Trumpism Is Getting Bad Press-- Everywhere

Tom Nichols is author of The Death Of Expertise and that video above was recorded before Trumpism really took hold in America as Trumpism. The Know Thing impulses were always around, but not focused and ascendant as they became once they were in the Oval Office. Yesterday, writing for USA Today, Nichols addressed the problem as it stands now: As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult. "America," he wrote, "has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.

It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis-- a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic-- would snap people back to reality.

I was wrong to be so optimistic.

Endangering others as empowerment

Some states (including Rhode Island, where I live) have had great success in asking their citizens to cooperate for the common good. Other communities, unfortunately, have had to endure shouting matches with bellowing ignoramuses who think it is intolerable that they be asked to wear a mask while shopping or ordering food-- two things people in other countries would gladly do wrapped in aluminum foil and with prayers of thanks on their lips if they got to do it in the United States of America.

There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.

When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues-- masks, no masks, closing, opening-- from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift.

Not all of those who have been reckless and irresponsible are Trump supporters. There are, as always, young people who believe they are invincible. And some experts inflicted a huge wound on themselves right in the middle of this crisis by blessing the Black Lives Matter protests rather than repeating stern warnings they gave to other Americans that such events are dangerous.

But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

Reject expertise and trust Trump

So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.

The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump-- a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars-- as the gospel truth.

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

But that is how cults work, and woe to anyone who crosses them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over 35 years, has endured attacks from the White House and some members of Congress because some Republicans believe that he is somehow trying to use the pandemic against the president. Worse, Fauci now has to travel with security, as Americans treat the rest of the world to the shameful sight of one of the most accomplished scientists in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world having to be guarded against unhinged cultists in his own country.

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them.

The concern goes beyond our borders. And, as Roger Cohen editorialized in the NY Times Friday, "No people has found the American lurch toward authoritarianism under President Trump more alarming than the Germans. For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the 'American catastrophe.' A recent cover of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel portrays Trump in the Oval Office holding a lighted match, with a country ablaze visible through his window. The headline: Der Feuerteufel, or, literally, the Fire Devil."

There's A History Of Extremists Who Can't Get Their Way Trying To Destroy The U.S. Government

Yesterday on Meet The Press Texas neo-fascist Ted Cruz adamantly refused to acknowledge to Chuck Todd that Ayn Rand devotee Paul Ryan is a "true conservative." Cruz drew a contrast by pointing out that Hate Talk Radio host Mark Levin, who is anti-Ryan, is a true conservative. "I like Paul Ryan," said Cruz. "He’s a friend of mine." Imagine if he didn't like him and didn't want to pose as a Ryan "friend!" One guy who really has been a friend of Cruz's is Trump-- an odd couple if there ever was one (although Cruz and unlikely odd couples...). Also on Meet the Press yesterday, Cruz mentioned that "Others have gone out of their way to smack [Trump]; I haven’t. I think Donald's campaign has been immensely beneficial for our campaign. … And the reason is he's framed the central issue of this Republican primary as who will stand up to Washington? Well, the natural follow-up, if that's the question, is who actually has stood up to Washington? Who has stood up to both Democrats and to leaders in their own party. I think my record is markedly different in terms of actually standing up and taking on the Washington cartel and I think that's why we're seeing particularly… as voters get more and more educated, study the candidates, listen to the candidates in person, I think that's why we're seeing the grass roots momentum… we're seeing… is conservatives… coalescing behind our campaign." Ultimately Trump will find a reason to as well. Cruz will be the GOP's disastrous nominee next year, probably with congenital liar Carly Fiorina in tow.



This as the American people, even those not yet engaged with the spectacle of a presidential election over a year away, are noticing that the Republican majority in Congress is congenitally incapable of governing and that they are, in effect, a natural opposition party-- and a mess.

