Texas GOP: Grand Old Possum Wagged By It’s Rat-tail Right

Rick Perry is touting a book by radical right nutball Cleon Skousen, who claimed that war hero and President Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist, among other tinfoil hat, paranoid fantasies.  There was a time when mainstream Texas conservatives distanced themselves from the dangerous drivel of the extremists. No longer. The rat-tail right is wagging the Grand Old Possum of a Republican Party.

My father was a moderate Republican who hated John Bircher Society types like Skousen. In fact, growing up in Houston I didn’t come across many defenders of the lunatics. There was a Barry Goldwater supporter across the street who would go wiggy on us from time to time. By and large, though,  the extremists seemed to talk the language of the right-wing dictators my Dad and his peers had just fought heroically to defeat in World War II. They didn’t take kindly to the delusional attacks on the general who led them to victory.

Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News has the story on Skousen:

Skousen was a prolific writer. Before he died, he built a reputation on the right as a leading defender of the John Birch Society and author of more than a dozen books and pamphlets, mostly about the red menace and the influence of communists and billionaire capitalists. He was largely forgotten until [Glenn] Beck began trumpeting the author’s ideas on his top-rated cable TV show.

I am quoted in Slater’s story pointing out that Perry’s strategy appears to include sending coded messages to the nutty right under the assumption that moderate Texans won’t break the code. The problem for the GOP is the extremists have driven the moderates underground. And, what once looked like a convenient alliance has become a dangerous monster.

Moderates never thought the extremists would take over. They were supposed to vote Republican, then disappear. Now they are in power, and they try to ban the teaching of real science in public schools, eliminate historical figures from history texts on political whims, trash the state’s infrastructure, call the teaching of critical thinking “gobbledygook,” and do their best to make our beloved state a global laughingstock.

When the governor of Texas tries to score political points by obstructing justice and blocking an investigation into the state execution of an innocent man, you know the GOP leadership has lost what little was left of any moral courage.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky sounds the alarm over the GOP’s exploitation of the dangerous right wing fringe:

But it is striking to see elected officials staying silent in the face of extremism or even egging it on, as are the eleven Republican cosponsors of a House bill that would require future presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates when they file their statements of candidacy, an obvious sop to the so-called “birther” movement whose adherents claim that Obama is not an American citizen. Instead of elected officials acting as a sort of restraining ego to the activists, everyone here shares one big id.

Skousen is FoxNewsNut Glenn Beck’s hero. To be sure, the apparent — and it’s only an illusion — dominance of Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other dangerous fools in the media helps convince the Perry’s of the world that the Nut Club is the place to be. Here’s what Alexander Zaitchik wrote in Salon about Beck’s love of Skousen:

Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Ignorance is volatile fuel. The strategists backstage with Perry may think that all means are justified by a winning end, but I’ve got to wonder how these otherwise amiable conservatives get to sleep at night given the cynical, dangerous game they are playing. I know for a fact that many GOP moderates are worried. They know what the rat-tail right is doing to Texas. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Lest anyone believe that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry’s primary opponent, is an answer, voters should be reminded that it’s her fear of the right wing nuts that has made Hutchison meek and ineffective. Playing possum in the party of possums, Hutchison is as guilty as Perry.

UPDATE: This afternoon the Atlantic Monthly sent around a video with Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham calls the GOP crazies crazy, and says party leaders have to call them out. If this is something other than a good cop/bad cop routine, it’s a good development. Perry, Hutchison and others need to heed Graham’s advice. Here’s Atlantic Monthly’s interview excerpt video:

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