Resurrecting the Angry Republican theme

The Republican party is over intellectually. Of course it doesn't seem that way now but the handwriting is on the wall.

The Republican Ideal is like those Native Peoples standing ashore watching the first Spanish ships on the horizon.  The game is over. A new game will begin but the old ways are useless in this new world.

It will take years for this realization to sink in a view of how the world works (i.e. a political ideology) has come to close.

The Native Peoples believed that all they had to do was get back to the old ways and the world they had known would return. Some danced Ghost Dances in hopes that the ancestors would rise up and give them their strength back.

The ancestors never came back.

Reagan is dead.

The anger pose is a very popular one on the right. It's most accomplished practitioners, Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Riley have huge audiences. People don't tune in to these shows to become better informed. Only to experience the anger the host directs at any particular person or point. Nothing is presented in depth or in context, because the purpose is not to inform.

Before I go further, let's just admit that Olbermann plays the exact same game on the left. But he is not nearly as popular as the other three. Nor does he have thousands of local market wanna be clones doing a pale impersonation of the masters. All of them present just enough of a quote or story to set up whatever strawman they will be directing their bile at for the next ten to thirty minutes.

Christopher Hitchens was on O'Riley about a year ago and was allowed to get out half an answer to one question before he was subjected to a ten minute, no pauses, rapid fire, angry barrage from the host. Hitchens closed the segment with priceless English wit by saying "You really must have me on the show more often to hear more of what you think."

The one guy on the right who appears to be breaking the mold is Huckabee. On his show it doesn't matter how much he disagrees with you, he still is really happy to have you as a guest. And he gives you time to make your points in full before coming back with his own rebuttals. To me that shows a great deal more confidence and intellectual ability than any of the others have.

I saw a Bill Clinton quote that might be apocryphal on his fellow Arkansas governor. "People don't think Mike Huckabee is a real conservative, but that's only because he's not all pissed off about it." I seem to remember Reagan disarming more than one political bomb with a joke and a smile. Modern conservatives would do well to heed his example. A true conservative fears no liberal idea.

In the anger and rage department, the right can't even tie their shoes.

Forget about the talk shows -- they are equally full of vinegar.

But on the street, in the blogs, even in entertainment (George Carlin, Bill Mahr, Sean Penn), you can't count the f-bombs, gorilla theater (throwing chicken blood at the Marine recruiting station in Berkeley), and invective thrown at Bush, and even at people who simply disagree with the left.

Where is the right equivlent to Code Pink, MoveOn, QueerNation? Look at character assassination of Sarah Palin -- the obscene t-shirts, etc.

.. Is listen to one day's worth of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Coulter, Ingraham, Boortz, Beck, O'Reilly, and Mark Levin and you would have no problem identifying the reason why Reich is talking about the GOP and its "Politics of Anger". 

These are the leading media figures of the GOP, far more recognizable to the voters across this country than Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, or Jon Kyl.