Joe Scarborough - last of the conservatives??

June 8, 6:57 AMIndependent ExaminerBrian Trent

Previous Next

12 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Independent Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Last of the rational conservatives?

Regular readers here will know how I've been documenting the civil war between classic conservatives and the neoconservative shock troops within the Republican Party.  Empowered partly by de facto leaders like Rush Limbaugh and yet also by a tide of irrational sock puppets in the blogosphere, political cannibalism and extremism has been the daily result.

All of a sudden, here is Joe Scarborough talking about conservatives, liberals, American culture... and making an astonishing amount of sense.

Scarborough didn't mince words and also didn't flock to partisan corners -- a truly astonishing feat for which I predict instant Internet evisceration. Yet his soon-to-be-burned-in-digital-effigy status won't change the fact that he's right.

Said Scarborough, who is promoting his book The Last Best Hope:

"The conservative movement has gone radically off course over the past 20 years... the rhetoric has been anything but conservative."

Gee, I wonder if he's referring to the way the party of fiscal responsibility and small government became hijacked by evangelical militants and hypocrites who love both big spending and big government as long as they're the ones who are doing it?

Later, Scarborough compares Rush to Stephen Colbert, pointing out that Rush is just an entertainer (albeit one who has become the standard bearer for intellectual dishonesty and fanatical irrationality.) And then there's this, about the state of media which simply empowers one's own view and never encourages someone to be a freethinker:

"A conservative can wake up in the morning and never have his or her views challenged. And the same is true for liberals. It's just stunning to me how difficult it is to have a political conversation with adults. It's very disturbing to me as someone fired upon by the left and right pretty regularly... You roll your eyes, but after a while, you just sit there and wonder: Where is the rational middle?"

Hate to tell you Joe, but the rational middle has been publicly condemned by outspoken GOP spokespeople, who came to the astonishing conclusion that their two election defeats owed to them not being conservative enough!  America's zeitgeist is one of extremism where people shout soundbytes without giving evidence or documentation, toss around empty platitutdes that they are programmed to say, and think they are somehow making an argument.  It's a culture where both the left's 9-11 Truthers and the insanely rabid anti-Obama crowd are united in their type of adolescent whining -- the former thinking a few Machiavellian documentaries are the equivalent of a reasoned argument and the latter thinking absurd statements like "Obama is a Muslim" is an argument of any kind.

And it ain't gonna change any time soon. The rational middle has been exorcized from the media, the blogosphere, and especially Joe's grand old party.