"Closed for repairs"

I could not catch the most recent "Real Time" when it first aired, but I've seen the New Rules segment, in which Bill Maher delivered this well-written observation about the Benghazi pseudoscandal:

In a poll this week, four in ten Republicans said Benghazi is the worst scandal in history. Second worst, Kanye West snatching the mic from Taylor Swift.

If you think Benghazi is worse than slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, Tuskegee, purposefully injecting Guatemalan mental patients with syphilis, WMDs, and the fact that banks today are still foreclosing on mortgages that they don’t own, then your hard on for Obama has lasted for more four hours, and you need to call a doctor.

I think one should read these words in conjunction with this much-discussed interview with Bob Dole:

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole says he doesn't believe he could make it in the modern Republican Party.

"I doubt it," he said in an interview aired on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if his generation of Republican leaders could make it in today's GOP. "Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it, cause he had ideas. We might've made it, but I doubt it."

"They ought to put a sign on the National Committee doors that says 'Closed for repairs,' until New Year's Day next year," he said. "And spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas."

One should not be overly sympathetic to Dole; there was plenty of take-no-prisoners partisanship when he ran the Senate. I can recall the election of 1996, when he tried to use some of the crazier Whitewater theories to his advantage. At the time, he seemed willing enough to play to the nutball wing of his party, even though the grimace on his face made it painfully obvious that he didn't believe a word he was saying.

Dole also criticized Obama for not reaching out more to the Republicans in Congress. Christ, if Obama had reached any further, he'd be guilty of practicing proctology without a license.

Believe it or not, Dole used to represent the party's rightmost sector. That's why Ford chose him as a running mate.

Now, appallingly, Bob Dole is considered a liberal Republican. As this blog notes:

If Dole really does have qualms about an approach to governance he once championed, and he thinks his party has gone too far, he should just quit the party. He should quit and Jon Huntsman should quit and Christie Whitman and Colin Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger and every other Republican who's put off by the party's excesses should quit all at once, and run a full-page ad in The New York Times explaining why. If these gray eminences, respected as they are by the mainstream press, said the party had finally gone too far for them, maybe mainstream journalists would wake the hell up and recognize that both sides aren't equally responsible for the mismanagement of our government.

Notice that none of those individuals have spewed any nonsense about Benghazi. When will they revolt against the paranoid fools who have commandeered their party?