Over at Politico, Jonathan Riehl gets it exactly right when he explains why the modern Republican Party is seemingly unable to repudiate the wingnuts in it’s midst:
Can you imagine William F. Buckley countenancing the know-nothing evasion of this current crop of conservatives? Seeking shelter, as they have been, behind rhetorical figments when asked about the president’s citizenship: “There are questions”; “I couldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles”; “I haven’t seen the original documents” and so forth. The fact of the matter is that Republicans are kowtowing to the extreme wing of their party.
Old-guard conservatives would be jettisoning these flim-flam “birther” panderers, just as they jettisoned the Birchers. Buckley and his colleagues had serious policy goals: They sought to defeat communism, not contain it. They sought to roll back the New Deal’s regulations in favor of the free market. They had a serious agenda to pursue. They had no time to dabble with the candy-man, Trilateral Commission conspiracies of the Birchers.
And they found their champions in Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Today, there are no comparable figures on the conservative right. There are no intellectual dynamos like Buckley, no political icons like Goldwater or Reagan.
In short, the problem faced by today’s conservatives is that there is no one of sufficient stature, and no group of serious political operatives, to tell the “birthers” to cut it out — to disown them as they deserve to be disowned. It’s a sad state of affairs. The entire political process suffers as a result
Instead of William F. Buckley, we’ve got Rush Limbuagh. Instead of Barry Goldwater, we’ve got Michelle Bachmann. The GOP won’t repudiate the birthers because they don’t have anyone with the courage to do so.
