Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia delivered the Republicans’ keynote address Wednesday night, and he spent a good portion of it railing against Kerry for voting against the “very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the war on terror.” What Miller didn’t say: Many Republicans voted against those same weapons systems.

“America needs to know the facts,” Miller said, but he failed to mention a few of them. Miller told the delegates that Kerry voted against production of the F-14 and F-15 fighters and the Apache helicopter, but he didn’t say that Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, proposed eliminating both of them, too. Miller criticized Kerry for voting against the B-2 bomber, but he didn’t say that President George H.W. Bush also proposed an end to the B-2 bomber program. In his 1992 State of the Union Address, Bush said he supported such cuts “with confidence” based on the recommendations of his Secretary of Defense: Dick Cheney. With the Cold War over, Bush said, failing to cut defense spending would be “insensible to progress.”

That’s not how Miller described the cuts Wednesday night. He said Kerry’s record on defense spending suggests that he wants to arm U.S. troops with “spitballs.” Miller, who was introduced as the “conscience of the Democratic Party,” didn’t see fit to mention that he and Kerry both voted in 2002 for the largest military spending increase in two decades — a defense bill that Republican Senator John Warner said would “help to ensure that our military has the tools it needs to defend our nation.”

Miller and the Bush campaign plainly know the truth about what he was saying — the Annenberg Public Policy Center and any number of others have called the Republicans on their misleading argument about Kerry’s votes on weapons systems. But adherence to the truth wasn’t Miller’s strong suit Wednesday night.

Miller said that Kerry has made it clear that he would never “use military force without U.N. approval,” and that he would let “Paris decide when America needs defending.” In fact, what Kerry said in his Boston convention speech was this: “I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.”

Miller’s anti-Kerry rant wasn’t the only convention speech in which Republicans misrepresented Kerry’s statements or his Senate record. In his somniferous speech Wednesday night, Cheney mocked Kerry for saying that the United States should fight a “more sensitive war on terror, as though al-Qaida will be impressed by our softer side.” But Kerry has not suggested a show of sensitivity toward al-Qaida; he said that America should fight a “more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.”

With delegates shouting “flip-flop, flip-flop,” Cheney blasted Kerry for supporting the “No Child Left Behind” legislation and then opposing it. In fact, Kerry supports No Child Left Behind but argues that the Bush administration has failed to provide promised funding for it. He mocked Kerry for voting for and then against the $87 billion supplemental funding bill for Iraq, but he didn’t explain that Kerry voted on two different proposals — one that would have paid for the $87 billion by rolling back tax cuts for the rich, and one which simply added the $87 billion to the federal deficit.

Sill, Cheney stayed away from most of the whoppers he tells on the campaign trail. He didn’t repeat the phony charge he made last month in Minnesota — that Kerry has the most liberal lifetime voting record of any current Senator. But Cheney didn’t have to work hard to misrepresent Kerry’s positions and his record; other convention speakers carried that water for him.

Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey told delegates Wednesday evening that John Kerry “can’t win by telling us the truth,” but then she immediately fudged the facts herself. In a claim that has been refuted so often that even Cheney doesn’t make it anymore, Healey told the delegates: “The truth is that John Kerry — not Ted Kennedy — is the most liberal Senator in the United States.”

But that’s not the truth, really. Earlier this year, the National Journal identified Kerry as the senator with the most liberal voting record in 2003 — a year in which Kerry missed so many votes while campaigning that the National Journal didn’t even apply two of its three measures of “liberalness” to him.

When the magazine looked at the more meaningful lifetime voting records of current sitting senators, Kerry wasn’t the most liberal one — and it wasn’t even close. Ten other senators have lifetime liberal scores higher than Kerry’s — and, yes, Ted Kennedy is among them.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney continued the home-state slam Wednesday, claiming that Kerry had voted for “tax hikes 98 times.” The Bush campaign made the same claim in a television ad released last week, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center has already shot it down.

