Political and moral tone-deafness

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Tea Partiers Should Seriously Consider Holding Their Applause
By Karl Frisch | September 27th, 2011

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You know things are bad when you look back on the rancor and race-baiting of 2008 with nostalgia.

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When NBC’s Brian Williams asked Rick Perry if he had ever “struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of [his 234 executions] might have been innocent” the Texan’s response that he had “never struggled with that [at] all” was met by boisterous applause.

Call me crazy, but a self-proclaimed God-fearing Christian should lose sleep over the killing of anyone. The political and moral tone-deafness is compounded when one considers the fact that four people on the Lone Star State’s death row have been exonerated and freed in the past four years alone — a figure that doesn’t include several cases where those executed could very well have been innocent.

With the storm of unflattering public attention that followed the audience’s applause, you’d think the elite base Republicans invited to sit in on these debates would have made a mental note to be on their best behavior.

You’d be wrong to jump to such conclusions. Logical thinking rarely applies with the Republican base. It seems logic, like the media and science, has a liberal bias.

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CNN’s first mistake was letting the Tea Party Express co-sponsor the debate. It was the political equivalent of letting patients run the asylum. And sadly enough, the patients themselves were decidedly pro-patients dying.

If you’ve been brainwashed into thinking NBC and CNN represent the liberal media and that these two outbursts are simply the product of liberal antagonism, you must have missed the debate Fox News and Google co-sponsored.

Since Google was the official co-sponsor it seemed only fitting that the Republican White House hopefuls would be expected to take questions from YouTube.com, a Google property.

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had been certified just two days before the Fox News debate and as luck would have it, a gay marine submitted a video question. You can imagine what that meant. He asked the Republican candidates if they would work to “circumvent” repeal of the decidedly homophobic policy.

The marine’s question was met by a swift chorus of boos from the audience, louder than any debate audience display of idiocy yet. Not a single Republican candidate acknowledged the obvious insult or the marine’s service.

If a Democrat had stood by and said nothing during such a moment, Republicans in power would have called for the guillotine.
The next Republican primary debate is on October 11 in New Hampshire. I’m guessing the audience will enthusiastically cheer the “or die” portion of the Granite State’s official motto.

Thankfully it’s the American audience and not the irrational tea party Republican base that will ultimately have its say on the future of this country.

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