Wow! Conservative Douthat BLASTS House repukes comparing them to Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now"

[BumRushDaShow]

19. This part was eye-opening coming from him

It’s clear, right now, that the populists can’t be trusted not to drive their party into a ditch. But neither can Republican leaders just declare war on their own base, as some moderates and liberals would have them do.

Instead, Republicans need to seek a kind of integration, which embraces the positive aspects of the new populism — its hostility to K Street and Wall Street, its relative openness to policy innovation, its desire to speak on behalf of Middle America and the middle class — while tempering its Kurtzian streak with prudence, realism, and savoir-faire.

Think of the way that Barack Obama, in his post-2004 ascent, managed to channel the zeal of the antiwar left without being defined by its paranoid excesses, and you can see a recent model for how this kind of integration might work.

But then imagine an alternate reality in which figures like Joe Lieberman and John Kerry were stuck trying to lead a Democratic Party whose backbenchers were mostly net-roots-funded fans of Michael Moore, and you have a decent analog for where the post-Bush Republicans have ended up.

As much as every rethug may hate what is happening to their lunatic party, not ONE will actually point to a Democrat, let alone someone like Pres. Barack Obama, as a "template" for what to do "right". They will rail and rant and hand-wring but they never give any credit to their "enemy". Ever. It could be that this is just a phenomena of the young right - the Megan McCains, Abbie Huntsmans, and Sippy Cupps of the new RW media.

Additionally the irony of his definition of the "new populism" as being anti-lobby (K Street) and anti-corporation (Wall Street) and somehow linking that to anything within the current GOP, is just ludicrous. Those are the very entities that sustain them and push their anti-people, pro-corporate message. The suggestion being that the Teabaggers are an example of this type of "populism" (yet those very entities created them out of thin air and continue to fund them).

IMHO, it appears he thinks he is defining what he was taught was Raygunism, but since he was born in 1979, just a year before Raygun's disastrous entry into the highest office and eventual reign of terror on our society, he is quite naive about the man and his evil policies, which have been white-washed and distorted.