Let's pretend, like the NY Times, that the Republican leadership's opposition to the New Start treaty is in some way substantive. Let's Jedi-mind-trick ourselves into this elaborate deceit, since stripping the pretense might hurl them forever inescapably into a pouty, binky-deprived tantrum of disagreeable reality. In fact, let's call their sensitive prepubescence what it isn't, "skepticism":
"The Senate moved closer on Monday to approving a new arms control treaty with Russia over the opposition of Republican leaders," writes the Times in its lede, "as lawmakers worked on a side deal to assure skeptics that the arms pact would not inhibit American plans to build missile defense systems."
There are of course no GOP skeptics, certainly not McConnell, not Kyl, not McCain. Had this precise treaty been up for Senate ratification four years ago, they would have hailed it as a Bushian triumph of Talleyrandian proportions; Reagan vindicated, Metternich invoked -- and Senate Democrats, en masse, and like adults, would have peeplessly ratified the necessary thing.
Yet the hardcore-base-pandering nakedness of the GOP leadership's breath-holding resistance to Start screams for no further clarity when one ponders this simple juxtaposition: on the pro-treaty side, there are former GOP Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as George H.W. Bush's former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft; on the other, anti-treaty side, there are -- all alone -- the ... tea party types.
Yesterday, for example, TeaParty.org vomited this "news," from NewsMax, into my inbox, under the contemptibly laughable headline, "Lame Ducks to Disarm America?":
"Some Senate Republicans appear ready to cave in to the strong-arm tactics the Obama administration and Sen. Harry Reid are using in their effort to ram through a lame-duck Congress one of the most sweeping nuclear treaties the United States has ever signed, a treaty that has many problems that could jeopardize America's national security....
"Perhaps the most serious and immediate flaw is that the treaty ignores the vast imbalance between U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear forces."
Oh dear. These crackerjack foreign-policy adepts seem to have overlooked something of rather critical relevance. "START" stands for "STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty." That would be a treaty that treats strategic arms. Not tactical weaponry, the strategic stuff. If you want a TART, boys, that's fine, but this is a START, as all Russian-American nuclear weaponry treaties have been. Got it?
The tea party-gram then proceeded to the vastly conspiratorial: "The greatest reason to suspect the true motivations behind the treaty is the inexplicable, headlong rush to ratify it."
And there you have it. A suitably implied, paranoia-gratifying, McCarthyite-inspired explanation of the darkly "inexplicable": domestic wickedness, burrowed evil, Democratic betrayal, presidential treason, all in the monstrous service of "Soviet" hegemony.
This brand of wingnutted delusion was once modestly distributed in plain brown wrappings in the U.S. mails only at the request of neurotic, palsied partisans. Now it's blasted via email to every at-risk paranoid with a voter-registration receipt -- who has become the unforgiving master of Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, and John McCain.