Dana Milbank points out something that ought to be obvious but really isn’t.
[Rep. Paul] Ryan and his fellow House Republicans…know their budget will never become law. They are free to be as reckless as they want to be, to throw as many bombs as they wish…
…Ryan is free to propose such a cockamamie plan because he knows that President Obama and Senate Democrats will never go along with it.
It’s a little more complicated than that, however. It’s not really true that the House leadership is “free” to offer up a draconian austerity budget plan. Rather, they are “compelled” to offer up this plan. It’s the price they paid to the wingnuts to get them to agree to raising the debt ceiling. In a greater sense, it is the price they are paying now for feeding their wingnut base a constant stream of bullshit about economics for forty years without pause.
In fact, the word “free” seems like one of the worst adjectives one could choose to describe the House leadership’s choices on the budget, on guns, on immigration, on climate, and on women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights.
You could call it: live by bullshit, die by bullshit.
The Democrats engage in some of this behavior. They all supported the Employee Free Choice Act when they knew it would be filibustered, but enough of them opposed it when they had the technical power to pass it that it died. Harry Reid certainly made it sound like he regretted not listening to Senators Merkley and Udall when they called for filibuster reform in 2009. Yet, he didn’t listen to them in 2013 when he had the chance to reconsider.
Party leadership will sometimes bullshit their base. It happens. But the Democrats don’t do this routinely. It isn’t central to their strategy. What Democratic officeholders say they want is mainly what they really want, and it lines up closely with what their base wants, and it isn’t based on delusions or lies. We want universal health care because it’s a cheaper and fairer way of providing health care than what we have now. We want to stimulate the economy to improve the employment situation, and we base that on sound and proven economic theory. We want to preserve a woman’s right to choose because we think all kinds of horrible things happen when women don’t have that choice, not because we think God has ordained it. We think people should be able to vote because greater voter participation creates a more accurate measure of the Will of the People, not just because we think it will be to our advantage.
You can go down the list. The Democrats have not fed their base a bunch of bullshit and created a totally confused and paranoid and logic-impaired segment of society that they rely upon to act in a stupid and self-destructive manner.
The GOP in Washington is not free to be sensible. They are not free to use evidence. They are not free to negotiate or compromise. They are compelled to behave in the way that they trained their base to expect them to behave.
They are slaves to their own bullshit.
Maybe in a few months I’ll be ready to think there’s a difference and Dems are more worthy of our trust, work, and money. For now, though, fuck ’em.
WTFU.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the malevolence of the conservative movement and their influence on the Republican Party.
And what about the malevolence of their courtiers in the Democratic Party?
That doesn’t even make sense.
Why don’t you itemize the conservatives positions on the issues. Pick anything. Pick any item you can think of. And ask yourself how you would feel about it if they got their way.
Ryan isn’t doing this for fun. He intends to get his way.
He just wants to force DEMOCRATS and Obama to take the lead on cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Then he and House Republicans will vote against these cuts, and run for the next 20 years as “we voted to save Social Security from Obama’s cuts!”
That is why Republicans refused to name the budget cuts they want, and demanded Obama (and now Senate Democrats) come up with their OWN cuts — which the House can then criticize and vote against.
Why not? It worked perfectly in 2010 when they won 63 seats by lying to seniors that “Obama is cutting Medicare, and we’re protecting Medicare.”
I think you’re right. I would only add that the Republicans who really matter, the ones pulling the strings, have said whatever they felt they needed to say to keep their shock troops motivated. Now they find themselves hoist by their own petard (not so much in the sense of having to follow through, but in losing the enthusiasm, and incurring the enmity, of their base when it becomes apparent they’re not going to follow through on bringing the bullshit into reality. They try again and again to say “NEXT TIME, JUST WATCH OUT!” but even their idiotic base eventually begins to wise up.
I beg to differ.
So the Republicans have succeeded in doing what the President warned them of at that meeting with the House Republican caucus in Baltimore in 2009–painting themselves into a corner. These days I guess you could call that Orly’ing oneself.
I agree that the Democrats’ sins are different. The Democrats are becoming the slaves of K Street.