The problem with the “98 times” claim is the Republicans’ fuzzy math. While their campaign calculus is getting better — in March, the President claimed that Kerry “voted over 350 times for higher taxes on the American people” — the Republicans’ calculation repeatedly miscounts and mischaracterizes Kerry’s votes.

Annenberg explains that 43 of the 98 “tax increase” votes were actually votes on budget resolutions that did not, in and of themselves, raise taxes. Moreover, in several instances, the total of 98 includes multiple votes on the same piece of legislation: By the GOP’s math, Kerry’s support for President Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction package as it wound its way through Congress should count as 16 separate votes to raise taxes. Kerry gets dinged six times for a single 1996 budget resolution, seven times for a 1997 budget resolution, and six more times for supporting a proposal to raise the cigarette tax. That proposal was sponsored by Sen. John McCain — a Republican.

Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele also took Kerry to task for sharing views with Republicans. Steele criticized Kerry for proposing a $6 billion cut in intelligence funding “just a year after the first attack on the World Trade Center.” What Steele didn’t say: Three months before Kerry made his proposal, Rep. Porter Goss — Bush’s pick to be the new CIA chief — proposed a much larger cut in intelligence funding. Neither Goss’ proposal nor Kerry’s passed. But as Annenberg has noted, a Republican proposal to cut $1 billion from the intelligence budget passed on a voice vote the same year.

While Republicans have aimed most of their truth-stretching at Kerry, they have also engaged in the occasional embellishment to bolster Bush’s image as a resolute leader. On the convention’s opening night, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called Bush “a leader who is willing to stick with difficult decisions even as public opinion shifts.” On the second night, Schwarzenegger said that Bush is a “leader who doesn’t flinch, doesn’t waver, does not back down.” While it’s true that Bush has stuck stubbornly to some of his failed policies — until this week, he couldn’t bring himself to admit any mistakes in Iraq — just as often he has crumbled when public opinion has turned against his views.

Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, then changed his mind when it was clear the votes were against him. He opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, then supported it. He opposed a congressional investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq, then supported it.

The president who was praised so often this week for his “unflinching” war on terror once said he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive”, then said that he didn’t really care about finding him. The president who never wavers used to say that America will win the war on terror; over the weekend, he said “I don’t think we can ever win it”; over the last week, he’s been explaining that he didn’t really mean what he said when he said it.

The flip-flops don’t fit the image Karl Rove has crafted for Bush, so the convention speakers have simply ignored them. In their place, they’ve told stories suggesting that Bush has shown “courage” by appearing in photo ops — grabbing that megaphone at Ground Zero, eating turkey with the troops in Baghdad — and by standing up to public opinion. Schwarzenegger said: “The President didn’t go into Iraq because the polls told him it was popular. As a matter of fact, the polls said just the opposite.”

But as a matter of fact, that’s not a fact. In a CBS/New York Times poll released on March 6, 2003 — 11 days before Bush gave his final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein — 69 percent of the respondents said they approved of U.S. military action to remove Hussein from power. While the White House surely helped shape public opinion — by misrepresenting intelligence, by incessantly linking Saddam Hussein and 9/11, by predicting that American soldiers would be “greeted as liberators” — the president didn’t buck public opinion when he went to war.

On Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried to make Bush look like a strong leader on domestic issues, saying that he would stand up to the trial lawyers who are driving up the costs of healthcare. Repeating a line used by Bush himself, Frist declared: “Let’s be clear. You can no longer be both pro-patient and pro-trial lawyer.” He said that Kerry has “made his choice” by choosing Edwards as his running mate. But Frist has made his choice, too: in the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Frist endorsed Mel Martinez, a millionaire trial lawyer.

No matter. Frist continued to press his charge, telling the story of a Ft. Lauderdale doctor who he said was forced to give up his medical liability insurance when the costs grew too high. Frist expressed concern that the hospital where the doctor works, Ft. Lauderdale’s Broward General, might be forced to close its emergency room because of all those expensive lawsuits by rich trial lawyers. “That hospital has the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the region,” Frist said. “What if it closes?” But Vicki Martin, a spokesperson for Broward General, told Salon Wednesday that she is unaware of any discussion about closing the hospital’s trauma center. And Frist’s claim that Broward General has “the only Level 1 Trauma Center in the region?” That’s false, too. There are at least two others, and one of them, Hollywood’s Memorial Regional Hospital, is less than 10 miles away.

