Occasionally, I’ll find an op-ed or a column that’s just brilliant. I don’t have anything interesting to say about it, or have any insights to add, it’s just great and I mention it because I think you might like it too.
Today’s must-read recommendation is a column from Michael Tomasky, in which he debunks the “stereotype” that the “GOP is the party of sober competence.”
“[T]here’s another argument about this administration, and about the Republican Party in general, that needs to be made, because this argument can alter presumptions about the two parties that have existed for at least a generation and can change the way the parties are seen well into the future,” Tomasky explains. “And it is this: The Republicans are total incompetents.
“Republicans, at least since the 1980 election, have gotten lots of mileage out of billing themselves as the party of competence. They knew how to deal with the Russkies. They understood a budget. They knew how to crack down on the crooks and hoodlums. They understood the bottom line, and they knew what was right for America. The Democrats, meanwhile, were supposedly more interested in their dainty little social-engineering schemes than in success. Lots of people bought all of this, and of course there was a little bit of truth to it — then. But the labels stuck hard. Democrats still have to take dramatic steps to prove their competence while Republicans are presumed — by the mainstream media, anyway — to possess it until they demonstrate otherwise.
“Well, guess what? They’ve demonstrated otherwise. No one — no one — can name a single front on which today’s Republicans have shown even the simplest competence.”
There’s more to this and it’s all great. Tomasky goes point by point, demonstrating the GOP’s failures in every area of domestic and foreign policy.