Quote of the Day: Lindsey Graham on conservatism and the GOP

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Every once in a while, the somewhat eccentric Republican senator from South Carolina says something that makes a lot of sense. Like this:

To those people who are pursuing purity, you'll become a club not a party. Those people who are trying to embrace conservatism in a thoughtful way that fits the region and the state and the district are going to do well. Conservativism is an asset. Blind ideology is not.

Graham was reacting in part to NY-23 and conservative efforts to control and purify the Republican Party, a process that is well underway.

I would like to remind the senator, though, that it was his good buddy McCain who put Sarah Palin on the ticket last year, giving her, and everything she stands for, both personally and politically, a national platform and catapulting her to stardom in the GOP.

There are some sensible Republicans left, and Graham is relatively sensible, an occasional voice of reason in the insanitarium (whatever his many faults), but their numbers are dwindling.

The Republican Party has become the party of the far right, well outside the mainstream of American society. It's the party of Limbaugh and Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly, Coulter and Malkin, Palin and the teabaggers, the birthers and the rest. Even the Republican establishment is on the right, or playing to the right, as we saw last year despite McCain's victory, a victory many conservatives worked hard to prevent, and that we have seen in full force since Obama's inauguration.

This is what Graham's party has become, and Graham himself is hardly blameless. And while he may now be fighting to take back his party from the blind ideologists of the far right, it is more than likely that there will be many more Doug Hoffman's in the years to come.