What Perry's Brain Freeze Really Tells Us About The GOP Mentality

OK, I admit that I've watched Rick Perry's screw-up in the debate over and over again. It was hard to watch the first time, but it got more hilarious with repeated viewings.

I recently told a friend that the reason Perry forgot the Department of Energy when he said he'd get rid of three agencies of government -- but could not remember the third one -- was because every GOP presidential candidate is competing with each other to demonstrate who hates government the most; and in Perry's zeal to out-hate the rest of the field, he jumped right in without really thinking about what he was going to say. It is this thoughtless approach to the issue of governing, I argued, that pretty much defines the GOP these days.

E.J. Dionne takes this basic idea and runs with it:

* * * Would Perry end all federal aid to education? Would he do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that, among other things, tracks hurricanes? Energy was the department he forgot. Would he scrap the department’s 17 national labs, including such world-class facilities as Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or — there’s that primary coming up — Aiken, S.C.?

I’m not accusing Perry of wanting to do any of these things because I don’t believe he has given them a moment of thought. And that’s the problem for conservatives. Their movement has been overtaken by a quite literally mindless opposition to government. Perry, correctly, thought he had a winning sound bite, had he managed to blurt it out, because if you just say you want to scrap government departments (and three is a nice, round number), many conservatives will cheer without asking questions.

This is a long way from the conservatism I used to respect. Although I often disagreed with conservatives, I admired their prudence, their affection for tradition and their understanding that the intricate bonds of community are established with great difficulty over time and not easy to reweave once they are torn asunder. At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism. * * *

Fucking-A.