Tea Party debate America recoiled when the audience cheered the prospect of uninsured Americans dying of their treatable ailments if they can't cough up enough money.

Apparently, last night on the Fox News debate the audience booed a soldier in Iraq because he is gay and then howled with joy when Rick Santorum said he would re-instate Don't Ask Don't Tell. One wonders if perhaps the next Republican debates will feature a bacchanal accompanying a book burning or the stoning of an adulterous woman.

To be a Republican today is to be a dangerous ignoramus and an evil-minded bigot with real mischief on his mind. It is this marginal and murderous mob that is being introduced to America through these debates, more than the Killer Clowns arrayed behind their podia awkwardly trying to look Presidential for the cameras.

A wholesomely diversifying, secularizing, greening America is taking a good long look at the vestiges of its ugly past and, it is to be hoped, drawing from that ghastly spectacle the strength to push harder still to move forward to solve our shared problems together through the agency of more, and better, Democrats, before it is too late.

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