By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner;
MOBILE, Ala. — Are Republicans or conservatives these days even capable of smiling?
President Trump and his wingman Steve Bannon are angry people, inventing enemies from thin air just to have someone against whom to fulminate, picking fights for the sake of fighting, spewing bile for the thrill of seeing it splatter.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s lips are permanently pursed. Even his allies say ice water flows in his veins. He hires political hit men whose modus operandi is the vicious attack ad, but whose judgment and feel for political terrain matches that of Gen. George A. Custer.
Leading evangelical leaders, along with prominent radio and TV hosts, push paranoid theories about an “establishment” supposedly more powerful and insidious than the Bible’s Legion, perhaps in league with Keyser Söze as well. Caucuses of conservative House members, brows always furrowed, nitpick every piece of legislation for minute ideological transgressions.
And outside groups paying huge salaries to their executives vie to see whose fund-raising solicitations can sound the shrillest warnings against liberal pinko establishment RINO swamp creatures.
Everywhere one looks on the political Right, the stocks-in-trade are bitterness, frustration, anger, and paranoia, sometimes aimed at the Left but usually aimed with greater vituperation at other right-of-center factions. The sewer of a campaign we just endured here in Alabama was a perfect example, with Republican nominee Roy Moore sending out e-fundraisers associating McConnell by name with “the forces of evil” who “hate our Christian conservative values… [and] hiss and howl at the mere mention of God, morality and obedience to the Constitution.”…
[later in the column:]
…. Didn’t anybody learn anything from Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp? Or even from losing in 2008 to Barack Obama’s “hope and change”?
Doesn’t anybody know hope is more attractive than fear? Honey better than vinegar? Laughter more contagious than angry yells?….
[The full column is at this link.]