“GOP Fully Succumbs To Its Cultural Rage”: The Day The Mad Dogs Took Over The Republican Party
It was a head-spinning day in Washington, yesterday was, as the story seemed to change from hour to hour in terms of who was proposing or accepting or refusing what and who seemed up and who seemed down. But through it all, one constant did not change and doesn’t seem likely to change: The Republicans are wrecking themselves.
Indeed, historically so. This is one of those turning points in American political history, the kind you’ll tell your grandkids you were around to see: a once-respectable party that finally was eaten alive by the cultural rage it had so long used to its advantage but held in check in order to win elections. It was a long time coming and it’s a grand thing to watch, provided they don’t wreck the country along with themselves.
First, a quick recap. Thursday morning, John Boehner finally picked up on the signals the White House had been sending and offered a “clean” but short-term debt-limit increase. Since Boehner clearly knew that such a measure wouldn’t get votes from his loony-tunes caucus, he was aiming for something that might pass with a combination of Republican and Democratic votes. That was admirable. But there was a problem: He proposed to do nothing about the government shutdown until Nov. 22, and that was something most Democrats wouldn’t have gone for.
Still, the Obama administration signaled that it would play ball. This angered Harry Reid, who was at work trying to round up a few Republican votes for his own one-year increase of the debt limit. The afternoon skirmishing was intense, featuring a few Republican senators (Roy Blount, Susan Collins, and, most interestingly of all, John Cornyn) undercutting Boehner, saying they would like to alter his proposal to include a provision to allow the government to open back up. Then, late in the day, the Not-So-Magic Bus of 20 Republicans rolled up to the White House, and Boehner put… well, put something on the table to Obama, something involving a six-week increase in the debt limit but who knows what else, and Obama said: not yet.
It is true that Obama drew back from the signals his people had been sending for a couple of days. But it’s also true that we don’t know exactly what happened in that room and what was proposed. One of the various crazy things about the GOP position now is that we don’t even know what they’re negotiating for. “America’s pressing problems,” they kept saying. But what exactly are those? I guess now Obamacare isn’t one of them, since it’s off the table. Or maybe the medical-device tax is. So higher taxes on prostheses is the crisis that the country must solve yesterday?
They mean, of course, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want cuts. But they just want Obama to give in on those without giving him anything on revenues. This would be the normal way of what we call “negotiating.”
But the thing is this. People who have specific policy goals engage in negotiation. But these Republicans don’t have specific policy goals. They have what we might call emotional policy goals. They want to wipe Obamacare, and Obama’s desires on taxation, and the entire Obama record, really, from the face of the earth, like Pharoah wanted to wipe Moses’s name from the obelisks. They don’t even really know what they want to win, as Indiana GOP Congressman Martin Stutzman famously said last week. But if it humiliates Obama, it’s a win. Bad for the country? That doesn’t matter either. To them, by definition, if it’s bad for Obama, it’s good for the country. They actually think this.
And so, through a combination of a critical mass of anti-thought people in their caucus who won’t govern at all if it means seeing Obama come out OK, and a “leader” who can now plainly be called the weakest speaker since America became a country of consequence, the Republican Party has finally and fully succumbed to its cultural rage. It has used that rage mostly effectively for nigh on 50 years now, since Barry Goldwater. That rage has served it well on balance. It helped elect Nixon. It certainly helped elect Reagan, and even though it could be argued that once in office Reagan didn’t do that much to stoke it, he understood that he needed it to win, which is why he opened his 1980 campaign down in Mississippi, to say to his America that it was all right to resent black people, he understood you.
The rage kept the base galvanized. It kept the enemy, or enemies—liberal and the media, often one and the same—in the gun sights. But it could also be controlled, the way Reagan controlled it. And even Dubya controlled it. The rich didn’t really share the rage, or most of them. Even the Koch Brothers probably don’t, what with all the froufrou artsy-fartsy outfits up in New York they help sustain.
But all of them have used it. And they have tolerated it, the casual racism, the hatred of gay people, and the rest. They tolerated it because the booboisie voted the right way, and because they, the elites, remained in charge. Well, they’re not in charge now. The snarling dog they kept in a pen for decades has just escaped and bitten their hand off.