The Republicans paid tribute to Ronald Reagan Wednesday night, and they’ve talked a lot this week about the lessons he taught them. They’ve surely taken one to heart. It was the late president, after all, who once said: “Facts are stupid things.”

In fact, even though virtually every Republican presidential candidate kissed Trump’s ring, it’s further down the ballot where he has had the biggest financial impact. He gave $5,000 to Connecticut GOP Senate nominee Linda McMahon last year and $30,800 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, which did not return a request for comment.

On the House side, he gave $2,500 to Rep. Ed Royce’s, R-Cal., reelection effort; another $1,000 to Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West, R-Fla.; and $2,000 to Rep. Peter King, R-NY. And while he’s given to Democrats in the past, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, all of Trump’s donations in this year’s election cycle were to Republicans, including Romney ($2,500) and disgraced former New York Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned after being caught looking for sex on Craigslist. (Trump gave $500, which appears to have been returned.)

Trump has been especially involved with West, whose campaign did not return a request for comment. The “Apprentice” star appeared with the congressman at a Tea Party rally in Florida last April, and West even said he was open to being Trump’s vice presidential pick if the real estate mogul somehow won the GOP nomination. West told Newsmax at the time that he hoped Trump was “very serious” about his presidential bid. West also accepted $2,500 from Joseph Farah, the birther editor of World Net Daily, in 2008. (It’s Farah’s only political donation the past three cycles.)

But perhaps no candidate has closer or deeper ties to Trump than McMahon, who also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. McMahon made her money through the WWE professional wrestling league, which her husband founded.

Trump has been involved in the sport for years, which suits his flamboyant and phony image. Wrestlemania IV and V were both held at Trump Plaza, and a video that made the rounds on Twitter yesterday shows Trump tackling Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 23. Trump and two beefy wrestlers hold down and restrain McMahon before shaving his head to wild cheers from the packed arena.

Trump’s ties to Linda McMahon became a campaign issue earlier this year when Democrat Chris Murphy slammed his opponent for taking Trump’s money. “That’s right, the man who led the charge to see President Obama’s birth certificate, report cards and test scores has set his sights on Connecticut’s Senate seat,” Murphy campaign manager Kenny Curran said in a fundraising email to supporters in February. The Connecticut Democratic Party even cut a web ad attacking McMahon that featured Trump.

The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which attempted to expand “Nazi stands for National Socialist” to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the “lie” he’s arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.

So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Williamson’s argument seems to be that Republicans couldn’t have taken advantage of a Democratic split over civil rights by appealing to racist white Southern voters because Republicans were too uniformly pro-civil rights, themselves. (This great big lie he’s debunking is one that Nixon and Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan happily signed on to — they were thrilled when the Democrats fractured the New Deal coalition by eventually embracing civil rights!)

Williamson would, I guess, call it revisionist history, but he has revised all of the history out of it.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

Oh, did they? It’s dubious to argue that the party that nominated Barry Goldwater for president was “far more enlightened” than the one that nominated Kennedy, but Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist, so sure, fine, pretend Nelson Rockefeller cancels out Barry. But the segregationists didn’t all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasn’t until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished.

After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial.

