Clueless

If you're the kind of person who is fascinated by multi-car pile-ups, I think the Virginia Republican Party would be an acceptable substitute. Former Senator and presidential dreamer George Felix Allen started it out with Macaca, but that wasn't enough. He had to make it worse by announcing, after (finally) acknowledging his Jewish ancestry, that he had eaten a ham sandwich the day before and his mother made great pork chops. Those gaffes by themselves, positions on the issues aside, could have created Jim Webb's narrow margin of victory.
The leftovers from Jim Webb's victory parties weren't all gone when it came out that the Republicans in Virginia were at odds with each other about transportation funding. The wingers in the legislature thought that the localities should pay for new transportation initiatives. The Republicans on county boards and city councils were appalled. The groups started attacking each other until someone called a meeting and told them to play pretty. It looked like the party was going cannibalistic.
Comes then Virgil Goode, congressman, to express his disgust that an American-born Congressional colleague of the Muslim faith wanted to be sworn with his hand on (gasp!) the Holy Koran. Never mind that congresspeople can be sworn with their hands on whatever they choose (or, presumably, on nothing at all). Goode said that this was bad, and we'd all better adopt his position on immigration or we'd see much more of this. While a predictable number of neanderthals jumped to stand with him--my favorite wrote that he or she would never recognize the authority of any public official who was sworn on anything but the Bible--a lot of people expressed shock and disgust.
One would have thought that would be enough, that somebody would call the Republican officials into their big tent and point out that they couldn't say anything that popped into their heads and expect to stay in office, but it didn't happen. Instead, when a bill apologizing for slavery was debated in the House of Delegates, Delegate Frank Hargrove, Sr., said that black people should just "get over it." This wasn't enough to satisfy Hargrove. In the same speech, he asked whether the next step would be to ask Jews to apologize for killing Christ.
When the Republicans got started on damage control, it became clear that despite the experience they've had with the likes of George W. Bush, they aren't very good at that. One of their leaders in the legislature said that not all Republicans thought like Hargrove (and, presumably, Goode and Allen.) State Senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, whose extramarital affair with Representative Tom Davis got her some nice funding when he chaired Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, says that people in northern Virginia "understand the comments of those from rural areas versus those of us who represent northern Virginia and embrace its diversity."
The Republicans haven't grasped the real problem: there are some things that shouldn't be tolerated, and a political party that keeps its doors open to bigots and xenophobes gains a reputation for bigotry and xenophobia--not tolerance. It's less than a year until Virginia delegates and some state senators and local officials must run for office again. If the Republican party doesn't want to suffer the sort of crushing losses that the national party suffered last November, it's time for a purge. Senator Devolites Davis and her Republican buddies need to learn that if you don't immediately cut loose people like Virgil Goode and Frank Hargrove, Sr., people will start to wonder whether you really agree with them.