GOP Suicide Watch

Well. One was hardly expecting Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, Fred Barnes, Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove et al. to cheer on any Supreme Court nomination Barack Obama might make, so the fact that they oppose Sonia Sotomayor is at one level a big ho-hum. But the astonishing spectacle of them going after her in the most vilely and openly racist and sexist manner possible is further indication of a political party that is imploding before our very eyes. This is bad for the country, because we need two functional parties; but this may actually be the first time in more than a hundred years in which a third party movement, that takes the reasonable elements of Republicanism back from the angry white clowns, might stand some chance of success. We shall see. In the meantime, guys, keep it up! One result will be that the largest-growing demographic group in America will keep their distance from you for a generation at least, probably permanently. Another result, as Glenn Greenwald astutely wrote in a piece about the anti-gay ravings of conservative talk-show host Andrew Wilkow, is that almost all moderate, intelligent, ethical Americans will perform the same distancing maneuveur (my bolding):

There is lots of ink being spilled about the reasons for the collapse of the Right, the causes of the contempt with which young Americans in particular view them. It really isn't that complicated. They're repulsive. That's obviously not true for all conservatives, but the face their movement puts forward increasingly is this one. What kind of people would listen to something like this and react with anything other than pure repulsion, a desire to remain as far away from people like this as possible?

Indeed. And even the less openly racist attacks on Sotomayor, that go after her intelligence (as Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic did in his now-infamous smear piece) instead of characterizing her as a member of the "Latino KKK" (Lord help us), do the GOP no favors. They would do better in every sense to quietly sit this one out. You don't go after the intellectual cred of someone who graduated Princeton summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, won the Pyne Prize as top undergraduate, then won admission to Yale Law School and edited its law review -- you don't do that without making yourself look very foolish.

POSTSCRIPT: I love what Molly Ivins once said of one of Buchanan's rants, that it "sounded better in the original German."