The Republican National Committee is voting this week on whether or not to adopt a fully fantasy-based platform. The party is considering a motion to rebrand the Democratic party, over which they have no authority, the ‘Democrat Socialist party’. The move has been ridiculed by some in the party, as well as by members of the FOX News team, often considered friendly to the Republican party and its agenda.

With the election of 2008 having been seen by many as a sign that the party was gravely out of touch with the direction of the country or the realities lived by average citizens, 2009 has seen a bizarre rash of fantasy-based behavior from the GOP. In February, House leaders called a press conference to present their alternative federal budget proposal: it was 19 pages long, was described as containing roughly 8 cover pages, and only a brief outline of concepts, with no numbers and no forecasts for spending.

What’s more, the outline of concepts revolved around tax cuts: for industry, for the wealthy, even for businesses moving jobs overseas. Over the course of ten days, the party descended into infighting as attempts to lay blame for the debacle distracted from attempts to actually craft a budget proposal. When that proposal was offered, on the day of the actual budget vote (i.e., with no possibility of the alternative being considered), the calculations were still incoherent, incomplete, and included a $1.7 trillion deficit, no improvement on the Democratic proposal.

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When Pres. Obama toured Europe, the Republican party was vehemently opposed to any language he used that recognized the US may have been an imperfect partner in the past. The GOP so vehemently pushed the idea of American infallibility that they tried to paint Obama’s hugely successful diplomatic efforts, including record commitments for a global economic stimulus, as a sign of weakness, because somehow the language proved weakness.

When he was gracious enough to greet Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas, and receive a book from him criticizing American foreign policy, the Republican party launched a national campaign to paint Obama as weak and as having jeopardized America’s national security by shaking hands and accepting the book.

That Obama’s presence had altered the entire hemispheric dynamic, causing Chávez and others to look to him for leadership and to court his good graces, was irrelevant to the machinery of systematic fantasism that has overtaken the national party. They predicted the demise of American power and the rise of a Latin American socialist power that would do away with the American way of life… because two men shook hands, and despite the signs that demonstrated vastly expanded American credibility in the region.

Now, the Republican party wants to strip its own national committee of funding authority. This would free ideologues and regional power-brokers to do as they see fit. It would further regionalize and marginalize the Republican party in the national political sphere, and further separate their public image-making from the realities of national politics.

So, to add to that fantasy-driven strategy for achieving “ideological purity” the party has decided it is a matter of grave national priority for the minority party to re-brand the majority party using a non-existent adjective (Democrat is a noun, not an adjective) and a term not applicable to the Democratic agenda (however much the Republican party is desperate to call itself less socialist than its rival).

The irony of it all is that the most vast expansion of government spending in the history of the United States took place first with a Republican Congress (both houses) and George W. Bush in the White House, achieving the first ever $3 trillion budget. Pres. Clinton’s final budget, for fiscal year 2001, by comparison, was only $1.9 trillion. What’s more, Bush’s budgets did not count Iraq and Afghanistan war funding.

Obama’s budget looks dramatically bigger than Bush’s exclusively because he integrated planned war spending into the national budget. Not including it was a means of skirting provisions in federal law that are designed to keep spending low where possible. Bush’s war supplementals were designed to be bloated and to be political quicksand that no member of Congress would vote against or seek proper oversight over.

Then came George W. Bush’s own Red October. The collapse of the American financial system caused the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, under Republican president George W. Bush, to seek the spending of multiple trillions of dollars in loans, grants and buyouts, to bail out the nation’s largest banks. Over $150 billion was given to AIG alone. The government effectively nationalized the nation’s largest insurer and several large banks, taking huge ownership stakes and ushering in an era in which regulation or direct control were the two remaining options for marketplace governance.

That was the Republican party’s true struggle with socialism. But now, we have a party out of power, disgraced by its former leaders and reeling from a consistent inability to understand the issues of the day or the priorities of the average citizen, seeking to rebrand its opponent with a word that more accurately describes their own actions over the last 8 years.

And even that part of this story is based on a fantasy: we are hearing daily the outcries and recriminations from Republican leaders who speak of the evil Democratic plan to establish a nationalized healthcare system in which the government will dictate to individuals whether or not they should die from routine ailments. The language is, far beyond inflammatory, taken from an alternate universe, because no such national system has been proposed.

Obama’s plan is for universal coverage, not a single-payer national system. His plan is designed to support the private sector healthcare system, and even permit currently unsustainable and overburdened insurers to become sustainable businesses over the long term. The plan is aimed at achieving “quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans”, not a free-for-everyone single-payer socialist authority. The plan is intended to give more people access to more care and with better quality and more options.

So, the Republican party seeks to raise its national profile by using a phantom adjective and a phantom menace to rename a party that has no intention of renaming itself and would not be adequately described by the proposed rebranding. Can it be justified as a complaint? An opinion? A profession of faith? Maybe. And the Republican party has a right to that, as does anyone, but blind faith in false claims does not a majority make.

There is a real danger for the Republican party, going forward, if the RNC not only approves this absurdist vocabulary stunt, but if members of the party begin parroting the term in robotic allegiance to the party’s new fantasy agenda. The danger is that every potentially serious figure in the party will be seen to be a know-nothing lout, incapable of speaking about reality and wasting the public’s time with a relentless propaganda lesson aimed at nudging the public into this fictional universe that serves no one’s interest except those Republicans who would otherwise be unfit for public office.

As Neal Cavuto said yesterday on FOX News: “I see a party in a heap of trouble and the last thing you want to do when you’re in a heap of trouble is dig a ditch deeper. So put down the shovels and deal with some issues.” The RNC is going out of its way to demonstrate the party’s willing irrelevance to the problems facing the nation, and it may reap what it has sown as Democratic party measures are seen to be the only responsible choice for government in 2010, however imperfect they may be.