Three from Buzz

"When the kooks take the stage": "All we’ve learned here is something we already knew: This nation never has to worry about suffering from a shortage of kooks, cranks, and ideologues."

Town hall farces as GOP focus groups. P.M. Carpenter Exclusively on BuzzFlash for Friday, August 14. Even after all these years, it's really quite stunning: the squalid hypocrisy, the petty religiosity, the fierce ignorance, the absolute refusal to acknowledge even the most profoundly verifiable wrongs or grant the inexorability of the most profoundly needed improvements -- that's the modern Republican Party for you.

Must Read Paul Krugman on the "Terminator" Burn the House Down Paranoid Knife Attack of the GOP: "So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh. The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream. So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away." Amen! 8/14

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