‘This Is Really What The Republican Party Is Like Right Now,’ Explains Rachel Maddow

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explains how amazing it is that Virginia’s Republicans found candidates further to the right than Ken Cuccinelli, who in 2010 had the breast on the state’s seal covered up. Thursday night she did a devastating dissection of the dank corner of the Republican Party typified by the Virginia GOP’s candidate for lieutenant governor — E.W. Jackson, the man who was forced to hold a press conference this week to say, “I do not believe birth defects are caused by parents’ sin. And I do not believe yoga leads to Satanism.”

Maddow summarized:

“This is really what the Republican Party is like right now. Even after the 2012 elections, and the supposed nationwide tip-to-tail diagnosis that the party needed to rebrand, maybe take it a little easy on the fire and brimstone hot sauce, at least for the next few elections—even after all of that, this is who they are. They are more like this now than they were last year, and than they were the year before that. This is not the Beltway-narrative media about what’s going on in American politics right now, but it is exactly what is going on, if you watch how they behave and who they are and what they say in public.”

She concluded by saying, “Because this is how things are now. People keep saying this problem is in the past for the Republican Party. It’s not in the past, it’s worse than it’s ever been.”