Quote Of The Week

"Something has happened over the last 15 years in the American conservative psyche that most journalists and centrist political observers don’t want to admit. Conservatives are locked in an increasingly hostile defensive crouch against reality and demographic trends. Supply-side economics, once unquestioned in its Reagan ascendancy, has been shown to be a failure on multiple levels. President George W. Bush’s signature war in Iraq turned out to be a bungled disaster. Secularism is on the rise, gays can legally get married, and America is fast becoming a minority-majority nation. Climate change and wealth inequality are the two most obvious public policy problems, neither of which has even the pretense of a credible conservative solution. This, combined with the election of the first African-American president, has had a debilitating effect on the conservative psyche, which now sees itself under assault from all directions.

"Conservatives have responded by creating their own alternative reality in which rejection of basic facts and decency in the service of ideology is a badge of merit and tribal loyalty. That has created an environment in which the most popular voices tend to be the most aggressive and outlandish."

- David Atkins at Washington Monthly, disagreeing with some pundits who say that the current clusterfuck in the GOP primary process is the media's fault. 

Atkins blames the GOP base, and he is mostly right on that score. Members of the American Media, however, do bear some responsibility for this mess because they allowed the GOP to go full Bircher without any real reporting on the phenomenon.

As I have stated before, the radicalization of the Republican Party is easily the most under-reported story in the last several years, and the emergence of Donald Trump and Ben Carson as viable candidates for the GOP nomination resulted -- at least in part -- from this under-reporting.