The Republicans still might pull it back together. They were also at a historic low after Nixon resigned. They won three of the next four elections. But that was just one man’s megalomania. This is the psychosis of one-quarter of the nation. That quarter is now leading the elites around by the nose. And the Red Sea just might swallow them all. It’s certainly what they deserve.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 11, 2013
“Government Is Not Just About Sugar”: The GOP Helps Americans Appreciate The Importance Of Government
There’s a lot of terrible news for Republicans inside the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, but one of the worst bulletins is this: Americans are becoming more appreciative of government.
The poll shows that 52 percent of respondents said that government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people. That figure is up four points since June, and is at the highest level since July of 2008, when it stood at 53 percent.
The economic crisis was building during the summer of 2008, and people were growing increasingly weary of President George W. Bush’s laissez-faire attitude. Barack Obama’s more optimistic vision of government’s possibilities became infectious and helped propel him to victory, but after he took office, the popularity of government, as measured by that question, quickly fell and has been below 50 percent for most of his presidency.
Now it is back up, and Republicans have only themselves to thank. There’s nothing better than shutting down government to remind people of how much they need it. The television footage of shuttered offices and national parks, as well as people who are suffering because of lost wages and federal assistance, has had a significant effect.
So did the 2008-2009 recession and its aftermath. More people came into the government’s orbit, seeking assistance or benefiting from stimulus money, including much of the automobile industry. The poll showed that nearly a third of respondents said their family was personally affected by the current shutdown, compared to only 18 percent during the shutdowns of 1995 and 1996. The budget crisis has even made health care reform substantially more popular than it was just a few weeks ago.
This is one of the great existential fears of the right, of course, and is one of the few things uniting the various ideological wings of the Republican Party. Mitt Romney complained about the 47 percent of Americans who were “dependent on government,” and Senator Ted Cruz recently accused Mr. Obama of trying to get Americans “addicted to the sugar” of his health care law.
But this week, Americans know that government isn’t just about sugar. It’s a necessary part of their lives, and Americans expect it to be there when the private sector lets them down, as it did during the recession and as it has done on health care for so many years. Now as the Republicans’ abysmal new approval ratings show, voters are also gaining a clearer picture of precisely who in Washington is letting them down.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, October 11, 2013
“Meet The New Republican Party”: GOP Leaders Recommit To Same Old Far-Right Culture War
Earlier this year, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus accepted the fact that his party’s social conservatism had alienated many young voters, women, and moderates. The party would still adhere to its platform, Priebus said in March, “but it doesn’t mean that we divide and subtract people from our party…. I don’t believe we need to act like Old Testament heretics.”
At the time, this seemed quite sensible. Understanding the Republican Party’s unpopularity is a multi-faceted dynamic, but its economic failures and extremist tactics are only part of the larger problem. The GOP’s support for a far-right culture-war agenda — anti-contraception, anti-gay, anti-reproductive rights, anti-Planned Parenthood — has taken a toll, too.
This support has manifested itself in Republicans’ legislative priorities — the House GOP has been preoccupied this year with votes on abortion and birth control — but it’s not limited to Capitol Hill.
Marriage, abortion and religious liberty are the top cultural topics to be addressed at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit.
Conservative political issues will be a major part of the presentations, but the social-cultural issues “are what define us as an organization,” said retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin of the Family Research Council (FRC), a main sponsor of the annual conference, which is now in its eighth year.
Right Wing Watch highlighted some of the fringe extremists who’ll play prominent roles at the right-wing conference, but the key takeaway is simple: Republican leaders will join these fringe extremists as if they’re mainstream.
Looking over the list of confirmed speakers at the Values Voter Summit, we see several sitting Republican U.S. senators (Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Tim Scott, and Marco Rubio), and many more sitting Republican U.S. House members (Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and Scott Turner of Texas).
The list of confirmed speakers also includes House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who was on his party’s national presidential ticket less than a year ago.
And why are these guests important? Because it’s a reminder that no matter how much damage the Republican Party’s culture war does to the GOP’s reputation, they just can’t help themselves. The religious right movement may not be the powerhouse it once was — remember when the Christian Coalition was a major force in American politics? — but it still is a significant part of the GOP base, even if it helps drive mainstream voters away.
