I have a bone to pick with Brian Beutler. He wrote, Trump Is Far from the Only Republican to Let Supporters Spout Crazy. It’s in reference to a Trump event last Thursday where an audience member said, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.” He went on to say that the president was one and that there were “training camps” where “they” want to kill us. Trump didn’t counter him, and instead talked in general terms. Beutler is right that this is a general problem with politics — most especially with Republicans.

The problem I had was that he contrasted it with McCain’s famous moment in the 2008 campaign when he too was confronted with a crazy person saying that then Senator Obama was an Arab. McCain countered her, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about.” Beutler noted, “The only reason anyone remembers the altercation is because we expect Republican politicians to behave the way Trump did.” That’s true. But if the same interaction had taken place on 17 September 2007, McCain would not have answered that way.

That townhall was from 10 October 2008 — less than one month before the election. By that time, it was clear that McCain was going to lose the election. The issue at that point was not winning — it was saving his reputation. He ran a terrible campaign. He was a demagogue. He brought us Sarah Palin. I know that McCain was looking for just such an opportunity. And I’ve long figured that it was largely orchestrated by the campaign. People don’t just happen to find themselves in front of the mic at that point in the general election.

Of course, Beutler is not alone in this. CNN is using the same example. So is ABC News. Even CBC is reporting it that way, Donald Trump, Unlike McCain, Doesn’t Reject Statement From Obama Birther. And I suppose, as a way to blast Trump, this is a good thing. But the two things are totally different. Trump is horrible. He just isn’t much different from John McCain.

What really bugs me is that pretty much every reporter who is willing to lay praise on McCain for that successful bit of political theater is also deeply cynical about politics in a general sense. And so you have to wonder: what is that constant cynicism from the media good for? It clearly doesn’t stop them from totally falling for the most cynical political theater of the 2008 presidential campaign. All that cynicism does is poison the nation into its own dangerous casual cynicism.

But Beutler did make a comparison that is particularly good. When Trump was talking nonsense about vaccines at the Republican debate, neither of the medical doctors on stage were willing to correct him. In fact, the meek and mild PolitiFact rated Carson’s apologia for Trump pants on fire. But this is a point that no one made at CNN or ABC News or even CBC. So as usual, Brian Beutler is an insightful commentator, even if he is wrong to give John McCain any credit for his cynical ploy.

This is why we can’t have nice things: our media and its heroic efforts to make the most extreme claims by conservatives sound reasonable. At Wednesday night’s debate, Carly Fiorina claimed that the recent undercover “sting” videos of Planned Parenthood showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” That is false. But don’t tell that to the fact checkers! They exist for one thing only: to make sure that conservatives and liberals tell exactly the same number of “lies.”

Irin Carmon at MSNBC got to the bottom of the issue. In the video, there is “stock footage of a fetus outside the womb.” There is a video of a fetus outside the womb on a table with its legs moving slightly. There is just one problem: it is not from the sting operation or Planned Parenthood regardless. According to the group who made the video, it is from an abortion. But as Think Progress reported last month, Anti-Planned Parenthood Group Caught Passing Stillbirth Photo Off As Abortion. So who knows?

What about the person saying that they have to keep the fetus alive to harvest its brain? Well, that’s nowhere. There is an interview with a woman who says this happened. So I guess I would conclude that Fiorina is totally wrong, but not a liar. Let’s go through the main points:

1. The video is not from the Planned Parenthood sting.
2. There is a video of a fetus outside the womb, but we don’t know it is from an abortion.
3. There is no footage of anyone talking about keeping a fetus alive so it can be harvested.

So on all issues, Fiorina was wrong. Thus it only makes sense that CNN’s crack team of fact checkers would decide that the claim was, “True, But Misleading.” But okay, people can be wrong. What is so annoying is that they don’t go by their own reasoning. This is how Tom Foreman at CNN put it:

In other words: it’s false, but I’m gonna say it’s true. Similarly, PolitiFact concluded:

Their rating: mostly false.

