Benghazi Madness Is Just Another Example of the Unhinging of the GOP

From my vantage point across the Atlantic -- I've spent most of the last week in Portugal -- American politics looks as wacky as it did last fall when I spent five weeks roaming the cities and towns of Europe. Today in my in-box comes a link to a clear declaration that the Republican Party is unfit for human consumption, that it should be quarantined until the patient can be cured of a disease that has infected most corners of its body politic. (Mixing metaphors doesn't begin to explain the GOP's disjointedness.)

The Week, a magazine I subscribed to when paper print was still a good way to stay abreast of news and views, once was a balanced this-is-what-happened-last-week-and-here's-how-it-was-covered enterprise. Now it has changed into, as far as I can tell, an email-distributed opinion outfit with a highly editorial slant. It now leads with its opinion and analysis.

Which is fine. I don't always agree with its writers, who make no attempt to disguise their stridency, but they do offer opinion from different points on the political landscape. Today's piece, entitled "I'm no Democrat. I'm an anti-Republican," nails exactly what's happening in the GOP and what the best medicine should be. Here's Damon Linker:

Today, my voting record says I'm a Democrat. I voted for Kerry in 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012. I nearly always support Democrats in House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections. But I don't identify closely with or feel deep loyalty to the Democratic Party, its agenda, or its electoral coalition.

You could say that I'm less a Democrat than an anti-Republican. I vote the way I do because I want the GOP to lose, lose badly, and keep losing until it comes to its collective senses, which at this point seems a very long way off indeed.

There are so many reasons why I've come to this position that I almost don't know where to begin. So let's just start with recent headlines — which means the Benghazi Obsession.

The piece is a well-crafted takedown of Republican lunacy. Read it. Also, he doesn't spare Fox News, which he dismantles with this combined graphic from last year and just this month:

Fox News is as whacked as the party it shills for. Both deserve a shellacking and will get it once the full demographic shift reaches its inevitable turning point, which I suspect may occur in 2016. We've got a lot of bad ju-ju to go through until then.