Indeed, for Republicans eyeing national office, this has become something of a rite of passage — if you want to compete for the GOP’s presidential nomination, you’ll have to suck up to the party’s theocratic wing.
A group of longtime Christian conservative activists are holding a private meeting Thursday in Washington to hear informal presentations from two of the most talked-about potential Republican presidential candidates: Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
The gathering is being held in conjunction with the Family Research Council’s Values Voters conference, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, but it is not an official part of that event. Rather, it is being staged by a loosely-organized group of Republican leaders that call themselves “Conservatives of Faith.”
The hosts include Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, the former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, the conservative talk show host Janet Parshall and Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer, along with a handful of others from the conservative movement. [Robert Fischer, a South Dakota-based conservative organizer] is the group’s chief organizer.
Meet the new Republican Party. When it comes to social conservatism, it’s entirely indistinguishable from the old Republican Party.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2013
“The Heartbreak Of Extremism”: House Republican Leaders Are Afraid To Confront Radicals In Their Ranks
Seeing our government and our creditworthiness held hostage to the demands of a right-wing minority is infuriating. It’s also heartbreaking.
It’s heartbreaking because the only thing keeping our country from being its growing, innovative and successful self is genuinely and unnecessarily stupid politics.
The United States emerged from a horrific global recession in better shape than most other countries. Our recovery was slower than it had to be because of too much budget-cutting, too soon. Nonetheless, we avoided the more extreme forms of austerity and our economy has been coming back — at least until this made-in-the-House-Republican-Caucus crisis started.
It’s heartbreaking because a nation whose triumphs have always provided inspiration to proponents of democracy around the world is instead giving the champions of authoritarian rule a chance to use our dysfunction as an argument against democracy.
Does it really make House Speaker John Boehner proud that when the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank host global economic leaders on Thursday, one of their central pieces of business will be scolding the United States for using the debt limit as a political football?
It’s heartbreaking because the reward to President Obama for pursuing broadly middle-of-the-road policies is to be accused of being an ultra-liberal or, even more preposterously, a socialist. Are our right-wing multimillionaires and billionaires who are making more money than ever so unhinged that they can cast a modest tax hike as a large step toward a Soviet-style economy?
The most revealing example of the lunacy that now rules is the very health care plan that has Republicans so up in arms that they’re willing to wreck the economy to get it repealed. The Affordable Care Act is actually based on market principles that conservatives, including Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation, once endorsed. Its centerpiece promotes competition among insurers and subsidizes the purchase of private insurance.
It has little in common with the British National Health Service or the Canadian single-payer model — systems that work, by the way — except for sharing with them the goal of eventually covering everyone. Yet we have a shutdown driven by the idea, as Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) put it, that Obamacare constitutes the “greatest threat” to our economy. It should not surprise us when errant nonsense creates a nonsensical crisis.
And what’s going on is heartbreaking because this contrived emergency is distracting us from the problems we do need to solve, including rising inequality, declining mobility, under-investment in our infrastructure, a broken immigration system and inadequate approaches to educating and training our people.
Obama has finally decided he’s had enough of a politics based on “extortion” and “threats.” He has signaled that he is happy to negotiate, just not under a gun held by the most irresponsible elements of the GOP. He is exhausted, and rightly so, by the fecklessness of Boehner, who told Democrats early on that he would not shut the government down and then crumpled before a revolt by a corporal’s guard of 40 to 80 members of a 435-member House.
Now it is said by people who see themselves as realists that because he is dealing with irrational foes, Obama has to be the “adult in the room.” The definition of “adult” in this case is that he must cave a little because the other side is so bonkers that it just might upend the economy.
Giving in is exactly what Obama cannot do. The president offered Boehner a face-saving way out on Tuesday by suggesting he’d be happy to engage in broad budget talks if the government reopened and there was at least a short-term increase in the debt limit. To go any further would be to prove to the far right that its extra-constitutional extremism will pay dividends every time.
