GREAT KRUGMAN COLUMN

When I hear that freaks like Mark Levin had jobs with the Raygun administration, I think that we must never have another GOP president until the "movement conservatives" have been purged from the GOP.

Paul Krugman has more insight into the bone-deep problem of the GOP:

Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s.

And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package. In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs. If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be “loyal Bushies.”