Town hall farces as GOP focus groups

It's rare I find something complimentary to say about Arlen "Tricky Dick" Specter, but I'm compelled to admit that his many accumulated years of Washington ho-hum-ness really paid off for him this week in terms of best management yet of a town hall circus.

Other pols are snapping back at the attending clowns, trying to correct or lecture or -- and here's the most pathetic reaction of all -- educate the rhetorical ruffians and civic scofflaws. But not Arlen. No, Arlen mostly just gazed and smiled and patted them on their dense heads and sent them on their agitated way, like a gentle and tolerant daycare supervisor. His deft handling of the incorrigible nincompoops was, in its own little way, a thing of prodigious beauty.

The press has not failed to notice that Specter's performance probably helped him politically. Wrote Chris Cillizza, of the Washington Post's "The Fix": "Close observers of Pennsylvania politics agreed that the showdown in Lebanon marked a turning point in what to date has been a rocky period for Specter." But of much keener import, one hopes, was the turning point of disgust for those spectators throughout the Republic watching the showdown from their living rooms.

These near-riotous town hall events so doggedly covered by the national media are of course useless, if not counterproductive, when it comes to public enlightenment about the various health-care bills in Congress. But at least the squalid character and inventive ignorance of reform's stolid opponents do indeed come shimmering through, opponents who Sen. Specter, in a post-town hall interview with CBS' "The Early Show," asserted, with a high level of confidence gained through personal experience, were not "representative" of the country at large.

In other words, they're the cranks and crackpots and malcontents of that shrinking GOP base from which he so wisely fled in pre-primary panic and haste. And watching them is quite instructive; it's like observing a focus group of everyday Republicans at malicious play.

Naturally, when feeling especially malicious, Republicans invoke the Almighty. As did that one gentleman, shaking with righteous rage, just prior to his less than dignified exit from the public spotlight: "One day," he snarled at Arlen, "God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill."

Well, as an aside I hope for that gentleman's sake He doesn't hold grudges against presumptuous blasphemers. But why is it that right-wing godliness always -- always -- comes across as not merely demented, but hatefully demonic?

Also within the focus group, described by the NY Times as "almost entirely white and irritable," was a 35-year-old white and irritable woman with the vaporous worry that "This" -- meaning this, that, and everything humanitarian or socioeconomically ameliorative -- "is about the dismantling of this country." And then came the hysterical though predictable lulu, straight from Joe McCarthy Central: "We don't want this country to turn into Russia" -- which, as the Times further noted, "[drew] one of the most prolonged rounds of applause." You don't say. Some far-right chestnuts just never rot.

Lawrence O'Donnell, sitting in for Chris Matthews, of "Hardball," gently, very gently, interviewed this young lass the following day, and the Q&A proceeded much as one might have guessed. When did she become interested and active in politics? asked O'Donnell. Oh, about the time Obama came into office, she answered. Gee, what about the Bush years? Any interest then? Not really. Two wars -- at least one of which, implied O'Donnell, got a whole lot of folks ginned up over politics -- no interest or agitation then? Nope.

Of course not. Republican George W. Bush could rack up unnecessary wars and massive national debt and pry without warrants into our communications and torture suspects and in general "dismantle ... this country" with abandon, and nary a peep from the patriotic right.

Yet, to further quote the Times, in "interviews with many of those who showed up" for Specter's town hall session, the protesters "made it clear" that "the Obama administration's plans for a new health care system were just another example of a federal government that had ... gone too far."

Even after all these years, it's really quite stunning: the squalid hypocrisy, the petty religiosity, the fierce ignorance, the absolute refusal to acknowledge even the most profoundly verifiable wrongs or grant the inexorability of the most profoundly needed improvements -- that's the modern Republican Party for you.

Those within in it capable of self-examination and philosophical reflection have been escaping, hence the party has been concentrically shrinking, just a little more, each and every day. What will really fascinate, however, will be to see, after another month of these televised focus groups and ultraconservative Rorschach tests, whether more Republicans bail, or disgruntled independents join.