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

What is the funniest part of this: How it basically makes one brief stop in between 1875 and the mid-20th century in its exhaustive history of Democratic racism? Or how Williamson is clearly annoyed at having to even slightly, obliquely credit Harry Truman (Democrat!) for desegregating the armed forces, a thing (Democrat) Harry Truman did? Like, maybe what happened in 1964 was the eventual result of an intraparty battle that was happening in 1948 when Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (and Strom Thurmond, future Republican, threw a big fit about it)?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon Johnson’s role in ensuring its passage, was one major victory in a years-long effort by the party’s liberals to make the Democratic Party the civil rights party, and it worked so well that the racists were effectively no longer welcome. They responded by changing their positions or changing sides. It wasn’t an overnight change, because politics is slow, but it happened: Robert Byrd and even George Wallace changed their positions on black civil rights and apologized. Those who couldn’t adapt, or those for whom bigotry was more genuine belief than political opportunism, left the party. Strom Thurmond became a Republican. Lester Maddox launched a third-party presidential bid against Jimmy Carter and eventually endorsed Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992. Maddox was also a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white supremacist paleoconservative group that once counted Trent Lott, Thurmond and Jesse Helms as members. These guys are the heirs to the conservative white Southern Democrat tradition. I’m not really sure they themselves would consider it a pernicious lie to say as much.

What would have been much, much more entertaining would have been if, instead of writing this piece about “Democrats” and “Republicans,” Williamson had written it about liberals and conservatives. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both used conservative rhetoric to justify their segregationist beliefs — and so did William F. Buckley. Both parties at the time had liberal and conservative wings, and in each of those parties it was the liberal wing that was right on civil rights.

There was really only one American political party with a solid record on civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the American Communist Party. But “in praise of the liberal Northeastern Republicans who stood with the communists on civil rights and who were eventually driven from the party by conservatives like the ones who founded this magazine” would not go over well in the National Review, I imagine.

Williamson goes on to argue that the white South didn’t go Republican because of civil rights, it went Republican because of … the New Deal. So while the change happened too slowly and gradually to be ascribed to racism, it can happily be pinned on a series of popular economic programs that had been enacted 30 years prior to 1964. (Programs so popular that Southern racists and blacks joined together in a political coalition that lasted until liberals began … winning civil rights victories.)

But let’s not also forget to blame hippies and welfare:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party.

In other words, it was literally everything that was going on in the 1960s besides civil rights issues that made white Southerners eventually fully embrace the Republican Party. (And blacks continue to support the Democrats because Democrats lied about what happened in the 1960s and because Johnson promised them free government money forever, apparently.)

I mean it’s obviously true that the shift didn’t happen purely because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it’s just as obviously true that it’s a hilarious and deeply stupid misreading of history to pretend that the Republican Party has always and will always be the champion of civil rights.

[Thanks to, and please also read: Adam Serwer, Jonathan Chait, Mark Schmitt, Clay Risen, and Jonathan Bernstein.]

For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.

So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.

Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.

A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.

So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.

We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.

Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.

The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that’s part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on “demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics.” In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 — the current version is the fourth major iteration.

Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. Both private and public sector policymakers use ACS data to make important decisions. The federal government allocates $450 billion annually according, in part, to information derived from the ACS. Businesses also consider the ACS vital, which explains why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely a fan of government spending, is opposed to the House action.

Even conservative economists are leery: The clearest evidence that the House GOP has gone completely beyond the pale can be seen in a Businessweek article reporting that representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute all declared their support for government data gathering. If you don’t understand what’s going on in the U.S. economy on a granular level, you’re flying blind. This should not be a controversial statement.

Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled — although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal’s editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers.

There’s been no end of media chatter focusing on the importance of the data gathered by the ACS. We’ve also heard how the Constitution specifically enjoins Congress to gather demographic information “in such a manner as they shall by law direct.” And, in fact, the current form of the ACS follows the mandate set forth by a Republican Congress in 2005.

The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too “intrusive” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what’s wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

Which brings us back to the 17th century. It’s no stretch to argue that both representative democracy and the Industrial Revolution flourished in large part through the application of Enlightenment principles. The founders of the United States were very much a product of Enlightenment ideals. Looking for an Enlightenment avatar? Think Ben Franklin. Progress is built on the accumulation of knowledge, and ideological rigidity shouldn’t be able to compete against the truth that derives from a better understanding of our universe. And yet that’s where we are today — watching as one of the two major political parties in our country becomes not just more and more distrustful of science, but also opposed to the very notion of information-gathering — and governs accordingly.

At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.