The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Could Dionne’s 21 July Column Be The Worst Dreck Ever?

Posted on | July 21, 2011 | 17 Comments

by Smitty (via Memeorandum)

It may not actually compete too heavily with some of Brooks’ or Krugman’s bowel ejections, but, nevertheless, stand by while I pump a few metaphorical rounds into the zombie known as “GOP leaders must free themselves from the Tea Party’s grip”

Dionne Smitty
Media reports are touting the Senate’s Gang of Six and its new budget outline. But the news that explains why the nation is caught in this debt-ceiling fiasco is the gang warfare inside the Republican Party. We are witnessing the disintegration of Tea Party Republicanism. Probably a paradox, Dionne. The GOP leadership is substantially Ruling Class; their populist squawks have frequently sounded as sincere as a John McCain speech. ‘Tea Party Republicanism’ is substantially an oxymoron.
The Tea Party’s followers have endangered the nation’s credit rating and the GOP by pushing both House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor away from their own best instincts. The Tea Party’s followers. Really. You’re sure that the clueless morons who spent beyond the nation’s means for decades had nothing to do with it, Dionne? You’re really so craven as to project all the blame upon those trying to argue for responsibility?
Cantor worked amicably with the negotiating group organized by Vice President Joe Biden and won praise for his focus even from liberal staffers who have no use for his politics.
Yet when the Biden group seemed close to a deal, it was shot down by the Tea Party’s champions. Boehner left Cantor exposed as the frontman in the Biden talks and did little to rescue him.		 That probably constitutes one way to characterize the events. Someone else might call the negotiations an abject farce. The Bowles-Simpson Debt Commission last year, for all it tried too hard to polish the Progressive, nanny state turd, was the last semi-mature effort seen from this administration.
Then it was Boehner’s turn on the firing line. He came near a bigger budget deal with President Obama, but the same right-wing rejectionists blew this up, too. Cantor evened the score by serving as a spokesman for Republicans opposed to any tax increase of any kind. Well, yes. The government continues to steal too much. Our federal government is so fundamentally dishonest as to trim spending growth and then label the trimmings a spending cut. It is almost as though the people inside the beltway are no longer speaking an understandable form of English.
Think about the underlying dynamic here. The evidence suggests that both Boehner and Cantor understand the peril of the game their Republican colleagues are playing. They know we are closer than we think to having the credit rating of the United States downgraded. This may happen before Aug. 2, the date everyone is using as the deadline for action. Ah, the dynamic. Past the political game of fretting who gets blamed when the ship of state stacks up on the seamount, there is the reality that the Welfare State is toast. Clowns such as yourself, Dionne, continue to argue in some abstract realm, bickering and arguing over who has the deck when the moment of grounding occurs. You’re simply not relevant, and these arguments aren’t meaningful, Dionne. Does that reality do harm an overblown sense of self-importance, Dionne?
Unfortunately, neither of the two House leaders seems in a position to tell the obstreperous right that it is flatly and dangerously wrong when it claims that default is of little consequence. Rarely has a congressional leadership seemed so powerless.
Compare the impasse Boehner and Cantor are in with the aggressive maneuvering of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. He knows how damaging default would be and is working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to concoct a way out.		 See, the joke’s on you, Dionne. Despite the last century of harm, the fundamental pattern of having the House turn over in half the time of the Executive is having the desired effect; a reckless Executive is being reminded that the government at least nominally works for the people, not the reverse.
McConnell can do this because he doesn’t confront the Tea Party problem that so bedevils Boehner and Cantor. Many of the Tea Party’s Senate candidates — Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska — lost in 2010. Boehner and Cantor, by contrast, owe their majority in part to Tea Party supporters. McConnell has a certain freedom to govern that his House leadership colleagues do not. Wow, you really know how to draw the wrong lesson, don’t you, Dionne? It’s true that the unbridled will of the people was less that totally effective against the Ruling Class Overlords. They were able to circle the wagons, and squeeze a couple more years of graft out of the system. But, again, the Progressive Era is hard aground, going nowhere, and taking on water. “McConnell has a certain freedom to govern”. Look at what you wrote. The NRSC has got to know, and I think the fundraising numbers bear me out, that the only way the Ruling Class Overlords could have less respect in the eyes of the Tea Parties would be to, say, legally change their names to Dionne.
And this is why Republicans are going to have to shake themselves loose from the Tea Party. Quite simply, the Tea Party’s legions are not interested in governing, at least as governing is normally understood in a democracy with separated powers. They believe that because the Republicans won one house of Congress in one election, they have a mandate to do whatever the right wing wants. A Democratic president and Senate are dismissed as irrelevant nuisances, although they were elected, too. It is nearly funny how you raise the ‘separated powers’ point, Dionne. Have you looked at the rot in the Executive? The DoJ? The EPA deciding to implement Cap & Trade? The FCC going after Net Neutrality? So, are you really that ignorant, or blowing sunshine up your readers’ bottoms? I tend to think the latter, and am thankful for an Internet which I can use to record the disgust and contempt that Americans of conscience feel for creepy little propaganda organs of your ilk.
The Tea Party lives in an intellectual bubble where the answers to every problem lie in books by F.A. Hayek, Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand. Rand’s anti-government writings, regarded by her followers as modern-day scripture — Rand, an atheist, would have bridled at that comparison — are particularly instructive. Really? Instructive? If I thought you actually were grasping anything of Austrian economics, I might be cheered.
When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel, “The Fountainhead,” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives. Your one-sentence summary of Rand’s novel is so brief as to be useless. And our government has been blown up by the thieving swine whose shoes you shine, not Americans demanding fiscal responsibility. And the Ruling Class Overlords in the House hardly qualify as ‘radical individualists’.
Our country is on the edge. Our capital looks like a lunatic asylum to many of our own citizens and much of the world. We need to act now to restore certainty by extending the debt ceiling through the end of this Congress. And the guilt is owned by the Ruling Class, Progressive idiots who’ve run the country into the dirt. Take a bow, servant of losers.
Boehner and Cantor don’t have time to stretch things out to appease their unappeasable members, and they should settle their issues with each other later. Nor do we have time to work through the ideas from the Gang of Six. The Gang has come forward too late with too little detail. Their suggestions should be debated seriously, not rushed through. Let’s just agree it’s a wash, and start to talk about how we run the government when outlays equal receipts. That would be, you know, useful. Reasonable.
Republicans need to decide whether they want to be responsible conservatives or whether they will let the Tea Party destroy the House That Lincoln Built in a glorious explosion. Such pyrotechnics may look great to some people on the pages of a novel or in a movie, but they’re rather unpleasant when experienced in real life. We need the reckoning, so that dead wood of your sort can be swept aside in favor of something responsible and honest, Dionne.
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