Consider the political spectacle on Capitol Hill, in which Speaker John Boehner, hardly a Rockefeller Republican, could no longer deal with his caucus and, with little more than a chorus of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” announced his early retirement. Members of the caucus stepped forward to admit that the hearings on Benghazi were aimed less at uncovering the truth than at burying Hillary Clinton. An ambitious Party loyalist, Paul Ryan, is reluctant to run for Boehner’s chair because the House Republicans are the new Wild Bunch and, as a friend of Ryan’s put it to Politico, “he’s not a fucking moron.” [Actually, he kind of is... but that's a different and well-covered story.]


Consider, too, the G.O.P. candidates for the White House. Donald Trump and Ben Carson, the only Republicans polling in double digits, daily clear their throats with that ritual preface of modern self-satisfaction-- “I am not politically correct”-- and then unleash statements, positions, and postures so willfully detached from fact that they embarrass the political culture that harbors them. Trump is willing to say anything-- anything racist, anything false, anything “funny”-- to terrify voters, or rile them, or amuse them, depending on the moment. The worst of his demagogic arousals are reminiscent of Lindbergh’s speeches at America First rallies and his fear, as he wrote in Reader’s Digest, of a “pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown.” Carson, who seems as historically confused as he is surgically skilled, has said that Obamacare is worse than 9/11, “because 9/11 is an isolated incident.” What’s more, the two men’s rivals either fall into line or lack the persuasive powers and the courage to marginalize candidates they know to be dangerous.

An ugly spectacle? You ain't seen nothing yet. Heather Cox Richardson warns about what's coming down the pike:

The Movement Conservatives now calling the shots in the Republican Party are forcing the nation toward a Constitutional crisis. A very small number of extremists are trying to bend the federal government to their will. They want to force the president to abandon his own policies and adopt theirs. If he refuses to cave in to their demands to kill Planned Parenthood, they will refuse to fund the government. They will force it to shut down. The thirty or forty people in the secretive “House Freedom Caucus,” elected by voters only from their own deeply Republican districts, want to erase the constitutional role of the president. They want to impose their will on the American people.

They have deliberately set out to destroy the American constitutional system.

This is not the first time the America government has seen such an assault. The nation faced a similar crisis after the Civil War. Then, Americans saw the threat for what it was. That the revolutionaries were attempting a political coup was obvious. Only twenty years before the very same men had tried to dismember the United States government using cannons and rifles. The crisis of 1879 looks much the same as today’s, although the Republicans and Democrats have traded positions.

In 1879, Democrats took control of Congress for the first time since the 1850s. Voters had backed Democratic candidates primarily because of a deep recession that they blamed on the Republicans in power. A small cabal of former Confederates within the party, though, insisted they had a mandate to reverse the course the country had taken since they had seceded in 1861. They set out to return the South to white control once and for all. “The great blunder of our section was in abandoning our seats in Congress in 1861,” one Democratic representative told the New York Times. The better plan was to seize control of Congress and run the entire United States.

To that end, the 1879 revolutionaries had a simple plan. They would refuse to fund the government unless the Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes took the few remaining the U.S. Army troops out of the South (that the troops were removed in 1877 as part of a corrupt bargain is a myth). These men forced a weak Speaker of the House, the long-forgotten Pennsylvania Democrat Samuel J. Randall, to attach riders to a series of routine appropriations bills, one after the other. These riders ended military protection in the South for African American voting. They made holding federal troops at the polls punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment at hard labor for three months to five years; that is, an express ride into the Southern convict labor system that by then was brutalizing freedmen. Essentially, the riders reestablished the Democratic white supremacist policies Republicans had spent almost twenty years uprooting. Democrats planned to force Republican President Hayes to choose between caving to their demands or to leaving government obligations unpaid. They gambled that he would sign the bills to keep the government afloat.

But he didn’t... Hayes vetoed five appropriations bills with the riders.

