Robert Proctor's List: Conservatism

• That moment should tell every voter in America everything about this current crop of Know-Nothings — no person who would take such a stance is fit to be president of the United States or any developed country.
• What we are witnessing is an extension and acceleration of the G.O.P.’s obscene genuflection to Tea Party tenets: give no ground; take no prisoners; accept no deal.
• candidates at the debate were “essentially pledging allegiance to the Tea Party, instead of resolving the problems of this country.”

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• The candidates appear much smaller than they are because the party’s primary voters and core interest groups insist upon cutting them down to size.
• To win a Republican nomination, a candidate has to move right, recant absolutely any past position that violates the current conservative catechism and never dare to speak the truth that solving our deficit problem will require new revenue — a.k.a. taxes.
• Today’s GOP is committed to one proposition above all others: Reducing the size of the federal government.

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• Do right-wing talk show commentators incite violence against the government?
• The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries.
• As much of the right sees it, the government is planning to incarcerate its enemies (see Beck and Erickson, above), socialize the economy and take away everyone's guns.
• That doesn't make Beck, Erickson, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk responsible for Tucson. It does make them responsible for promoting a paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous land.

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