Heritage Foundation, a Harvard conservative, and the conservative crackup

{mosads}Regarding the immigration fiasco surrounding the Heritage Foundation: As the civil war within the GOP over immigration intensifies, the Heritage Foundation should withdraw its discredited “study,” written with the help of a gentleman who once offered ignorant and bigoted theories insulting Hispanics, that falsely alleged that the cost of immigration reform would rise above $6 trillion.

The bogus Heritage report is one more example of the conservative crackup, the tendency of the right to rely on delusion and denial that is embarrassing even to many Republicans.

Heritage should just withdraw the report, throw it away and try again. There is more. Now comes professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard, another darling of the right and another example of the conservative crackup, who spent his week apologizing for a bigoted smear of gays and economically ignorant comments about John Maynard Keynes in which he falsely suggested that Keynes did not care about future generations because he was gay and childless.

Huh? I guess conservative “thinkers” cannot rebut Keynes by citing the success of their conservative economics as imposed on America by Herbert Hoover or George W. Bush, and they cannot rebut Keynes by citing the economic recoveries brought by more enlightened policies of FDR and Barack Obama, so they (again) play the gay card and (again) are forced to apologize.

True conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Edmund Burke must be mourning in heaven the collapse of modern conservative thought.

There is more. Recently Dr. Ben Carson, another intellectual darling of the right, also insulted gays and proceeded to insult the spirit of a National Prayer Breakfast by using a nonpartisan moment of shared faith to insult a president of the United States who was present to pray.

What can we say of champions like this, who make Donald Trump look like a statesman? What should we make of the latest Dick Morris epistle, predicting (yet again) the demise of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?

Speaking of conservative crackup, the Morris piece was a smash hit on the right, as was his famous 2012 piece predicting Obama would be smashed, hours before Mitt Romney was smashed by Obama.

We are witnessing indeed a conservative crackup in which global warming is denied; gay economists cannot care about the future; weird theories are put forth by those who seem to believe that Hispanics are inferior; prayer breakfasts are interrupted by Republican insults of a president who prays while he prays; taxpayers are asked to subsidize House Republicans in their second year of trying to exploit the death of Americans, thinking incorrectly they will wound the most popular male or female political leaders in America.

And of course, all of this is accompanied by the “Romney will win big” theoreticians of politics predicting even greater GOP victories ahead. As Ronald Reagan might say: There they go again.