The ex-Confederates had overplayed their hand. As the stalemate dragged on, popular opinion turned against the Democrats carrying water for the extremist former Confederates. After four months, the Confederate cabal backed down. But they had inflicted irreparable damage on their cause. Americans who believed in the country and the Constitution shunned the Democrats and rallied to the Republicans. In 1880, voters put James A. Garfield into the White House and Republicans back in charge of Congress. The extremists were cooked. Control of the Democratic Party moved away from the South to the northern cities, where reformers like Grover Cleveland, who would lead the party in 1884, accepted the Republicans’ southern policies and focused on urban issues instead.

The crisis of 1879 holds lessons for today, as an extremist cabal of Movement Conservatives searches for a House Speaker who will promise to make raising the debt ceiling contingent on defunding Planned Parenthood. Now, as in 1879, these extremists ran roughshod over a weak House Speaker, claiming a mandate to overturn the policies endorsed by the majority of Americans. Now, as in 1879, those extremists seek to bend a president of the opposite party to their will by holding government finances hostage until they get their way. Now, as in 1879, they threaten the structure of American democracy.

It is worth hoping that now, as in 1879, Americans will recognize this revolution for what it is, and that today, as they did then, voters will expel the extremists from power.

Tellingly, history professor Cox Richardson, author of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party entitled her piece yesterday Ted Cruz wants to be king: Make no mistake, the GOP extremists’ real goal is absolute control.

Bitter In-Fighting Has Turned The GOP Into A Stalinist Nightmare-- And The Response From Mainstream Republicans Has Been Like Refusing To Get Chemotherapy Because You Want Your Body To Unite With Your Cancerous Tumor

There are few substantive issues that I would find much agreement on with mainstream conservatives like Charlie Dent (R-PA), Chris Gibson (R-NY), Bob Dold (R-IL), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Richard Hanna (R-NY), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ). My heart goes out to them, though. But none of these congressmen are crackpots, nihilists, infants, sociopaths or anarchists who want to make the country ungovernable if they can't get their way. David Brat (R-VA) is. If you missed Brat arguing with Charlie Dent on Meet the Press Sunday, watch the video up top. Hugh Hewett, the first talking head questioning the two Republicans, is very much a right-wing GOP kook. And even he's sick of the backbiting Republican extremists that are grinding the whole country to a halt and making it impossible for a government to function in an orderly and efficient way.

It goes beyond the grotesque corruption inadvertently exposed by the Speaker-who-never-was when he admitted Trey Gowdy's phony-baloney Benghazi Committee was never anything but a sick, partisan witch hunt at the taxpayers expense. But there is something we can learn about the GOP's willingness to feed their extremists red meat from that sordid episode. There needs it be an investigation of the investigation. Why haven't Trey Gowdy and Darrell Issa resigned from Congress yet?

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is reeling again after a fired GOP investigator accused the Republican majority of conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton-- accusations the right says are an attempt to get the committee to pay him a settlement.

Major Bradley Podliska, who left the panel in June after about 10 months on the job, told CNN on Sunday he was fired because he refused to conduct a partisan probe of the former secretary of state. He said the panel has veered off its original course to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that left four Americans dead-- instead zeroing in on Clinton following news that she used private email while secretary of state.

...Podliska is a Republican and believes the Benghazi investigation holds merit, making his criticism of the panel all the more stinging for the committee. A lawyer for Podliska said he was not partisan and never authorized anyone to go after Clinton.

"I'm scared. I'm nervous. I know that this is, you know, I'm going up against powerful people in Washington. But at the end of the day I need to live with myself," he told CNN. "I told my wife, I will view myself as a coward if I don't do the right thing here."

...Podliska, an Air Force Reserve intelligence officer, plans to file a lawsuit against the panel next month for wrongful termination. Podliska said the termination was twofold: because of his unwillingness to focus his probe solely on Clinton and State but also for taking a leave of absence to fulfill military service obligations.

"I was fired for going on military service, and I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, nonpartisan, thorough investigation," Podliska said.