It’s so aggravating! I have no doubt whatsoever that if a liberal had said something like this, PolitiFact’s rating would have be false, if not “pants on fire.” Now it seems that other fact checkers are doing a better job. But given that the debate was on CNN, the CNN “fact check” is likely to get the most coverage. And second will be PolitiFact.

The whole idea of “fact checkers” is absurd. Reporters should be checking facts all the time. But at least for all of my lifetime, reporters are more interested in just “reporting” what this person said and what that person said. Actually finding out the facts would show “bias.” But it is better to have such fools and no one claiming to check facts if the results are going to be outrageous contradictions like we saw from CNN and PolitiFact.

In The Sun Also Rises, Bill Gorton asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. Mike replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” It is often quoted because it is generally true — not just in finance. Things tend to gradually worsen and then suddenly fall apart. Think of a bad marriage. But it can be anything. Martin Longman recently wrote, Gradual and Sudden Bankruptcy. It follows from a recent interview with Stuart Stevens, where the line was used to describe what many think of as Donald Trump inevitable collapse. But Longman sees it as indicative of the Republican Party as a whole.

His argument is that the GOP has been slipping for a couple of decades now. And it certainly looked like the election of Barack Obama was going to cause the sudden collapse to take place. But it didn’t. Instead, they doubled down and pushed forward with the same ideas. They even made the argument that it wasn’t deregulation that causes the crisis but the fact that there was still too much regulation. But maybe all that stuff that came before wasn’t the gradual part; maybe that was just conservatism. Maybe it was that doubling down that brought on the gradual part:

There are certainly reasons to believe this. They could put together a Trump-Carson ticket that would be a total joke and the party would go down in flames in the general election. Or there are countless other variations. It could cause the party to break up into the “populist” part that is based mostly on racism and the “libertarian” part that is based upon big business getting handouts. It could bring about a revolutionary realignment of the parties. But I’m not so sure.

What I fear is that the Republicans do get control of Washington in the next election. And I really don’t see where the Republicans go from here. If they actually get power, are they really going to do all the radical stuff that they seem to have primed themselves to do? The common wisdom on this is if they do it, they would destroy their party in the long term. But the history of politics over the last several decades seems to indicate that the Republicans wouldn’t pay that big a price for such a thing. Sure, maybe they would lose the next election — very possibly in a big way. But the party would live on and it would be impossible for the Democrats to turn back much of the damage that the Republicans had caused.

I want to believe that Longman is right. The modern Republican Party is an extremely dangerous institution. And it really has backed itself into a corner. It’s come out strongly against all kinds of things that Obama has done that it would have been in favor of if a Republicans had done them. Jonathan Chait has argued that the party will just go back to the George W Bush days of tax cuts and big deficits. But I’m not at all certain the party is still able to do that with the expectations that it has created in its base.

But the bigger issue is just that regardless what the Republican Party does, the country seems incapable of punishing it in a major way. Maybe it isn’t the Republican Party that falls apart gradually and then suddenly. Maybe it is America itself.

About a week and a half ago, someone started spraying graffiti in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco — in the southeast of the city. The graffiti said, “NO MORE CHINESE.” This was done at six locations. I was pleased to see that people had painted over and crossed out the “NO” so the signs read “MORE CHINESE.” That’s a great response.

Last Tuesday, the police arrested John Schenone for the crimes. He’s a 62-year-old man whose photo makes him look like a prototypical angry old white man. On Friday, he pleaded “not guilty,” but was refused released because the acts are being considered a hate crime, and four guns were found at Schenone’s home. The bail was set high enough that it is likely he will stay in jail until his trial.

To people who don’t know the history of the Bay Area, this may seem bizarre. But the truth of the matter is that people of Chinese descent have long been targets of the local community. The Chinese Exclusion Act was largely the result of goings on in California. And after the law was passed, the state passed a number of even more extreme laws that were ultimately found to be unconstitutional. The first drug law in the United States was passed in San Francisco, which outlawed opium dens. The main target was not the drug but the Chinese population.

