Republicans are doing more than try to win elections next year. In both presidential primaries and Congress, they are undermining the kind of American government that people are literally dying to emulate in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.
The Presidency is in its second round of insult to injury as Sarah Palin follows Donald Trump into making a circus of the selection process, taking a free ride to pump it for personal publicity with no clear intention to take part in it, even as Michele Bachmann lowers the bar with an Iowa no-show, sending instead a video praising Trump.
If by some off-chance she does run, Palin will have made a bad joke out of the most important decision American voters have to make—-choosing who will repair the economy, send young people to war, name Supreme Court justices-—based on wisecracks and hoopla at motorcycle and pep rallies.
In Washington, the GOP is turning the legislative process into the same kind of farce as Mitch McConnell, in the face of rising public opposition to the Ryan Plan, blandly holds Medicare hostage to budget and debt-ceiling votes vital to preserving American credit throughout the world.
MORE.