My brain has already initiated an auto-destruct program for all neurons containing any information about Mitt Romney’s campaign. It won’t take long for the program to reach completion because Romney ran a campaign about nothing. He was supposedly going to fix the economy because he supposedly was good with numbers. But he wouldn’t give us any details about how he intended to create jobs or fix the budget deficit or anything else. So, really, what is there to remember? That corporations are people?
Because Romney never articulated any plan, and eventually adopted Paul Ryan as his running mate, the Ryan budget plan became official Republican orthodoxy. It’s no surprise, then, that the Republicans don’t have any counteroffer for the president other than the Ryan Plan.
They accuse the president of upping the ante, but they literally have no idea how to respond. They say, “We’re not giving the president what he asked for,” but they don’t know how to come together around an alternative plan. And that is because no one is in charge. It would be bad enough on its own to have their presidential candidate leave the stage defeated. But, when Bush left no heir-apparent, and Romney took no leadership, the party just began to drift aimlessly. The only affirmative things they did were aimed at opposition and obstruction. They built the Tea Party to kill the health care bill. Then they won power, instead. They still control the House of Representatives but they are terrified to suggest anything that the government actually ought to do. And they are also terrified to articulate in plain legislative language any translation of the nihilist ideology they’ve cultivated.
Why? Because people don’t want massive tax cuts for the rich coupled with shittier Social Security and Medicare. They would rather give themselves AIDS than support the Ryan Plan or any conceivable alternative the modern GOP might ralph up on them.
Who is going to pull it all together and make a proposal to the president? John Boehner? Didn’t we learn that John Boehner has no clout with his own caucus during the debt ceiling fiasco?
Seriously. Who is going to step up?
I predict that we are going over the cliff for the simple reason that there is no head on the GOP chicken.