Yesterday, on CNN's "State of the Union," Georgia's Sen. Saxby Chambliss had this incredibly ignorant thing to say:
"[W]e have this issue called state's rights. And this is one situation where the state of Arizona has decided to take matters into their own hands. And if that's what the people of Arizona want to do, then certainly they have that right."
What, is this 1964, when Arizona-homeboy Barry Goldwater demanded a national regime of (states') rights of association over Constitutionally guaranteed civil rights?
Or maybe 1864, before the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment proscribed "any State" from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and from denying "any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"?
Or perhaps we were thrust back to 424 B.C., when Aristophanes wrote in his comically acerbic play "Knights" -- a new translation of which I was serendipitously reading yesterday morning, just as Sen. Chambliss was trolling along -- that "Politics, these days, is no occupation / for an educated man, a man of character. / Ignorance and total lousiness are better."
It's been 2,400 years and the axiom still holds. Chambliss & Co. knows its market.
A few days ago the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote a searing description of Tea Party activists, who, let's face it, have mind-melded with the somewhat larger Republican rank and file to the point of indistinguishability. Robinson didn't say that, but recent polls on the national pathology of modern Republicanism -- nearly 60 percent of GOPers believe Obama is a Muslim, nearly half believe Obama is an undocumented worker, nearly 4 out of 10 believe Obama is following in Hitler's footsteps, and nearly a fourth believe that Obama may in fact be ... the Antichrist! -- confirm it.
It -- the Tea Party, Republican Party, whatever -- is a sorry collection, wrote Robinson, that "encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, 'constitutionalists' who have not read the Constitution [my italics], Medicare recipients who oppose government-run health care, crazy 'birthers' who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists ... and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be 'outsiders.' "
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