“America Held Hostage”: The Age Of Right Wing Republican “Government By Class” Politcal Thuggery
Welcome to America Held Hostage.
The reference is not just to the ongoing government shutdown that theoretically could be — but in all likelihood won’t be — over by the time you read this. Rather, it is also to the intransigence and extremism of the Republican Party, a brand of government-by-crisis political thuggery that made this confrontation inevitable.
And not just the Republican Party but more specifically, that collection of cranks and outliers within the party so addled by hatred of the president, so crippled by the mental disorder known as Obama Dementia, that they are incapable of rationality and reason. They are the right wing of the right wing, a walking id so fully divorced from reality that even many of their fellow conservatives are wary — and weary — of them. And these are the people who are running the show.
God bless us, every one.
This latest in a series of manufactured crises centers on the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s landmark health care reform. It may be a good law, may be a bad law, may be (and probably is) a good law with some flaws, but one thing is certain: it is a law. Duly passed by Congress, duly signed by a duly elected president, it has survived no less than 41 votes by congressional Republicans to weaken or repeal it — not to mention a showdown in the Supreme Court. No law in modern memory has been more thoroughly or energetically challenged.
Having failed epically and repeatedly to kill it, these right-wing Ahabs now embark upon an extortionate new tack that, even for them, is astonishing in its disingenuous gall. They have blocked passage of a routine resolution to fund the government unless the health care act is defunded. Then they condemn the president because he won’t “negotiate” with them.
It’s as if a Little League team lost a big game on a critical call. They complain to the umps, they look at the instant replay, they file an appeal with the league, but the call still stands. So they take the ball and go home and say they will not play again until the other team agrees to “negotiate.”
What a crock. In that scenario as in this one, there is nothing to talk about. The problem isn’t the fairness of the process, but the inability of losers to accept the loss.
Once upon a time, a parent might have addressed the problem of children behaving like brats through the vigorous application of leather to the region of the gluteus maximus. Once upon a time, a voter might have addressed the problem of politicians behaving like brats in much the same way.
But the ability to spank legislators is largely lost. The reason in a word: gerrymandering — voting district lines drawn to insulate legislators from voters with contrary viewpoints. Lawmakers choose their own voters, are answerable only to those true believers who already agree with them. It is a system guaranteed to reward extremism and make punishing it nearly impossible.
When you cannot “throw the bums out” (congressional incumbents are re-elected at a dictatorship rate: 90 percent), the bums are free to be as splenetic as they want to be. There is no pressure to be a statesman. Indeed, statesmanship becomes a liability.
The system must be fixed. Districts should be drawn by judges or other nonpartisan entities along sensible geographic and demographic lines. No more of these crazy-shaped districts that look like Plastic Man eating spaghetti on a rollercoaster.
The stakes could hardly be higher. The full faith and credit of the United States is at risk. Yet the right wing of the right wing engages in petulance, pettiness and pique that would embarrass a 4-year-old. They will have things their way — or they will shoot the hostage.
These people seem not to understand that elections have consequences. Unfortunately for this country, obstructionism does, too.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Featured Post, The National Memo, October 9, 2013
“Boehner’s Empty Suit”: An Emperor On An Island With No Exit Bridge
A day in the life of the emptiest suit in Washington:
7 a.m. You wake up, light a Camel. Read a pink Post-it left on the refrigerator by your wife: “John, don’t ever forget, YOU REALLY ARE THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE!!! Also, we’re out of bagels.”
7:30 a.m. You lie in your tanning bed meditating about the government shutdown, wondering if it was such a brilliant idea to let it happen. You put on some Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon,” but that doesn’t help.
8:00 a.m. On the ride to Capitol Hill, your driver remarks that there’s not much traffic in the city, no tourists lined up to see money being inked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. You smoke another Camel.
