silas216:

Brad DeLong notes that the GOP we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades; I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches.

Early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war.

For this I was labeled “shrill”.

More than that: throughout these past ten-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the GOP’s consistent pursuit of huge unfunded tax cuts, that the occasional desire of Democrats to put evidence in a more favorable light is not equivalent to the constant, raw dishonesty emanating from the right. And pundits in good standing have been expected to make calls for bipartisanship that involve pretending that Republican politicians are actually the kind of statesmen the party used to contain, but no longer does.

So now we see a primary struggle in which the choice is between a series of not-Romneys whose political and policy views are stark raving mad, on one side, and the not-not-Romney who is, maybe, just pretending to share those views. How did that happen?

The answer, as Brad suggests, is that it happened a long time ago. The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades. Rick Santorum isn’t someone out of left field; he’s always been what you see now, and he was a central figure in his Senate days.

All that has happened now is that the mannerisms have finally gotten to the point that the pretense of a reasonable party is no longer sustainable.

But you weren’t supposed to notice until just about now.

I usually refrain from posting entire articles, but this really needed to be said.

And the real bitch of it all is that, regardless of how right people like Krugman were (and are), they’ll still be seen as “shrill”. Because, after all, falling back on tropes beats having to admit you were utterly, wholly, completely wrong all this time about anything that mattered.

And fatuous assholes like Brooks and Friedman will still be sitting in their ivory towers, looking down their noses at the rest of us, laughing all the way to the bank.