Maddow: Republicans are stuck in 'downward facing dogma'

On Thursday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow continued to chronicle the Republican Party's inexorable slide to right in a segment called "Downward Facing Dogma." She chided the GOP for its ongoing obsession with culture war issues and gravitation more and more toward fringe ideologies.

First off, Maddow discussed Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's attorney general and now Republican candidate for governor, who has been attempting to make a distinction between himself and some of the other far-right Republican candidates running for higher office in the state. Maddow reminded viewers that Cuccinelli is one of the men trying to shut down every single abortion clinic in Virginia, who ordered that the Roman goddess on the Virginia flag's bared breast be covered and who is trying to defy the Supreme Court by upholding Virginia's outdated sodomy laws.

The puritanical crusader's attempt to make himself over as a moderate gubernatorial candidate has been "hobbled," in Maddow's words, by the rest of the GOP ticket, men like E. W. Jackson, who famously declared that yoga can lead to demonic possession. Jackson tried to walk that back in a rambling press conference on Thursday saying that no, he doesn't believe that yoga will turn you into a Satanist.

The slate of Republican nominees was chosen at the state's Republican convention rather than by a primary vote, a convention, Maddow said, attended by "the hardest of hardcore Republican base activists."

"So, they not only picked fire and brimstone Ken Cuccinelli," she said, "they also picked him a running mate who is not going to be an asset in any effort to soften the Virginia Republican Party's hardline, tiny tent message."

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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