These darned wingnuts have had a political lobotomy

Some of this, I think, is linked to a religious faith that rejects an appropriate skepticism. The Republican credo was enunciated by Pawlenty last year when he declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “God’s in charge.” For those who did not quite get this drift, he repeated himself. “God is in charge.” Why he felt compelled to make a public spectacle of what in years past would have been a personal matter is now obvious. Republicans are more religious than Democrats (50 percent of evangelicals are Republicans while only 34 percent are Democrats, according to a Pew poll), but the more telling figure is this one from a different survey: Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to believe Satan is a real spiritual entity. The devil, as you can see, is in the polling details.

The consequence of such views has to be crushing. It is simply impossible for a centrist to capture the Republican presidential nomination – maybe even to be a Republican. (I challenge any of the above to wholeheartedly endorse evolution or global warming.) The party continues on a course that has already driven out the political moderates and pro-choicers that once comprised its intellectual and financial core and, in the staffing of administrations, still somewhat does – Colin Powell, for instance. To call this a brain drain understates the calamity. It’s a political lobotomy.