What Motivates the Republican Party? The GOP seems wildly hypocritical and unprincipled, until you understand its guiding idea.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics

by Steve Benen

William Morrow, 384 pp.

In the fall of 2014, the Obama White House was busy trying to stop the spread of Ebola. The administration sent advisers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assist the afflicted countries' health ministries, and it sent troops to West Africa to build emergency hospitals. It began screening people arriving in the United States from at-risk nations. It isolated and treated several American medical personnel who contracted the virus abroad and brought it back home.

Toward the end of his new book, The Imposters, Steve Benen reminds us of what the Republican Party was doing while all of this was happening:

As Election Day neared ... Kentucky Republican [Rand Paul's] eagerness to exploit public anxieties started to spin out of control. Paul publicly questioned Ebola assessments from the actual experts, blamed "political correctness" for the Ebola threat, and traveled to battleground states questioning whether Obama administration officials had the "basic level of competence" necessary to maintain public safety. He added soon after, describing a hypothetical flight, "If this was a plane full of people who were symptomatic, you'd be at grave risk of getting Ebola. If a plane takes twelve hours, how do you know if people will become symptomatic or not?" Fast-forward five and a half years. In March 2020, Paul was infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and did not self-quarantine. Instead, he spent time in the Capitol Hill swimming pool while waiting for his test results, potentially exposing his Senate colleagues. After he recovered, Donald Trump appointed him to a task force focused on quickly "reopening" the economy.

Benen, a blogger and producer for Rachel Maddow at MSNBC (and, as it happens, my predecessor as principal contributor to the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog), obviously could not have anticipated the pandemic when he wrote of Paul's exploits. But the example does show his eerie ability to identify GOP hypocrisy. And in many ways, it's representative of what the entire book is: a staggering chronicle of Republican duplicity. Benen shows that in order to score points and win elections, the Republican Party is willing to engage in completely contradictory behavior--even when it's a matter of life and death.

The Imposters is a skillful illustration of how rank cynicism...