Ed Rollins' Band

"I'll turn you into me.
I'll turn you into me."

If you were just passing through this solar system, had only the sketchiest grasp of American politics, and had just finished this column by Ed Rollins ---

Commentary: Rush Limbaugh GOP debate is idiotic

By Ed Rollins
CNN Contributor

Editor's note: Ed Rollins, who was political director for President Reagan, is a Republican strategist who was national chairman of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential campaign.

(CNN) -- The cold winds of March have obviously affected the intelligence and thought processes of people who need to get their thinking straight.

The idiotic debate raging in Washington this week around Michael Steele, the newly elected chairman of the nearly defunct Republican Party, and Rush Limbaugh, a conservative icon for the past 35 years, is beyond foolish.

The battle to be the "de facto leader" of this party is akin to the question of who wants to steer the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Who represents the party or its values is not relevant when only 26 percent of voters have a positive impression of the party at all and only 7 percent very positive, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey.

The Democratic Party is the reverse, with 49 percent positive. When 60 percent of the country approves of the job President Obama is doing, every Republican leader is going backward.

Republicans are not relevant. We just lost two back-to-back elections (2006 and 2008), and obviously, what we are selling, the voters aren't buying. In the midst of the most severe economic crisis in my lifetime, we have a president who is taking the country on a dramatic sea change. This is what he said he would do and he is doing it. And where are Republicans? Right now we don't have the alternative ideas, a message or, more important, the messenger.

Rush Limbaugh is not the Republican Party. If he wanted to get elected to office, he probably could have won or maybe even have gotten the party chairman job.

But why would he want that job when he makes hundreds of millions of dollars entertaining his daily listeners? Rush is one of the most important conservative voices in the country. He has the largest talk radio audience in the country (15 million weekly listeners) and has been influential in national debate for years. He will continue to be a voice a lot of people will listen to. The great thing about talk radio and cable television is you can listen or watch or turn it off if you don't like it.
…

--- you might very will come away with the impression that Ed is a reasonable guy outlining a grim situation in honest, clear-eyed terms. Striking a careful, sober tone and coming across a little like an epidemiologist describing the ruinous effects of some highly lethal, highly contagious virus that was ravaging the country, or an agricultural inspector backtracking a particularly resilient outbreak of salmonella to its source.

And your impression of Ed might be right, so far as it goes.

But then, what if you found out that the terrible virus in question had been painstakingly synthesized in the lab and unleashed by that very same epidemiologist?

Or if it came out that the agricultural inspector had also been a partner in the peanut farm where the salmonella outbreak had originated and had approved the first hundred shipments of the toxic product because, well, WTF. I mean, Ed’s gotta eat too, right?

Because what Ed doesn’t mention here is that the 26%-ers who still fucking looooove the GOP -- who goose-stepped along with Bush right off the cliff and into infamy, and who spent the last three decades getting their Jebus from Jerry Falwell and their politics from Rush -- didn't just precipitate out of thin air.

Nope.

Instead, our friend Ed Rollins -- that nice, straight-talking fella from the previous few paragraphs -- built 'em.

From a kit.

He and his protégé Lee Atwater

(who eventually shivved him in the back.)

Their bastard child, Karl Rove, helped. Tom DeLay helped. Jesse Helms helped. Phyllis Schlafly helped. Ed's former boss, Richard Nixon, helped. Ed’s close personal friend, Newt Gingrich, helped. Ed’s political hero, Ronald Reagan, helped.

In fact virtually all of the Usual Suspects out in the GOP's New Confederacy Workshoppe spent years and years and worked real, real hard to make sure the pinhead dregs of the segregationist South found a warm and welcoming home in the Party of Lincoln.

Because it helped them win elections. Period. Full stop:

Making nice with the scum of American culture = winning elections.

And so the GOP brain caste spent its entire political allowance recruiting the crazies. Pandered to them. Flattering them. Catering to their every whim. Giving them their own religion. Their own media. Their own think-tanks and their own cohort of men with college degrees, expensive suits and very sincere hair to reassure them that every one of their paranoid, imbecilic ideas was actually noble and patriotic.

That they and they alone speak for America.

That they and they alone are America.

Giving them, in other words, what they had always craved; political respectability and real power. In exchange for which they became the tent pole that propped up the entire Republican party.

Of course, there were a whole lot of folks who tried to warn people like Ed that letting lunatics control their Party was a horrifically stupid idea that might have some sort-term benefits, but would ultimately end very badly. The folks who frantically waived those warning flags were called "Liberals", although I believe the Gingrich-approved Conservative term for us is "those filthy, America-hating Socialist traitors".

And now the day of reckoning has arrived.

Now, Ed, there is no one left inside your GOP Big Tent but the orcs, holding the old place hostage, going reliably apeshit and issuing their fucktard fatwas every time people like you try to put one toe over their clear, bright line of ideological purity and move to Party back from the Know Nothing political graveyard.

They're in there right now...raging-drunk on the power people like you gave them....and blasting away at anything that moves with the political weapons people like you put into their hands.

Because that's what people like you hired them for and trained them to do.