About GOP Crackpots, Rolling Stone Beat Sykes By A Year

AM 620 WTMJ radio talker Charlie Sykes took the lead on the local Right this week by attacking GOP/Tea Party radicals who helped doom the Romney campaign, lose safe Senate seats and, post-election, embraced nullification:

For a couple of days, Sykes has been calling out "crackpots" in the party whose "crazy talk" cost the GOP supposedly safe seats in this election cycle.

It's been interesting to hear Sykes wrestle with his deepest, Tea-sipping red callers, including State Rep. Chris Kapanga, who came on to defend his 'arrest-the-bureaucrats' demand and embrace the kind of nullification thinking - - where the state can overrule federal law - - that was popular in the pre-Civil War South.

In fact, Sykes let fly twice about it all on his blog:

Less Crackpotism, Please

(Speaking of crackpots, there is also some buzz about secession. Seriously? We fought a war over that, which ended badly for the advocates.)

There's a price to be paid for this kind of thing: think Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and Christine O'Donnell. How many senate elections do we have to lose before we realize that?

Fellow conservatives: your moms warned you about this. Just because the other kids want to jump off the cliff, doesn't mean you should too. Even if that means telling a Tea Party group... no.

And: 

A Confederacy Of Dunces

I think we need to nip this outbreak of crackpotism in the bud now: he[Sic] secession talk is both dumb and cowardly. Ditto for "nullification." 

Now I'm not trying to run up Sykes' blog or radio traffic - - he doesn't need any help from me - - and I know full well he's trying to weed out the wackos so the GOP runs better in the next election cycle.

My point is that if you look at this online Rolling Stone piece from 12/7/2011, and printed in the hard copy edition of 12/22/2011 - - 1/5/2012 (and, yes, we do keep these things here at the home office for a long time because now that the kids are gone, how else can we keep up with what music to add to the Walkman these days?) - - Sykes is awfully late to the party, as crackpotism on the Right and its impact on the election was spotted a year ago :  

The GOP's Crackpot Agenda

...If Obama can inspire anything resembling the historic turnout he sparked in 2008, the GOP is in for a beat-down...a recent poll found Latino voters swinging to Obama by nearly three-to-one over both Romney and Perry.

...As long as the GOP insists on catering to the needs of the ultrarich, Republican veterans warn, it risks alienating the working-class conservatives who ushered in the Age of Reagan. "The Republican Party is just screwed up in its head," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "It's behaving politically in a very irrational way, and policywise in a nonsensical manner."

Mike Lofgren, until recently a top Republican staffer on the Senate Budget Committee, has offered an even more dire assessment of "the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs."

This fall, Lofgren announced he was abandoning his own party – unable to stomach what he called "the headlong rush of Republicans to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future." Citing the "broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann," Lofgren summed up the GOP's capitulation to extremism:

 "The crackpot outliers of two decades ago," he concludes, "have become the vital center today."