"Nein, nein, nein."

I simply cannot resist reposting this from Richard Cohen in a Washington Post op-ed piece today. I rarely laugh when reading op-eds, but this wiped me out:


"...Now we have the question of whether Romney, a Mormon, is actually a Christian. (He certainly looks like one.) I mean, who cares? How high should we build a border fence and should it be electrified? And what about Ben Bernanke and the Fed? Fire him, for sure. Close the place down. Right on! Does anyone disagree? Only Herman Cain, to a degree. It’s nearly unanimous. The motion is carried. Let’s move on.


To what? Not to a real discussion of the issues. Obamacare might or might not be a failure (it hasn’t even been fully implemented), but what should replace it? What should be the proper role of the U.S. in the world? What should we do about illegal immigrants? Can private enterprise alone create enough jobs, and what to do with an Everest of foreclosed homes? What would we do without the Fed? If TARP is such a failure, how come many economists think otherwise? Doesn’t anyone disagree about anything?  Not, for sure, Romney.  The old Romney thought for himself. The new one is a conservative apparatchik.


Dissent has been purged by a radically conservative media and like-minded voters in the primary and caucus state. The GOP is in thrall to dogma and ignorance, hermetically sealed against uncertainty, hostile to inquiry and inadvertently mimicking the leftist parties of old when communists, Mensheviks, socialists and other “icks” would beat the brains out of one another over some fine point of Marxist dogma. Is this the way to go?  As Karl Marx, a German, might have said by way of Herman Cain, “Nein, nein, nein.”