Real Conservatives on the GOP

From C-SPAN Sept September 30, 2013

Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. Two congressional scholars' both life long Republicans, analyzing the current the current state of affairs .Co-authors of "It's Even Worse Than It Looks-- How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism".

Neither of these men can be called liberal, one is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the other is a a resident scholar at the American enterprise Institute. Both are conservative organizations, one more to the right than the other.

Norman Ornstein -- "The reason we're not getting there... Is because we're not dealing with liberals and conservatives here we are dealing with some radicals who really want, I think, to bring enormous turmoil to the system so that they can achieve their ultimate ends. That's not conservative. It's radical."

From the book, referred to by the host as probably the most quoted section of the book follows:

"...one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The host noted that the Republican Party has been severely critical of this particular passage. Now we know why the Republican Party is so contemptuous of reality and facts. It's because truth hurts.

Mann went on to say, "I have to say, Norman and I have received scores of scores of emails from self identified Republicans who said to us, "thank you." Our party's been taken hostage by an extreme group. We need to return to problem solving, pragmatic policymaking. So Godspeed your efforts!"