After a weekend filled with football, politics, some REAL winter weather in our Northern locations, and little bit of fried fair food for our South Florida staff [They have regional fairs in winter in South Florida; who knew?], we still have yet to process everything that happened over the last two days.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has announced she'll resign her Arizona House seat sometime this week to focus on her recovery, and Arizona's extremist Republican Governor Jan Brewer is already preparing to set the special election for Giffords' seat. Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died of cancer over the weekend - a fate we wish on nobody, no matter what they did or did not do in life. The NFL playoffs also finished up over the weekend, with the New England Patriots and the New York Giants set to play a rematch in this year's Super Bowl.
The biggest news over the weekend - or at least the story that received the most major media coverage - was the South Carolina GOP Primary contest. In a win that didn't really surprise us, noted hypocrite, adulterer, and former U.S. House Speaker from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, nominally defeated former Masssachusetts governor, Willard "Mitt" Romney, along with Rep. Ron Paul and former Pennsylvania Rep. Rick Santorum.
The truth is, the real winner this weekend may once again have been President Obama.
In extensive exit polling, it became starkly obvious that the kinds of voters who backed Newt Gingrich on Saturday were exactly the kind of voters the right-wing ideologues and media talking heads have been increasingly stoking for most of the last twenty years. We could have guessed their makeup, though the data confirms it: Older, angry, less educated extremists, who are also so-called evangelicals, who are scared about the economy - and most importantly, who want to beat President Obama in this election at ALL costs. That includes making the economy temporarily worse, and even increasing the debt.
It should be no surprise after looking at those exit polls, that those who claim to be conservative yet are hypocritical about their own beliefs, would push so heavily for the nomination of a man who is also a hypocrite and an extremist. That Republicans in MANY other areas of the country - including the Midwest - do not generally share South Carolinians' blind hatred of President Obama quite obviously meant nothing to the Republican primary voters there.
What the blindly ignorant in South Carolina don't seem to understand is that - no matter how angry they are - the fact is, Newt Gingrich will not likely be the GOP nominee. As journalist Josh Marshall pointed out over the weekend, Gingrich's unfavorables - the number of people who dislike him, for any reason - are around 60%. Nominating Gingrich would not only drive away moderates and independents - where much of the election could be won. As multiple Republican party members and supporters also pointed out over the weekend, Gingrich is so divisive that if he were the nominee, the GOP stands a significant chance of losing support down the entire rest of the ballot. That could cost Republicans the House, and chances at the Senate and the Presidency, as moderate, sane Republicans would also likely abandon the party.
That kind of logic doesn't seem to matter to the Tea Party extremists currently in control of the Republican Party, however. After wildly swinging at the President over tax cuts and the Keystone pipeline in December - and beating themselves silly in the process - the GOP extremists in Congress look to be trying another attempt at the same action. Even though they've just returned to DC, they're already threatening to hold the country hostage unless the President ties immediate approval of the Keystone pipeline to an extension of middle class tax cuts.
The President is on firm ground; the deadline on Keystone that the GOP wanted in December was a phony made-up time limit. The State department and the state of Nebraska have both said it would take about a year to gain environmental and planning approval for a new path for the pipeline. No amount of foot stomping, huffing in Congress, or bloviating in the media will change those facts, any more than the anger of the extremist Republicans will make Newt the GOP's eventual nominee.
There's a reason politics at this level is sometimes called "pro ball." The amateurs in the Republican Party need to learn when to put down their makeshift bats, before they hurt themselves any worse then they already have.