It reminds me of those old bumper stickers that we used to see up in Oregon, “Welcome to Oregon! Now go home.” With regard to the Chinese, it would have been, “Welcome to America! Do our most backbreaking work. Then go home.” The Chinese of the late 19th century were very much like the Mexicans of today. And we here exactly the same arguments: both cultural and economic. None of them are valid. But it is always so easy to blame all your problems on the weak instead of the strong.

Among most people, it has become totally unacceptable to say racist things about African Americans. That’s a good thing. But I’ve noticed something recently that really bothers me: people seem much more open about saying bigoted things about other minority groups. And I think that’s what’s going on here. Let’s assume that Schenone did this. Without this trend, he still would have hated his Chinese neighbors — but he would have been quiet about it. Instead, he felt that it was acceptable to express that hatred in such a public way. I think that’s why norms against using things like the n-word are important. Not having them normalizes hatred and thus makes public and private racism more common.

Schenone could not afford an attorney, so he was given a public defender. It’s hard for me not to see him as a victim too. That’s not to excuse these crimes. It’s more along the lines of molesters becoming molesters. If we had a society in which people were helped to find meaningful lives, maybe they wouldn’t be so eager to find scapegoats.

Right after the first Republican debate, Reed Richardson tweeted out that there were six important issues that simply weren’t mentioned: income inequality; minimum wage; climate change; voting rights; parental leave; and mass shootings. Last night, he tweeted again, “So, tonight CNN only got to two — minimum wage & climate change — of these six issues ignored by Fox News.” The context is an interesting one. I didn’t watch the first debate. But I watched last night’s debate, and I was shocked at how much they went on about the same things over and over again.

This morning on The Majority Report, Sam Seder mentioned that if a space alien came down to earth and his introduction was just the Republican debate, it would conclude that the world was on fire. The rhetoric was so extreme — and not just about the Middle East. It was extreme about everything. And I’ve got to wonder how effective it is. I understand that the Fox News and Rush Limbaugh fanatics eat it up. But I think people who aren’t that into politics just see it as bizarre. Things aren’t great, but no one is afraid to get in the car and drive to pick up some ice cream at the super market.

Listening to the Republicans made me think that they are a lot like police officers: always and everywhere very afraid. One of their favorite lines is about how the United States is not respected and not feared. This is meant to be an attack on Obama. But we would have to be a pretty fragile country if one president could destroy our standing in the world. Of course, they don’t care one piece of used chewing gum about how American is perceived in the world, they just want something to complain about because they are running against the current president’s party. But this is all so lame.

There’s also the constant contradiction: America is the greatest nation the world has ever know; and it is terrible, fragile, basically the new Soviet Union. I wrote about this earlier this year, What Is This “America” Conservatives Love? Because it certainly isn’t the aspirational America that I love. It isn’t even the “my country, right or wrong” America. Instead, it is some gauzy notion of “America” that never existed and never could exist. It’s an America where they get everything they want and they don’t have to compromise with anyone else.

But what the Republicans decide to talk about does tell us something. The only reason that minimum wage was brought up was to allow Scott Walker and Ben Carson to argue over it. And even there, Carson hedged. It’s not clear how much he might be willing to raise it. But whatever it is, he wants to then tie it to inflation and never discuss it again. Wages traditionally went up at the rate of productivity growth — not inflation. So Carson’s idea is to effectively make the minimum wage irrelevant within a couple of generations.

The broader issue is that Republicans don’t want to talk about economics because they know that the economy isn’t that bad. And most of all: it is great for the rich, which is the only group that the candidates really care about. So of course they are going to avoid the issue. They only talk about the economy in the same gauzy way they talk about “America.” At the same time that Ben Carson seems to think that keeping up with inflation is good enough for the American worker, the rest of them think raising the worker up is all about increasing productivity — even though we’ve seen rising productivity for the last 40 years without wages going up for most people.

Hillary Clinton put out a great ad mocking the the Republican debate on these issues. It’s well worth watching. And it shows just what the Republican Party has to offer to the average American family: nothing.