The Crazies on the right won't let the Party change

The Bubble dwellers live in an alternate universe from the rest of the world. You can't penetrate that Bubble with common sense, intelligence, or truth, all of which are alien to the Bubble Dwellers who get their "news" from the Fox insane asylum and Rush Limbaugh, the real head of the GOP.  Limbaugh speaks to his adoring "dittotheads" every day and they parrot back whatever he tells them. His commands become their definition of "truth."

THE CRAZY BASE WON'T LET THE REPUBLICAN PARTY CHANGE
By Bob Cesca

In the wake of the election, there's no doubt the Republican Party is capable of making some adjustments to rebrand itself. If nothing else, the party has demonstrated its proclivity for sloganeering and marketing and there are plenty of ways it can adjust its messaging. But it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the base simply won't allow the party to change in any meaningful way.

The base is deeply encased within the twisted, alternate-reality looking glass that the GOP has been constructing throughout the last three decades: a realm of anger, racial resentment, distrust of government, hatred of immigrants and violently anti-choice misogynists and demagogues. The party has deliberately incited these tendencies via the conservative entertainment complex, as David Frum called it on Morning Joe -- AM talk radio, Fox News Channel and the like -- and augmented it with the generous contributions of wealthy financiers who bankroll everything from astroturf campaigns to the bulk-purchasing of every book-length screed by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck.

The problem this creates, of course, is that the Republican Party has been consumed by misinformed idiots with no substantial connection to the real world, and the first post-election PPP poll only serves to amplify this conclusion.

First, the good news. Fifty-six percent of Republican voters aren't really interested in seceding from the United States.

Wait. Isn't that kind of low given the seriousness of topic?

The bumper-sticker party of "these colors don't run" -- the party that practically branded the notion of American patriotism during the previous decade -- is only around half-sure that it doesn't want to totally abandon the United States it heretofore claimed to love so much. The other half is split between still making up its mind on secession and totally wanting to secede right away.

As I've written before, we can only regard this as fair-weather patriotism. More than that, it's just dumb. Perhaps there's a big steaming chunk of wishful thinking on the part of the secession supporters, but the process of secession presents a huge obstacle: it's simply impossible.

For a significant demographic cross-section of the party, softening on issues like immigration and reproductive choice is more obscene than the impossible task of disconnecting from the Constitution and forming a separate nation.

But wait. There's more.

The PPP study asked Republican voters why they thought President Obama was reelected. Thanks to the ex-morning-zoo-deejays and television screechers in the conservative entertainment complex, half of all Republicans think the president stole the election. Actually -- correction -- the president didn't directly steal the election. Half of all Republicans told PPP that ACORN stole it for him. 49 percent of Republicans believe ACORN, the evil nonprofit organization, rigged the election for the president somehow.

Good news and bad news on this one.

The good news first: the percentage of Republicans who think ACORN stole the election is down by three percent from 2009 when 52 percent thought ACORN prevented John McCain and Sarah Palin from winning the election.

Here's the bad/hilarious news: ACORN ceased to exist years ago following a conspiracy of videotaped lies by Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe; a scam that was picked up by Republican leadership in Congress where the organization, which didn't break any laws, was stripped of federal funding. After it was too late, the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined that the Breitbart/O'Keefe videos were heavily edited and that no federal funds were misused and no laws were broken. But ACORN was killed by a conspiracy of lies and slander anyway.

And now, years following its wrongful death sentence, ACORN is still being unjustly and inexplicably accused of stealing elections, and it's all because the base is entirely disconnected with facts and reality -- a disconnection that's reinforced in almost every sphere of right-wing influence.

Anyone who thinks the Republicans are capable changing is just as delusional as the secessionists and conspiracy theorists who compose the GOP's base. The far-right entertainment complex is so deeply and inextricably woven into the life-support system of the Republican Party, it's nearly impossible to extract the crazy-cells without killing the host.