The only real questions are how long will this charade will go on and what kind of smoking husk will be left of the Republican Party when it’s over.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer likened House Republicans to suicide bombers, kidnappers and arsonists in a single interview on Thursday.
“What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest,” Pfeiffer told CNN’s Jake Tapper in laying out the president’s refusal to compromise with the GOP to win an increase in the nation’s debt limit. “We’re not going to do that.”
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Pfeiffer also offered up analogies comparing Republicans to kidnappers and arsonists.
He referred to a list of Republican add-ons to a debt-limit bill as “ransom demands,” and said “it’s not a negotiation if I show up at your house and say give me everything inside or I’m going to burn it down.”
All day long, Republican senators have been going to the floor to badmouth the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, using language that is either distorted, one-sided, or simply made up. And they are the reasonable ones. The Mighty Right-Wing Media Wurlitzer has churned out so many lies about ObamaCare and raised so many false fears and expectations, that they have created a singularity. Like a supermassive black hole, this singularity has an immense gravitational pull, and it is pulling the entire Republican Party into its maw. Logic, reason, political common sense, understanding of the Senate rules, self-preservation, relations with the business community, our credit rating, realism, practicality, and the truth are all being sucked right into this black hole of “asininity.”
And it is already chewing them to pieces. Nothing any of them are saying has even a passing resemblance to the truth unless it is immediately preceded or succeeded by one of the biggest lies you have ever heard. And, in the end, the whole farce will be shown for what it is. The Republicans will have to cave completely and totally, and have nothing to show for their efforts except disappointment, disillusionment, and a health care bill that doesn’t do any of the harmful things they all agree it will do.
I always knew that there would be a time of reckoning. It turned out that the opening of the ObamaCare exchanges is that time. Now they pay the consequences for their sustained mass hallucination. It will be much like when Romney convinced himself that he was about to be elected president, but on a far broader and consequential scale for the Party of Lincoln.
No one in their leadership or their rank-and-file or their base is prepared, even a little, for the sting that is coming.