The 27% Problem.

Half Ehrlichman. Half Rove.

Part One of Three.

Left in complete darkness we will infer patterns and causalities. Left there a little longer, we will invent Gods and angels and a retinue of ritual that must be performed to keep our deities happy.

Left longer still and we’ll start killing each other over the imaginary differences among our make-believe Olympians.

Now none of that is a particularly new or revolutionary observation, but instead a reminder that, in the absence of explanation, people will invent reasons. When those reasons are untestable, we call it faith; when those reasons always reliably follow the channels cut by our prejudices or ignorance, we call it bigotry; when the reasons can be tested, confirmed, retested and reconfirmed, we call it science.

Reasons can run the gamut from “She’s just not that into you” to “Oh, I see; he’s a moron” to “Because light travels at 300,000 kps everywhere”, but they are always there.

They may not be to our liking – a failing heart valve, adultery, alcoholism and bribery, for example, have each been the reason for some of the more unhappy (or at least disquieting) events in my life – but reasons are always there. And from crossword puzzles solutions to some tangly international policy, as maddening or hard to face as the ultimate answer may be, I personally get a beat of satisfaction – almost a physical sense of “ahhhh” deep in my chest -- when the answer finally falls into place.

The darkness does not care either way.

Now consider a few plugs of journalistic chaw plucked out of the Pundit ether (emphasis added):

First, from The Chris Matthews Show

…
Ms. KAY: The other problem for Republicans is, you start criticizing the president too strongly and it can be counterproductive. Because so many people in the country still have--the majority have a reverence for the office of the president, and where as much they don't like...

GREGORY: And 75 percent of conservatives still back him.

Ms. KAY: Still support President Bush.

Ms. TUCKER: Well, yes.

Mr. STENGEL: Are you--as long as you don't criticize the office and you criticize the execution, that's fine.

Ms. KAY: Yeah. It's a fine line to walk, because if you start criticizing Bush too much, you will be seen by some Republicans as criticizing the president.

Mr. STENGEL: There are people defending the presidency. There's almost no one defending Bush.

Ms. TUCKER: Just this week, the Republican governor of Georgia was on the radio saying, `You ought to shut up about the war.' He is part of that base. The Republican presidential candidates' problem is not just the war, their biggest problem is their base. Their base still overwhelmingly supports the war, doesn't want to hear much criticism of the president. And they are--and Rudy Giuliani's problem, of course, is that they're strictly anti-abortion.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

Ms. TUCKER: And they're a group of people who are impervious to the facts, just like George Bush is.
…

Ms. Tucker has just laid her finger directly on one of the two most important stories of our time; that a mass of the American public (27% of the population? 75% of the GOP? A horde perhaps the size of modern Germany?) aren’t simply mistaken or misunderstood or misled by villainous men.

They are unfit citizens. They are Bad Americans.

They are the evil gift that keeps on giving. The residue of centuries of impacted racism, Dominionism, homophobia and assorted other spices, set ablaze by to warm the electoral ambition of everyone from George Wallace to George Bush.

They are pandered to and flattered by Fox teevee and Hate Radio, and they are all gathered conspicuously together under the same political banner.

There is finally no other explanation that will bear the weight of the fact of the short, catastrophic arc of the Bush Administration and the longer, brutal malevolence of the 30 Year Long March of the Wingnut GOP.

The good men have long since fled the Party. The barely adequate men have fled the Party.

Hell, anyone who can swirl a shotglass-full of synapses and not come up with “Commie fem’nazi queers” as the punchline to every joke and the answer to every question has fled the Party.

The honest answer to the question raised by Frank Luntz – “Why do Republicans keep winning if their candidates are so shitty?” – is that the GOP base is morally subhuman at a deep and probably incurable level.

That selling fascism to brownshirts and racism to intractable bigots is like any other kind of narcotics trafficking. Like selling hillbilly heroin to Limbaugh. Users are not necessarily going to score out loud and in public, but they don't exactly need a whole lotta persuasion to get them to buy and mainline the lethal shit the Right is slinging.

Luntz’s “solution” is the most recent GOP Talking Point being handed around the Conservative Pundit glory holes as eagerly as Hillary snuff porn anime: That Liberals need to stop being so “angry”.

When your party is led by outright lunatics and liars, traitors and thieves…

When after thirty years your base can only take nourishment suckling on the poison that oozes from Cheney’s bile sacs, Coulter’s fangs, Hannity’s tongue, O’Reilly’s wheezing pores, Falwell’s ingrown soul…

When your official cult house organs have been spewing raw hatred it the noosphere for thiry years…

...and your advice is that the other side who have finally had it with playing nice with these moral locusts are” too angry”?

It boggles the mind.

But then again, Luntz isn’t stupid; he knows perfectly well that he serves evil. He simply doesn’t care. Selling out his country is a good buck, and as an obedient whore he will form his mouth to say whatever it is his paymasters wish him to say.

However this is the problem:

What do you do when 1/4 of the people in your country are the enemy of your country?

We cannot be a United State when 1/4 of the nation does not believe in Uniting. When they believe only in capitulation and conquest?

When their point-of-view – their superstitious, eliminationist, Hate Radio-barbered point-of-view – is impervious to reason, compassion or mercy,

Because while they may not possess the basic cognitive and empathic functions the Good Lord saw fit to endow flatworms with, they do stomp and scream and vote, and it is high time – long past time – to start speaking of the 27% that props up the GOP as The Problem.

A Problem every bit as destructive as global warming, and that requires every bit as much of a sea-change in attitude and a generational perspective.

End Part One of Three