So we have a doubly dysfunctional government in which one party is the addict and the other is co-dependent–and both are in hock to K Street.
I do not think that the Democratic base and the members of Congress are aligned in their interests anymore. Congress is aligned with its donors, which puts it at odds with its base–in both parties. Republicans play the crazy; Democrats play at being weak victims.
We just saw it with Reid & the filibuster. He flat lied to the base for a year.
According to the interview he gave in Washington Post, he USED the Progressive attempt to get reform to jolly McConnell into making a few feeble changes, because “With the history of the Senate, we have to understand the Senate isn’t and shouldn’t be like the House.”
This of course is exactly the opposite of what he was saying last year when he publicly apologized to Sen. Merkeley for opposing reform in 2011.
So, he never intended to reform the filibuster and was just lying about it for a year because the liberal base of his party and party activists were all demanding change! How is this any different from GOP telling seniors they support Medicare & S.S. and then proposing the Ryan budget?
Obama’s failure to take any action to close Abu Grahib after he became president is another perfect example of flat lying to the base about things you never intend to do.
Abu Ghraib?
you need to review your talking points; it’s failure to close Guantanamo, and you left out the part about Obama doing nothing about the banksters;
The Democrats engage in some of this behavior. They all supported the Employee Free Choice Act when they knew it would be filibustered, but enough of them opposed it when they had the technical power to pass it that it died.
This is wrong, and you know it. All the Democrats voted for it when they controlled Congress and Dubya was still in the White House. So clowns like Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor could vote for it and not piss off Walmart because they all knew there was no chance in hell of Dubya signing it into law. It died because Obama became President and the Walmart twins, and likely a few others, knew that he’s sign it if passed. So they couldn’t let that happen.
Yes, now that you remind me, I think you are right. It was the veto not the filibuster that gave them courage.
(shrug) this is the completely and utterly predictable result of allowing confederates to have a say in how the country is governed.
if we don’t like it, we can stop it. at any time.
Umm…How can we stop this “at any time”? Sign me up for stopping it right now.
Please elucidate.
Cut Texas,Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama out of the country, build a wall, and send all the wingers there?
Yep. It’s Rutherford B. Hayes’s fault.
Posturing and irresponsibility are a consequence of bicameralism, the filibuster, constitutional review by the courts, and the presidential veto.
Separation of powers, in other words.
In a unicameral legislature free to do what it says it will politicians have to speak and behave much less like raving jackasses.
I love the US constitution. Don’t you?
Their fate is really nothing more than the end prodect of that old “Oh what a tangled web we….” thingy.
As I’ve argued it for many years now, while it may lead to the inevitable public shame (at least in the history books) of the repugnant party and many of their more prominent players/liars in the shell game they’ve played for decades now, their monied masters that started the avalanche of lying are laughing all the way to the bank as they say, as a cursory examination of the wealth they’ve accumulated shows.
I think they are better characterized as amoral/immoral happy sacrificial lambs for their monied masters. Their lying/BS has been motivated by much the same self-interest seen in say, athletes who have willingly shortened their lives (and in many cases, soiled their reputations)by steroid use for short term gain under the public spotlight, and the wealth that flows from it.
They don’t see themselves as slaves to their BS, they see themselves as having handsomely profited from it in the short term. For many of them I’m sure, inevitable infamy is well worth the price, and certainly preferable to the obscurity they would have otherwised suffered.
Under this scheme, they love the fact that the monsters/voting minions they’ve created love the flavor of the turds they’ve fed them, because that means the infamy they risk with such conduct will be mitigated insomuch as they won’t be universally reviled. That would require those minions in large numbers to accept and acknowledge that they’ve been stupid and were duped — which won’t happen without a major catalyst. I’ve long thought AGW will be exactly that. So what we’re really talking about here is a co-dependent relationship between the pols and their minions, both of which have effectively been slaves to the monied interests.
To avoid the misery of the shame they all rightly deserve, they love each others company because it shields them from the brutal realities they all know on some level, are waiting to wash them all away like the rats they are, or in keeping with the turd theme, the river of reality washing them away in Augean Stables style.
Reality/truth will inevitably be the Hercules we seek.