CAP: The Nonexistent ‘Center’ Folds -"conservatism that doesn’t seem interested in governing at all"

[pampango]

Today, however, while the Democratic Party has a liberal and a not-so-liberal wing, the Republicans have only hard-line and almost-as-hard-line conservatives. What’s more, as the conservative columnist Ross Douthat notes in a piece titled "Going for Bolingbroke,” these elected representatives are governed by a kind of “conservatism that doesn’t seem interested in governing at all.”

Believe it or not, Douthat is actually understating the problem. The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein—a nonpartisan, center-style pundit if ever there were one—recently penned a piece in The Atlantic that evinces fury at what he calls “The Unprecedented, Contemptible GOP Quest to Sabotage Obamacare.” In the article, he notes that it was not just the old-fashioned outliers of the party who were seeking “to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely,” but that “Senate Republicans’ No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, [also] signed on to the blackmail plan.”

A big part of the problem, as the much-discussed Fox News interview with Reza Aslan demonstrates almost perfectly, is that contemporary conservatives simply cannot conceive of knowledge or information that is not consistent with their own ideological preconceptions. It does not matter what independently verified or scholarly evidence or documentation exists: Either you are for them or against them. The fact that Aslan appeared to significantly misrepresent his credentials repeatedly in the now-famous interview adds a rich layer of irony to the whole circus. They could have nailed him, if only they had opened their eyes behind their own biases.

But in a world with no facts and no evidence, there is obviously no center. By perpetuating this insider illusion, the mainstream media continue to misinform the nation according to their own deeply held biases and unspoken prejudices.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2013/08/01/71251/the-nonexistent-center-folds/

To say that "the Republicans have only hard-line and almost-as-hard-line conservatives" is being overly generous. They have a crazy wing and a crazy-enabling wing.