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Bob Tells It Like It Is

America's best editorialist, Bob Herbert, speaks the truth when he says of the GOP, "It’s not a party; it’s a cult."

He makes a compelling case:

This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.

It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.

It would be hard to imagine what a worse failure than the Bush Administration would look like. But the right-wing nutjobs who dominate the public presentation of the party (including, especially the House GOP leadership) and the wingnut talkers on TV and the Internet adhere to the Rovian strategy of pathological lying as public relations. What do we end up with?

It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.

Let's hope they go the way that all cults eventually do.