Super-Vapid Tuesday

The New York Times today (the morning after so-called "Super Tuesday") had an excellent editorial on the depressing Republican primary and the obnoxious positions taken by the candidates. Here are a few excerpts:

"Long before Super Tuesday, the Republican Party had cemented itself on the distant right of American politics, with a primary campaign that has been relentlessly nasty, divisive and vapid.... This country has serious economic problems and profound national security challenges. But the Republican candidates are so deep in the trenches of cultural and religious warfare that they aren’t offering any solutions....There are differences [between Romney and Santorum]. Mr. Santorum is usually more extreme in his statements than Mr. Romney, especially in his intolerance of gay and lesbian Americans and his belief that religion — his religion — should define policy and politics. Mr. Santorum’s remark about wanting to vomit when he reread John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech in 1960 about the separation of church and state is one of the lowest points of modern-day electoral politics....
Mr. Romney has been slightly more temperate. But, in his desperation to prove himself to the ultraright, he has joined in the attacks on same-sex marriage, abortion and even birth control. He has never called Mr. Santorum on his more bigoted rants. Neither politician is offering hard-hit American workers anything beyond long discredited trickle-down economics, more tax cuts for the rich, a weakening of the social safety net and more of the deregulation that nearly crashed the system in 2008."

The editorial goes on to berate the candidates for their mindless and vicious attacks on Obama and for their potentially explosive position on Israel and Iran:

"There is also no space between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum in the way they distort reality to attack Mr. Obama for everything he says, no matter how sensible, and oppose everything he wants, no matter how necessary.... They also have peddled the canard that the president is weak on foreign policy. Mr. Romney on Tuesday called President Obama 'America’s most feckless president since Carter.' Never mind that Mr. Obama ordered the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden and has pummeled Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, all without the Republicans’ noxious dead-or-alive swagger. Now, for the sake of scoring political points, Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who is hanging on only thanks to one backer’s millions, seem determined to push Israel toward a reckless attack on Iran."

The entire editorial should be widely read. One wonders how relatively sane Republicans (are there any left?) have been responding to this despicable primary campaign. If such temperate right-wingers do still exist, perhaps they will demonstrate their sanity at the ballot box in November.