Jonathan Bernstein is correct that you can tell who the target audience for an opinion piece is by looking for the “to-be-sure” paragraph. The “to-be-sure” paragraph is intended to anticipate, confront, and cut-off likely criticisms of your argument from people who are generally on your side of the political spectrum. It is usually used to solidify your credentials as a solid liberal or conservative, depending on your intended audience.
Example: “To be sure, I’m all for single-payer health care, but ObamaCare isn’t too shabby.”
Example: “To be sure, ObamaCare is a complete disaster, but now is not the time to shut down the government over it.”
Mr. Bernstein is also correct that pandering to the Tea Party with the latter of those two examples is not going to be effective, and what is really needed is direct confrontation of their bullshit. The way to treat Tea Partiers is the way you would treat a drug addict. Realize that you didn’t cause their craziness, you can’t cure their craziness, and you can’t control their craziness. All you can do is establish that you have zero-tolerance for their bullshit and lay out consequences for them if they keep mainlining excrement. And then you need to get out of their way and let them figure things out for themselves.
Judd Gregg thinks that he can talk sense to these addicts if he grants them half their insanity. That’s like telling a junkie that it’s okay for him to abuse alcohol as long as he stays away from the smack. That won’t work. These people need some tough love and a 12-step program.
Their brains have been marinated in weaponized bullshit for so long that they don’t know how to function without it. They can’t be reasoned with until they’ve been right-wing media-free for at least 90 days. They probably need an inpatient treatment program that has no televisions or radios, and no email, either.
You can’t shame them. Begging won’t work. Anger won’t work. Negotiating won’t work. Guilt won’t work. Fear won’t work. Pretending you’re their best friend won’t work. You might as well stop being in denial about it and realize that only forcing them to own up to their problem is going to get them to begin on the road of recovery.
People don’t enter 12-step programs until they experentially hit bottom. There are big donors working overtime and spending lots of money to see that that doesn’t happen to the Tea Party members of Congress exploit the crazy to get the attention of their constituents.
Considering that their Pied Piper is a guy who had problems with oxycontin (and, who knows, might still have problems with addiction), and the fact that the constituents in a lot of these areas are in fact among the more culturally, economically, and politically stressed out in the US, it’s going to take something major to get them hitting bottom.
And the Democratic Party and White House have been coddling them and their craziness for quite a while. Mainly because the Wall Street media continues to lap it up for goosing ratings.
Exactly. They were all raised on Limbaugh’s crazy milk, weaned on Rush’s teats. I just don’t see them getting fixed. What is needed is for society to isolate them and their fellow travelers – and there is a lot of money out there trying to keep that from happening.
They can all move to South Carolina, secede, and create the ConservoChristoFascistTheocratic totalitarian state that they really want.
Then, a few months later, comes the Rapture. That is, when the rest of the USA nukes them all to bubbly molten glass.
Win-Win!
Dang, Snarki, I want to go back to my native state sometime. I don’t want to be stopped at the border because I don’t share the right ideology. And there are a lot of good folks trapped by the crazy majority in that state. A total of 865,941 (44.09%) of them even voted for Barack Obama in 2012.
If the Democrats there ever start trying to win instead of hunkering down trying to look like elephants, there might be some changes. Of course, that would require figuring out how to win a modern US election without having the advantage in money and media.
Didn’t we just do that last year? True, we’ve got to do better in 2014, but I think we have a pretty good idea how to do it.
Looking at the news today I’m thinking this might end the Republican party as an effective national political force. On the one hand you have McConnell, who in spite of being a diehard conservative, crazy obstructionist, and facing a primary challenge, is saying (sensibly) that you just can’t have a government shutdown over this. On the other hand, you have Erickson calling for Tea Partiers to primary out Republicans who don’t support the shutdown.
The sane conservatives, no matter how much they want to welch on their taxes and starve the poor, understand that an economic catastrophe is, well, a catastrophe. If the Tea Partiers can take over the primary process, and they’ve done pretty well so far, the sane conservatives will be forced to support the Democrats. But if the Tea Partiers stay home in disgust with “socialists” like McConnell and Ayotte (hahahahaha!) the Republicans are going to lose any vaguely competitive election.
People have been talking about this possibility for a while. But looking at the news, I’m starting to think it’s actually going to happen.
The problem is that the one person in the country who most desperately needs to heed this advice is John Boehner.
You can’t shame them. Begging won’t work. Anger won’t work. Negotiating won’t work. Guilt won’t work. Fear won’t work. Pretending you’re their best friend won’t work. You might as well stop being in denial about it and realize that only forcing them to own up to their problem is going to get them to begin on the road of recovery.
Which is why I want to gouge my eyeballs out when I turn on my TV last night and see Sheldon Whitehouse saying how maybe, just maybe; if we let the crazies vent a while and take us right to the brink, and we teeter on the edge of complete catastrophe, maybe actually have some semblance of a national disaster, that he hopes they might finally come around and just do what everyone knows is the right thing for the country.
Those of us who have been trapped for our entire lives out here in Glenn-Beckistan know this view is no less insane than the rantings of Ted Cruz.
It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, and anyone who knows an addict is familiar with this play and knows how it ends.
I don’t like the comparison to drug addicts that you constantly make. Not the first time either. Did it recently with regard to Rand Paul’s Charlie Sheen impersonation.
Drug addicts are (mostly) a victim to circumstance. It’s not the drug, it’s the cage. These cretins are nothing like drug addicts.
They are exactly like drug addicts in every single particular.
I can’t think of one way in which they are different.
They have consumed a dangerous substance for so long that they not only grew addicted to it but they grew an immense tolerance to the high it provides and need ever-growing amounts of crazy in order to stave off their jones.
The result is actual, physical brain damage.
It’s exactly the same.
And the only cure is the same. And we can’t cure it.
Some addicts have an idea what they’re doing to themselves and hate what they’re doing to others. All these “conservatives” have no clue what they’re doing to themselves and love what they’re doing to others.
The problem I have is that finally people like myself who favor a completely different look at our drug problems are starting to make headway that our way of treating addiction is completely wrong headed, and in order to change that we need to look again at just how people become addicts or why. Believe it or not, in many circumstances, they’re making perfectly rational decisions, and it’s the circumstance that is putting them down tht path. Maybe you can make he comparison that the circumstances of being primaried from the right pushes them to make these perfectly rational choices for their own political survival, but even that’s a stretch in my opinion.
I appreciate any attempt at demonstrating that drug users aren’t fucking fiends or monsters. And of course, reminding people that drug use has intersections with environmental and societal context.
But a lot of what I see here is treating it like your usual Prohibitionist: with mockery and scorn. No thanks. These Republicans ARE fiends and monsters.
best line of the post and so true
You have to knock them down until they can’t get up anymore. Only solution.