What’s required from the outside forces who want this mess to go away is unrelenting pressure on Boehner and the supposedly more reasonable Republicans who say they want to open the government and pay our debts. Up to now these Republicans have been the enablers of the Tea Party faction. They’re the ones who must become the “adults in the room” because they’re the ones who allowed all this to happen.
The Tea Party folks at least know what they believe and fight for it. The rest of the Republican Party cowers before them, lacking both conviction and courage. It would be truly heartbreaking if a once-great political party brought the country down because its leaders were so afraid of confronting unreason in their ranks.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 10, 2013
“From Obsession To Insanity”: The GOP Is Unhinged By Obamacare
Whacking yourself on the head with a ball-peen hammer would be stupid. But doing it again and again — that’s insane.
Welcome to your U.S. House of Representatives, presently led by a pack of Tea Party Republicans. They are so crazed by Obamacare that they repeatedly hammer themselves over the head with it, having voted 46 times (so far) to dismantle, defund, delay, deny, and otherwise destroy this landmark health care bill — all to no avail. They would be hilarious, were they not so pathetic.
But now, their anti-government, anti-Obama obsession has turned into insanity. Acting as though the USA is nothing more substantial than a banana republic, this Tea Party clique of petty potentates has forced a shutdown of our national government. The craziest part of their stunt is the duplicitous claim that finally providing health care for millions of uninsured Americans will have, as one leader of the mad-dog pack put it, “horrific effects.”
Yet, even as they publicly insist that they’re heroes for trying to save the people from the horror of receiving fairly decent health coverage, the GOP hierarchy is quietly warning its members that defeating Obamacare now is essential to their own health. Why? Because they know the program will work, providing better care and nearly universal coverage at a cheaper price. It will become widely popular, and any politico who tries to kill it later will become wildly unpopular. Even the senator from Oz, Ted Cruz, understood that the program had to be aborted before it was born. It will be so loved, Cruz candidly conceded (as he desperately tried to suffocate Obamacare with a painfully-long “filibuster”), that the public will be “hooked” on it for the long haul.
Yes, Sen. Oz, the American people tend to support policies that are beneficial to them. What’s crazy is you and your cohorts thinking they’re crazy for thinking that.
So now, Dr. Hightower offers this advice: Don’t fume about the GOP’s lunatic effort to kill health care reform — just laugh at their farcical show. It won’t affect them, but it can improve your mental health.
For starters, take Ted Cruz’s 21-hour blabathon that he said would stop Obamacare in its tracks. Not only did he fail spectacularly, but senators voted 100 to zero against his crazy ploy. Yes, that means that even he ended up voting against it! What a hoot he is.
A shameful hypocrite, too. While going to extremes to keep millions of Americans from getting vitally needed health coverage, Cruz goes to great lengths to keep the people from being reminded of his own health care, past and present.
Having been born in Calgary, Canada, little Ted’s parents were able to take advantage of the country’s universal health care, or as the Tea Party darlings like to call it, “socialized” medicine. That’s right, for the first four years of Ted’s life in Calgary, he was covered under government subsidized healthcare. I find it absolutely hysterical that little Ted would grow up to throw a 21-hour-long temper tantrum over affordable health care for hardworking American people. Recently, Cruz had been repeatedly refusing to answer whether taxpayers covered his health care. Finally, he piously responded that he was eligible for taxpayer coverage, but had nobly declined.
Such slapstick! It turns out that Ted was fibbing, for he’s covered by his wife’s policy. As a millionaire top executive at Goldman Sachs, she and her family are given gold-plated Cadillac coverage by the Wall Street giant. Goldman pays some $40,000 a year for her and Ted’s policy (more than most families make in a year) — a benefit-cost that the firm passes on to us taxpayers by deducting it from its corporate tax bill. Hilarious, huh?
Then there’s the comic twist that’s included in Congress’ current government shutdown. While more than a million regular government workers are going without a paycheck, the congresscritters who forced the furlough continue to collect their $174,000 in annual pay. Some lawmakers are donating their checks to charity, but four out of five are happily pocketing theirs. “Dang straight,” barked Rep. Lee Terry. “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college,” the Nebraska Republican said. “Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly,” Terry told his constituents.
And that’s your Congress at work. Laugh ’til it hurts.
By: Jim Hightower, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 10, 2013
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