Sunday, January 11, 2009

Jeb Bush, apparently not much of a reader...

And he's supposed to be the "smart" son.

In all seriousness though Yglesias makes a good point,

...and many people don’t know about the early days of the conservative movement in which they were every bit as crazy as they are today, but it wasn’t considered fashionable to pretend they weren’t crazy.

It's certainly eye-opening to read the history of the early days of the Cold War, the Korean War and the seeds of the modern GOP and realize just how crazy those roots are. Joe McCarthy, General MacArthur and his acolytes, a young California Congressman named Richard M. Nixon - these people were rabid right-wingers, it was not in any way a moderate movement. Liberals today would do themselves well to brush up this history as the Obama administration dawns. Pay particular attention to the ways that the right demonized President Truman and his administration. You can draw a straight line from George W. Bush's dangerously corrupt and extreme GOP to Nixon's earliest days in Congress and Joe McCarthy. It's the same rigid ideology and the same vicious tactics and what's old will be new again in 2009.

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