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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDaily Kos GOP strategist: 'We built this moment. And then we looked the other way'
Last edited Thu Mar 19, 2020, 08:05 PM - Edit history (1)
Thanx to Reagan's killing of the fairness doctrine we got Fox News and other wing nut propaganda outlets
which bathed America in misinformation for the past 2.5 generations and so now even science is suspect.
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GOP strategist: 'We built this moment. And then we looked the other way'/In retrospect, electing the dumbest motherfucker on the planet was probably a bad idea.
Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, all government is bad. Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. Thats awkward.
Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party must stop being the stupid party. By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer.
The failures of the governments response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.
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Republicans are learning a hard lesson now: Experts are good. Jesus will not swoop down and save us. In fact, science is our savior. The government is there for a reason. In retrospect, electing the dumbest motherfucker on the planet was probably a bad idea.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/18/1928675/-GOP-strategist-We-built-this-moment-And-then-we-looked-the-other-way?detail=emaildkre