I feel bad for Bob Herbert at the New York Times. His column yesterday has the same tone many of my posts on this blog have had: what in the hell is going on in the United States?

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"Am I now ready to go to the healthcare town hall debate with the President, Dad?"

Right before the election I had dinner with a gay friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist.  He told me that he was voting for McCain.

“Why?!” I asked, not hiding contempt in my tone.  He smiled as if he had been confronted with this exact response dozens of times.  “Well, I vote with my checkbook,” was what he managed through his toothy grin.

Republican politics tend to be one of the ways gay men who don’t feel comfortable with who they are escape themselves.  Some people join the military; others join the priesthood; and others become Republicans.  They think it’s the “Daddy Party”, so they join it to separate themselves from the nancyboy Democrats.

As they grow up a little and realize they are voting against their interests, gay Republicans usually have to come around with the “vote for the checkbook” argument.  I had a response:

“Leaving aside the arguments that you are choosing your checkbook over your civil rights; what, exactly, about the last eight years made your checkbook stronger or was in any way exemplary of fiscal restraint and prudence?” I asked.

He had  no answer, but instead looked embarrassed.  As a former Teenage Republican, from a conservative standpoint the George W. Bush years lost the fiscal issue for the Republicans.  Anyone who still says they vote for them for fiscal reasons is apparently still living in 1988.

Herbert is one of my favorite columnists, and the tone of his writings are imbued with a sense of dumbfoundedness.  Back in January he saw the beginnings of the Republican mode of attack against Obama:

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

[....]

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?  Tax cuts. [....]

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

Yesterday, Herbert’s column almost nine months later sounds even more exasperated:

The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. [....]

The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. [....]

But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

We’ve also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don’t want to know. Moreover, we’ve put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. [....]

There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It’s not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It’s our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case.

The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We’ve forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.

The problem is our national discourse, and that the Republicans appear to have crafted Obama and Liberals as enemies, as opposed to reasoned opposition.  It’s a dangerous step, for either side.  Winning political skirmishes to advance your ideology is fulfilling; turning a society against itself in the process is dangerous.

The current political climate is at best creating a country that is unable–and unwilling–to solve its most serious problems.  At worst, it is turning the country against itself, which can have far more violent and disastrous repercussions than the right is willing to admit as they carry guns to public debates.  The moment something big goes wrong with the emotions they are stoking, the current state of Republican politics is going to come back to bury them.

Bob Herbert, you’re not the only one exasperated, confused and concerned.

Possibly related posts

• “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” (0)
• Poll shows Tea Party is about social Darwinism (3)
• Thank you President Obama, Democrats, for healthcare (0)
• The news organizations are failing to inform (1)
• Obama is an ‘enemy of humanity’ says GOP Congressman Trent Franks (3)