U.S. Republican presidential candidate and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann speaks at a campaign in Iowa. Photo: Reuters.

The United States is in grave danger from domestic enemies:  Infiltrators from the Muslim Brotherhood have wormed their way into sensitive government positions, Communists wield influence in the House of Representatives, and President Barack Obama hates America and is trying to dismantle, brick by brick, the American Dream.

The first two assertions – Muslim infiltrators and Communists in Congress – come from Republican members of Congress. The third comes from the host of the radio talk show with the biggest audience in the United States. All three merit pondering about the current state of the Republican Party, a mainstay of American democracy for more than 150 years.

A brief look at the details of the claims first. In June, Michele Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a radio interview that “it appears there has been deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood.” In letters that came to light in mid-July, she asked the inspectors general of four government departments to launch inquiries into the depth of Muslim penetration.

Bachmann’s letter to the Department of State pointed to Huma Abedin, a top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as grounds for “serious security concerns.” The letter, co-signed by four other Republican lawmakers, quoted an anti-Muslim organization as saying Abedin had family members with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

That claim prompted angry rebukes from the man who ran her unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, Ed Rollins, and from Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2008. Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist, combined criticism of Bachmann’s “far-fetched” charges with a warning about the future of the party: “The Republican Party… is going to become irrelevant if we become the party of intolerance and hate.”

Bachmann’s root-out-the-Muslims campaign came just two months after Allan West, a Florida Republican, told a town hall meeting that “I believe there are about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party (in Congress) that are members of the Communist Party.” Republican leaders let that statement pass without comment.

For two of the country’s most eminent Congressional historians, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, West’s claim provided evidence that the Republican Party has gone astray. In an op-ed article in April, the two noted the lack of condemnation from major party figures. What was remarkable about the case, they said, “is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.”

For other extreme views, let’s turn to talk show host Rush Limbaugh on July 16:  ”I think it can now be said, without equivocation – without equivocation – that this man hates his country. He is trying – Barack Obama is trying – to dismantle, brick by brick, the American dream.” Why? “He was indoctrinated as a child. His father was a communist. His mother was a leftist.”

FROM LUNATIC FRINGE TO MAINSTREAM

Limbaugh has an average weekly audience of around 15 million, more than any other radio talk show and no matter how over-the-top his attacks on Obama and his team may be, they very rarely draw comment from Republican politicians who fear doing so might cost them votes.

Particularly in an election year, it’s not unusual for members of Congress or commentators to make outrageous remarks about the political opposition. Democrats were harshly critical of President George W. Bush. But there is no exact Democratic equivalent of the likes of West, Bachmann, Limbaugh and others who vent ideas that were once restricted to the lunatic fringe and are now part of the Republican mainstream.

To help understand how U.S. politics arrived at this stage, and the dysfunction that goes with it, a new book by Mann and Ornstein entitled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks is recommended reading. The two work for think tanks on different places on the political map – Mann for the centrist Brookings Institution and Ornstein for the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their conclusion: “The… core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

“More loyal to party than to country,” the Republicans behave like an adversarial party in a parliamentary democracy. In America’s separation-of-powers government, this is a formula for “willful obstruction and policy irresolution,” write Mann and Ornstein.

The two criticize the U.S. mainstream media for having done a poor job in explaining the transformation of the Republican Party and its steady rightward drift to a place where compromise is a dirty word. They argue that the journalistic tradition of giving both sides of a story produced false equivalence and thus failed to portray an accurate picture.

But in the end, they say, it’s up to the voters. If they punish ideological extremism at the polls next November, the Republican Party would have an incentive to return to the center. “Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.”

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Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist.

Photo: Reuters

When U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the European Union first issued public calls for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the death toll in Syria stood at 2,000. That was in August 18 last year.

When Obama repeated the call on May 19, as host of a summit meeting of the Group of Eight, the body count had reached 10,000, according to United Nations estimates. The two figures highlight the lack of success of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure on a ruthless leader who learned lessons in unrestrained brutality from his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he succeeded in office.

A peaceful solution to Syria’s protracted crisis now looks remote enough to wonder whether Bashar al-Assad might outlast Obama in power. The U.S. president is not assured of winning another term in office next November. But the odds of the Assad regime surviving into 2013 look better with every passing day, even though one of the U.S. government’s top experts on Syria has labeled the Syrian president a “dead man walking.”

There are several reasons for skepticism about a resolution to the Syrian crisis in the near future. One is the government’s military superiority over fractured and lightly-equipped opposition forces. More importantly, there is no international consensus on how to deal with what began 14 months ago as peaceful demonstrations against a 40-year family dictatorship and now includes huge suicide bombings of government targets that have raised suspicions of al-Qaeda involvement.

At the summit of the G8 – the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, Canada and Japan – an aide to Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made clear, again, that Moscow, unlike the West, does not see Assad’s departure as a necessary step towards ending the bloodshed. “Some may like or dislike the Syrian government…but one cannot avoid a question – if Assad goes, who will replace him?” said Mikhail Margelov.

That’s a question to which there is no answer in Washington or the European and Arab capitals whose leaders say that Assad must go. Doubts over what would happen “the day after” explain why the U.S. and its allies have been reluctant to consider arming the opposition and why they rule out military intervention on the model of Libya.

Where Russia is concerned, some critics see motives that go beyond opposition to regime change, the prospect of losing a major client for arms exports, and fears of losing the Soviet-era naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only outpost in the Mediterranean. Said Gary Kasparov, a vocal Putin critic, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

“The Kremlin is desperate to keep Bashar al-Assad in place…since any conflict in the region sustains the high oil prices Mr. Putin and his cronies need to maintain power.”

Assad’s friends
Whatever the motive, it’s difficult to see Assad leaving as long as he enjoys arms supplies and backing from Russia, diplomatic support from China, military and intelligence advice from Iran, and shipments of diesel fuel from Venezuela. After a flurry of wrong predictions of Assad’s imminent exit late last year, political crustal-gazers have been wary of forecasts.

But punters on an online exchange that allows bets on political events, rate Assad’s chance of being in office by the end of the year at 68 percent, up from 42 in February, when China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy.

The two countries voted in favor, two months later, of a Security Council resolution that backed a six-point peace plan drawn up by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Its provisions included an end to all violence by the government and the rebels, talks aimed at a “political transition” and the dispatch of an unarmed U.N. force to monitor a truce that both sides are ignoring. .

There’s a Catch-22 in the Annan initiative. It specifies a “Syrian-led, inclusive political transition “which perversely makes al-Assad part of the negotiations (if ever they begin). There is no good reason to think he would be inclined to make concessions on the negotiating table after making none in months of bloody crackdowns on the opposition.

Administration officials have made clear that U.S. patience with Assad, and with the slow progress of the Annan plan, is running out. Some of the bluntest language from Obama aides has come from his ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She has pointed out that the mandate of the truce supervision mission runs out at the end of July.

“No one should assume that the United States will renew this mission,” she has said. “If there is not a sustained cessation of violence, full freedom of movement of UN personnel and rapid meaningful progress on all other aspects of the six-point plan, then we must all conclude that the mission has run its course.”

And then what? Obama wading deeper into yet another Middle East conflict four months before the elections?

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Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist.