Showing posts with label #GOPFail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #GOPFail. Show all posts
10/15/13
I am worried. The US (and world) stands at an economic and political precipice today; I just hope the radical wing of the GOP doesn't push us into the abyss...
This paragraph from Politico.com sums up our situation on October 15, 2013:
Speaker John Boehner, who has wrestled with an unruly pack of conservatives for months, will soon be faced with an uncomfortable choice: Pass an emerging bipartisan Senate deal to lift the debt ceiling and fund the government, or don’t — and risk massive political and economic consequences.
10/11/13
Quote of the day
What is happening in the Republican Party today is reminiscent of what happened to the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
--John Judis
10/9/13
10/8/13
Quote of the day on GOP nihilism
...My best guess is that since they failed to make Obama a one-term president, they now intend to do what has become their custom with second-term Democratic presidents: impeach him. How to do it? Risk blowing up the entire global economy, bet on Obama caving at the end by some kind of dubious executive action, and then prosecute him for it. And what would that do exactly? It would not end Obamacare. But it would throw us instantly into both a Second Great Depression and a severe constitutional crisis.
I simply do not see here any actual constructive strategy to help the country recover from the worst recession in decades. I see absolutely no strategy to deal with what everyone agrees is a deeply dysfunctional and grotesquely inefficient healthcare system. I see no viable way to bring down the long-term debt, because such a goal can only be achieved in our system with compromises from both parties, and the GOP is offering nothing that only the Democrats want. That’s why this is such a serious crisis, because the key driver of it has no real idea what it wants to do except destroy a re-elected president.
This is a function of many factors the Dish has covered for years – the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism under George W Bush; the rise of fundamentalist thinking in religion, economics and politics; the cultural marooning of the white rural poor; the substitution of a political party with a media-industrial complex that simply wants conflict for ratings and money; the collapse of anything that might be called a conservative intelligentsia able to converse with a liberal intelligentsia on common, empirical grounds; the cowardice of Republican elites in the face of their know-nothing wing, epitomized most brutally by John McCain’s selection of a delusional crazy person as his vice-presidential candidate in 2008; and the recourse to purism of an almost absurdist variety on the right – see Mark Levin’s influential view that the entire Constitution needs to be made over.Full post here.
--Andrew Sullivan
10/7/13
The Tea Party mentality revealed...
They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to [Paranoid Style of American Politics author Richard] Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil.-- Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America Via the Daily Dish
10/2/13
Why part of the GOP's aversion to Obama is race-based
But when I mention race, I should unpack my point. It’s not a simple one, and I do not mean to be glib or too casual in throwing that word around.
I’m talking about the difference between opposition to a president’s agenda and a belief that he is somehow an impostor, illegitimate, and a usurper for reasons that seem, in the end, to come down to racial and cultural panic.
Do I have to recount the endless accusations against Obama of such? No president has been subjected to endless litigation of his birth certificate or his religious faith (as if the latter mattered anyway). No president has been heckled in a State of the Union address with the words “You lie!” as Obama was. There was no claim that George W Bush was illegitimate because he muscled through a huge Medicare expansion as he was destroying this country’s fiscal standing having lost the popular vote to Al Gore.
The Democrats didn’t threaten to shut the government down to stop anything he did. And no Republican, facing a major economic crisis, has received zero votes from the opposition in his first year. Both Bushes and Reagan won considerable Democratic support for tax cuts and tax hikes in their early years. The opposition accepted the legitimacy of the election. That’s the difference.
Full article
--Andrew Sullivan
Only like he can do it, Andrew Sullivan on the GOP government shutdown
From the Daily Dish:
“When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness. I know I’m very much a minority among conservatives in this, but the behavior of Congressional Republicans pushed me out of the party two years ago, even though I almost always vote Republican, or withhold my vote.
I am not a liberal, and do not want to vote for liberals, especially on social policy. But I told a Louisiana conservative friend the other day that the Congressional Republicans are making me consider the previously unthinkable: throwing my vote away by voting for a Democrat in the special election next month to replace my GOP congressman, who just resigned to take another job. The GOP candidates in this local race are hot and heavy to overthrow Obamacare. I think about how poor this district is — 26 percent of the district lives in poverty, making it one of the poorest Congressional districts in America — and how badly we need jobs and economic growth, and I think: What kind of world do these people live in?” – Rod Dreher.
You can tell I’m in the same camp, although I gave up completely on the GOP a decade ago as I saw its craven acquiescence to an imperial presidency, its love of massive, unfunded spending, its dogged support of wars of doomed nation-building, and its Christianist loathing of almost anything vibrant in modernity. But these past few days, by pure accident, I’ve thought about them in a slightly new perspective. I’ve been in Washington, DC, for a bunch of minor medical procedures: my thrice-yearly testosterone implant; my flu shot; a booster pneumonia shot; an HPV vaccine; an impending colonoscopy; an HIV blood test; and last, but by no means least, a repair of an umbilical hernia that has had me immobile since Friday. My compromised immune system requires constant check-ups, and the Dish now pays for my COBRA insurance – which will soon have to be traded in for Obamacare because my options are running out.
A word to Republicans: why would you want to deny someone these basic forms of healthcare? Or force them into bankruptcy because of them?
I could struggle on for a while without them and without my HIV meds. But sooner or later, I’d start running out of money, probably get a bad case of pneumonia, or an uptick in likelihood of cancer if my HIV breaks out again, or a hernia operation that was urgent rather than precautionary, or a debilitating bout of flu likely to make my asthma-ridden lungs even weaker in the future. This is the fragile reality I live in as a spectacularly privileged, if immuno-suppressed inhabitant of one of the most advanced societies on earth. But take any of it away and my well-being and basic health begin to fray.
Are you, Republicans, prepared to say that the countless working Americans who cannot now afford any of this should carry on without it indefinitely? People only have one life, you know. It can erode pretty quickly. On what moral grounds do you consign people to this fate when it is currently unnecessary?
I understand the important arguments about cost control, and any number of arguments about how to construct a system like this. I think I’ve heard them now for close to three decades – and we’ve all benefited from the arguments. But these needs are about as real as any can be. And our system has passed a remedy of sorts. It will need adjustment, reform, cost-cutting, and constructive criticism to make it work as well as it might. But seriously, after all we’ve gone through, you’re prepared to bring our entire system of government to a halt in order to prevent sick people from getting access to this kind of treatment?
What hallucinating, self-serving monsters have you become?
10/1/13
Quote of the day, by a GOP congressman about his colleagues: "Lemmings with suicide vests"
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) had choice words for fellow House Republicans who are willing to see the government shut down over their opposition to Obamacare: "Lemmings with suicide vests," he called them.
"They have to be more than just a lemming. Because jumping to your death is not enough," he said.
"You have this group saying somehow if you’re not with them, you’re with Obamcare. If you’re not with their plan -- exactly what they want to do, you’re with Obamcare. It’s getting a little old," he said.
Three most articulate reactions to the Republican's government shutdown
Ezra Klein gets to the heart of it:
Jon Stewart reminds America of what really happened here:
Rachel talks about the GOP rightward, extremist shift:
Jon Stewart reminds America of what really happened here:
Rachel talks about the GOP rightward, extremist shift:
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