8:11 a.m. From the car you call the police to report that some jerk on D Street is selling “Boehner is a Bum” T-shirts — no, wait, he’s giving them away! Worse, he’s wearing a national park ranger’s uniform.
9:07 a.m. Staff meeting. The assistant in charge of reading all your hate mail insists she’s not crying, it’s just allergies.
On a more upbeat note, three Tea Party activists in Arizona tweeted that the shutdown is a smashing success, and that if you cave in to moderate Republicans who want to end it, then you are lower than lily-livered liberal scum.
9:30 a.m. You deliver your regular morning blame-Obama-for-everything soundbite, which goes pretty well, all things considered. Your wife calls to say you looked totally reasonable on TV, not the least bit satanic, and asks if you’d please swing by the grocery store on the way home.
10:46 a.m. Fox News wants to interview you about the 800,000-plus federal workers being laid off. How are they supposed to pay their mortgages, keep up their car payments, yada, yada, yada….
And this is Fox? They’re supposed to be on your side.
You tell your assistant in charge of turning down hard-hitting media interviews to say you’re too busy trying to end this dire national crisis caused entirely by the Democrats and the president.
11:07 a.m. Three discreet drags on a Camel before sneaking into another tanning bed that you’ve installed in a dark alcove near the Speaker’s office. You put on some Zeppelin, “In Through the Out Door,” but can’t stop thinking about the havoc you’ve created by not letting the shutdown come to a vote on the House floor.
At the Department of Defense, 400,000 civilian workers furloughed with no pay. Same story at NASA, the Department of Justice, Treasury, Commerce, Labor, Energy, even Veterans Affairs.
And this was totally your call, as some unhappy colleagues have pointed out. One word from you and a clean spending bill would have passed, no problem, if only you weren’t such a wimp.
“I hate that word!” you start to holler, fogging up the Plexiglas.
12:30 pm. Lunch with a carefully chosen group of supporters. They try to brighten your mood with news that the signup website for the Affordable Care Act — sorry, Obamacare — is plagued with glitches.
What better proof that the president’s healthcare law is a total disaster, right?
“So cheer up, Mr. Speaker!” they say.
“Cheer up?” you snap back. “Didn’t you see the headline in the New York Daily News? ‘House of Turds.’ With my picture!”
“You’re definitely not a turd, Mr. Speaker.”
“Gee, thanks. Get the check.”
2:15 pm. You cancel the daily session with your charisma coach and go to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls. Out of nowhere comes a thundering downpour!
Turns out you didn’t receive the storm alert on your cell phone due to layoffs at the weather service caused by the you-know-what, that you yourself allowed to happen.
You stub out your Camel, go back to the office and sulk.
4:00 p.m. Your regular afternoon blame-Obama-for-everything soundbite is postponed because the assistant in charge of making sure you’re never photographed with Ted Cruz has spotted the lunatic Texan roaming the halls.
5:45 p.m. Quick trip to the tanning bed, then moisturize.
You’re preparing for a live interview with Diane Sawyer. The producer says Diane’s going to remind you that you’re the one person who could stop the government shutdown tomorrow, if you wanted to.
Suddenly you remember a dentist appointment.
6:30 pm. On the ride home you phone the NSA and ask if someone could please hack the Google site and remove all the mean stuff being written about you. Unfortunately, the hacker in charge of that department has just been furloughed.
So you light up another Camel, and call Harry Reid.
By: Carl Hiaasen, The National Memo, October 8, 2013
“A Concerted Right Wing Effort”: We Are The Ones Who Shut The Government Down
There are still some dead-enders on the right, who go through the motions and pretend Democrats should be blamed for the government shutdown, but it’s awfully difficult to take them seriously. At times, it doesn’t even seem as if those repeating the talking points believe their own rhetoric.
