The Brittle Hum of the Republic

From Ed Kilgore at Democratic Strategist on the on-going contest for RNC chair:

UDATE (the last, I promise!): One of the issues about Monday’s RNC candidate debate that went largely unnoticed was that a Republican Party supposedly determined to turn the page on the Bush-Delay Era allowed the very symbol of some of the worst aspects of that era, Grover Norquist, to call and moderate the debate. Ah, but I missed one dissent: from the conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, who did a post entitled “The GOP’s Grover Norquist Problem and the RNC Debate.” Could it be that Malkin would note the irony of the very father of the K Street Strategy, and the principal enthusiast for the deficit-celebrating Starve the Beast fiscal philosophy, presiding over deliberations of this supposedly cleancut, corporate-bailout-opposing, and fiscally righteous party?

Nope. Malkin’s complaints was this:

“Some of us have not forgotten how Norquist made common cause with the left-wing zealots at People for the American Way in a forum bashing the Patriot Act — and how he forged even more dangerous alliances in the name of Muslim GOP outreach.”In the current atmosphere, Grover Norquist’s sin is that he’s not conservative enough. Gaze in awe.

http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/

update: in an earlier post, Kilgore observes this head-shaking phenomenon that I’ve written about previously:

 But the widespread, almost universal conservative search for anything, everything, other than ideology as the source of the GOP’s demographic problems could well be a blind spot that keeps them wandering in the wilderness, endlessly looking for more attractive ways to package the same product. It would be nice to see a few more conservatives consider that possibility.