Bloodless Coup

+ Fox News is going gangbusters

+ Fringe-right media generally is going gangbusters

- (for the GOP) the noise being made by the fringe right is serving to marginalize the party further among moderates and "independents".

Put another way, the nutball right has always been there. What's different now is that certain corners of the media have figured out how to make an awful lot of money by stoking them up. This is good for the media's profits, not so good for the GOP, which looks truly insane to many average Americans at this point.

Goldberg is a fool. Nuff said.

I like the assumption that FoxNews/Hannity/Beck/Rush/Palin are driving the rump of the Republican party (the really crazy bunch) off the landscape of American politics; this assumption bangs around the web, and is taken moderately seriously (I think) by lots of "deep thinkers" on the web (Atrios, Kos, Armbinder, TPM, Drum, etc.). The idea is, the GOP gets crazier and crazier, and more and more marginalizes itself.

The problem is, this is an assumption, and I'm not sure it is correct. An alternative (but scary) view is that the GOP gets crazier, and the center of American politics moves with it. That's another assumption; I like the first one (GOP goes nuts; goes away) better than the second (GOP goes nuts, country follow), but the forecasted crackup of the GOP does not show signs of happening anytime soon.

Rush et al make more money when the nutters are powerless (and thus riled). It's an interesting point to ponder -- what do the nutter-elites really want?

I think Fred Kaplan hit on something useful when he termed a set of would-be foreign policy opinion makers Fantastists in (his very good) Daydream Believers. To answer jacflash's question, they want a world that in some key ways does not exist in this universe and the media, whether Rush, CNN or whatever, usually declines to point that out.

And as to Baltar's point, isn't there a strong school in the US elections lit that holds that elections are primarily referenda on the incumbent? If so, it's entirely possible that Obama could lose to an opponent, even a crazy one.

I've always maintained that unless the economy turns around significantly, Obama will have a very tough fight in 2012, no matter who the GOP puts up.

I was mostly referring to domestic politics in my rant; I haven't really thought about the issue for foreign policy. In part, I think, foreign policy is harder, since it isn't clear what is a "left/right" issue on many things. India? China? Non-proliferation? I can guess the neo-con position on those, but that isn't the same as a Republican position.

It's not necessarily the Republican postion, but in practice over the last several years ... Kaplan traces lots of it back to Albert Wohlstetter, Scoop Jackson and his acolytes, the Podhoretz/Decter/Abrams family, etc. - so yeah, the neocons

OK, but have the neocons taken over the GOPs foreign policy because they had better lobbying, or better ideas, or was it (my explanation) that the other branches of the GOP (social cons, paleocons, etc.) had no foreign policy, so the neocon position was adopted by default (they were the only sub-group that had a foreign policy platform).

I"m oversimplifying a bit here (other sub-groups of the GOP must have had some FP positions), but not by much. The neocon position, if it is dominant, seems to have made it to the top by default.

I don't think it was a default. I mean it's not like Richard Lugar, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Haass never existed (or Colin Powell for that matter). I think it was the savvy use/building of policy communities both within DC and through party cliques around the country - and of course decisions by Cheney and Bush.

This might make an interesting paper (if someone hasn't already done it); I think the Lugar/Scowcroft/Powell axis were basically cold-war Realists; once the cold war was over, they had no clear ideology (or, more accurately: their ideology failed to tell them what to do in the absence of a competing hegemon). Thus, along come the neocons who push their ideology, and win in the absence of competition with a more focused/clear FP agenda. I'm not convinced I'm right, but I'm not convinced you are, either.