Marco Rubio's hilariously repetitive performance at the GOP primary debate on Saturday even had his fellow candidates -- Chris Christie most notable among them -- mocking him, but those candidates would do better to look in the mirror, because as Paul Krugman argued in his column Monday, their entire party is engaged in the same tactic on a grander level.
For example, on Groundhog Day, House Republicans voted for the 63rd time to defund ObamaCare, a purely symbolic gesture which the GOP cannot, for obvious reasons, stop repeating. The reason? The oft-repeated myth that ObamaCare kills jobs -- it doesn't -- which goes hand-in-hand without another Republican canard, the notion that taxing the wealthy has a deleterious effect on economic growth.
Krugman attributed the party's decline into serial repetition to Fox News, writing that in
a direct sense, I suspect that it has a lot to do with Foxification, the way Republican primary voters live in a media bubble into which awkward facts can’t penetrate. But there must be deeper causes behind the creation of that bubble.
Whatever the ultimate reason, however, the point is that while Mr. Rubio did indeed make a fool of himself on Saturday, he wasn’t the only person on that stage spouting canned talking points that are divorced from reality. They all were, even if the other candidates managed to avoid repeating themselves word for word...
Read the rest at the New York Times...
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