Right Wing Insanity

The Nevada Legislature held a special session this last Monday, December 8th. The minimum cost of this special session was $100,000 per day. The reason for this lavish waste of the taxpayers money? To cut costs. A brief skim of the Nevada Constitution will show that the power to do this rests in the Governor’s hands, but our Governor, “Thumbs” Gibbons (over 800 text messages to his girlfriend while he was cheating on his wife), didn’t want to do the hard job of deciding where to cut cost and to raise revenue. So he called in the legislature to do the dirty work for him.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. During the 2007 session of the legislature, the Mayors of Reno, Sparks and Carson City wanted to have the Legislature ok the formation of a Northern Nevada Water Authority, even though they had full authority to do so on their own. They didn’t want to do so because it was more expedient for the voters to be mad at us than them. It is interesting to note that honesty in politics, real honesty, is as rare as hen’s teeth. The media, the pundits, the politicians and yes, even the voters, will attack honesty whenever it rears its offensive head.

Yesterday an article was printed in the Las Vegas Review Journal entitled “We Need More Right Wing Ideologues”. The author of that article is know for strident criticism of anyone he considers to be less than his idea of pure Republican, even though he is not a member of the party. During the last election, the GOP received a total shellacking and lost any semblance of power they may have had during the last session. RWI’s (right wing ideologues) like as this writer (I will not name him because he has done nothing to deserve such acknowledgement) have done more to hurt the Republican Party than corrupt governors have hurt the Illinois Democrats.

Cheap shot though it is, the statement is true. If the radicals are allowed to take over any organization, logic and civil discourse leave. I have tried to speak intelligently to the writer. Doing so is impossible. An ideologue cannot carry on a conversation, much less a debate without emotion taking over. Compromise and consensus are concepts totally alien to them, and if forced to participate, only result in frustration for all involved.

During the last eight years the Republican Party experienced a nearly fatal combination of Ideologue fanaticism and Democrat-style spending. The mix of the two have given us Democrat supermajorities in both Washington and several states. One would think that an intelligent person would see history in action and learn from it. Apparently that is too much to expect from the writer. A basic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result each time. What does it say about a person when they insist on not only repeating the disastrous action, but doing more of it?