Short road from managerial incompetence to rapture

Americablog reads today's Washington Post article on the growing confusion within the ranks of the Republican Party and suggests the term "dangerous incompetence." 

I don't disagree, but I'd go much further.  Remember?  The right wing has been successful in the past when it groups concepts together:  Kerry's "flip-flopping" became linked to "cowardice" in Vietnam.   Both of those were based on right wing inventions -- Kerry in reality was no more of a "flip-flopper" than Bush, and he was certainly no "coward."  But the speed with which right wing strategists linked words and concepts kept Democrats on the defensive.

We don't need to lie.   We don't need to invent.  We shouldn't waste our time anymore on potshots, first at Bush-Iraq, then Bush-Katrina, then Bush-NSA.  We do need to work faster and with much greater skill at grouping Administration policies driving all of their failaures.  We have to make a habit of finding the right labels and making them stick. "Incompetence" is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Managerial incompetence is linked to unwillingness to plan -- defiance in the face of reality -- which, in turn, is linked both to arrogance and ideological extremism.  Once you group ideological extremism with managerial incompetence, you have the kind of lethal combination which explains the complete failure of the Iraq invasion. 

But hidden in there is a complete disregard for humanity -- sending boys to die in a fake war, setting up barbaric detention centers, allowing people to drown in New Orleans, organizing an economy around a kind of religious darwinism.   

Lobbyists?  Corruption?  Millions of dollars unaccounted for in Iraq? They're just the icing on the cake.

Most Republicans are uneasy about their recent alliance with religious extremists.  When the incompetence and extremism are linked in their minds to those extremists, it's a short step to separating the Republican Party from evangelicals. 

The evangelicals can go back to the Constitutionalists and the Constitutionalist-Libertarians who not long ago dominated a stretch  of bandwidth in the South and Southwest and probably many other parts of the country.   All we need to do is group the words and concepts which so aptly describe the Republican Party's performance in Congress and the White House during the past five to fifteen years.