A fair number of Republicans, meanwhile, are admitting what is plainly true. Take Rep. Peter King’s (R-N.Y.) comments on “Fox News Sunday.” Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, King said:
“I’ve been against this government shutdown form the start. Now, I disagree with [Georgia Republican Tom Graves], we are the ones who did shut the government down. Charles Krauthammer called it the “suicide caucus.” I mean, Wall Street Journal said they were “kamikazes.” You don’t take the dramatic step of shutting down the government unless you have a real strategy and has a chance of working. It’s never had a chance of working; we’re now almost pushing ‘Obamacare’ to the side and we’re talking about other issues, and people are still out of work and the government is still shut down.”
When prominent Republicans appear on Fox to say Republicans are responsible for the shutdown, it’s safe to say the “maybe we can pin this on Democrats” gambit has run its course.
It’s not just King, either. The American Bridge super PAC put together a collection of Republicans holding their own party responsible for this fiasco. It’s not an especially short list.
What’s more, new reports over the weekend brought into focus how the right shaped its shutdown strategy months ago, and then carefully stuck to the game plan.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire had this report on Saturday.
Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
The piece included a familiar cast of right-wing characters — Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, et al — adding the billionaire Koch brothers “have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”
In other words, it’s time for the nonsense over who bears responsibility for this to end.
A month ago, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wanted to pass a clean spending bill to the White House to avoid a shutdown. At the time, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) pushed the argument — in writing — that a clean CR was a win for Republicans. When they’re being at least a little honest, some House Republicans are willing to admit that Senate Democrats already compromised when they accepted the lower spending levels far-right lawmakers demanded.
And given all of this, those who continue to suggest Democrats deserve the blame are clearly working from the assumption that you and other Americans are easily suckered into believing nonsense.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 7, 2013
“The Boehner Bunglers”: The Truly Incompetent Can’t Even Recognize Their Own Incompetence
The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
To see what I’m talking about, consider the report in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.
This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. — as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn’t seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.
Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Many people seem perplexed by the transformation of the G.O.P. into the political equivalent of the Keystone Kops — the Boehner Bunglers? Republican elders, many of whom have been in denial about their party’s radicalization, seem especially startled. But all of this was predictable.
It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
Remember what happened in the 2012 election — not the fact that Mitt Romney lost, but the fact that all the political experts around him apparently had no inkling that he was likely to lose. Polls overwhelmingly pointed to an Obama victory, but Republican analysts denounced the polls as “skewed” and attacked the media outlets reporting those polls for their alleged liberal bias. These days Karl Rove is pleading with House Republicans to be reasonable and accept the results of the 2012 election. But on election night he tried to bully Fox News into retracting its correct call of Ohio — and hence, in effect, the election — for Mr. Obama.
Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.
Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 6, 2013
“Woefully Ignorant”: Congressional Republican Lawmakers Who Struggle With Basic Concepts
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) knows exactly how he plans to deal with the debt ceiling and the full faith and credit of the United States.
“I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke,” Yoho said. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, that will sure as heck be a moment. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt.
Now, Ted Yoho isn’t some random guy who called into a talk-radio show, or some troll in online comments thread. He’s a member of Congress. This elected federal lawmaker believes world markets would be more stable if the United States chose default on purpose.
While every day brings new evidence of policymakers saying foolish things about important issues, I feel like there are more examples than usual crossing the radar right now.
* Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants to replace “Obamacare” with a federal benefits program that’s eerily similar to the Affordable Care Act.
* Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) demanded to know why a reporter with health care insurance didn’t enter an exchange marketplace designed for people with no health care insurance.
* Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) argued this morning that there’s “no such thing as a debt ceiling in this country,” and we won’t “default” on our debt by failing to raise the debt limit.
* Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) is convinced the government shutdown is about entitlement spending.
The list goes on (and on), but the larger point is, the country is in a difficult spot right now. The government is shut down, a debt-ceiling crisis is underway, and there’s no clear way out of the ongoing, self-imposed fiascos. The nation would benefit from sensible, knowledgeable policymakers showing sound judgment.
Instead we have these guys.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 7, 2013
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