Meanwhile Bill Scher, a conservative Democrat, begged the conservative Republicans he sometimes makes common cause with to not give in to far-right bullies, telling them that "[p]utting party first has proved to be their fatal error. Instead of standing up to the far-right bullies who perennially take the government hostage for the conservative outrage du jour, Boehner and McCarthy have effectively let them dictate how the House is run." He wrote at Real Clear Politics that Boehner and the mainstream conservatives in the GOP should "have it out for good with what had been known as the Tea Party. He could have drawn a red line by refusing to allow a shutdown in 2013, or forcing a vote on bipartisan immigration reform."

Boehner chose a different path, allowing the inmates to run wild in the asylum while trying to contain the havoc they wreaked. He let them learn the hard way that a government shutdown would hurt Republican poll numbers. He shelved the immigration reform package he said he wanted, shifting the blame to President Obama. He prevented an automatic yet politically suicidal cut in Medicare doctor reimbursements-- opposed by right-wing fiscal scolds-- by sneaking it through the House on a hastily called voice vote.

One can understand why Boehner would go to great lengths to avoid a Republican civil war, especially before the 2014 midterms. Control of the Senate was in sight, as well as a broader House majority. Theoretically, that would free the Republican leadership from the nihilists, and allow them to pass problem-solving legislation that could frame the debate for 2016 on their terms.

But theory was not reality. Only days after the 2015 congressional swearing-in, the House Freedom Caucus formed and painted a target on the speaker’s back. Nonstop fractiousness made the most basic legislative tasks a protracted grind, sidelining any hope of rebranding the party with a shiny new legislative agenda. With greater power did not come greater responsibility.

Something had to give. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “no more government shutdowns” ultimatum suggested that the Republican leadership finally had enough. Boehner no longer had the option of letting the hard right learn the hard way all over again. A showdown was unavoidable. Then Boehner slunk from the fight.

It’s not as if Boehner doesn’t agree that his right flank has become detrimental to the party. “We have,” he said in that CBS exit interview, “members of the House and Senate here in town who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know, they know, are never going to happen.”

And he knows they cannot be allowed to control the House and represent the face of the GOP if the party is to be competitive in presidential election years. Yet he is allowing that to happen. Abdication doesn’t remove the tumor. The cancer attacks whomever comes next.

I have no doubt that a full-blown confrontation would be as brutal as chemotherapy. Boehner was not wrong that his allies would face primary challenges. Several could lose. What would emerge after the civil war is uncertain. But letting the Freedom Caucus cancer metastasize is an untenable prospect for a major political party.

What’s maddening about this Republican rift is how small the ideological gap is between the factions. This is not a Whig Party torn apart over slavery. That schism led to the creation of the Republican Party. One hundred and sixty years later, the Grand Old Party is breaking apart, not over fundamental philosophic disagreement but over tactics.

And not even the tactics of winning, but the tactics of losing-- how Republicans should handle proposals that cannot survive a Senate filibuster or presidential veto. By putting party unity above all, nearly everyone in the party lost. John Boehner lost his job. Kevin McCarthy lost his ambitions. The party as a whole lost its chance to prove it can govern competently.

Republicans may try to paper-over the rift yet again, praying that Rep. Paul Ryan has the credibility to keep the Freedom Caucus in line. But you can’t remove a cancer with a faith healer.

But with the really craziest of the extremists Ryan has no credibility whatsoever. And that is very upsetting to elderly Republicans. "Anyone who attacks Paul Ryan as being insufficiently conservative is either woefully misinformed or maliciously destructive," said Tom Cole, a very conservative Republican from southern Oklahoma. "Paul Ryan has played a major role in advancing the conservative cause and creating the Republican House majority. His critics are not true conservatives. They are radical populists who neither understand nor accept the institutions, procedures and traditions that are the basis of constitutional governance." What Cole, an old fashioned Republican and ally of Boehner, doesn't understand about the new brand of Ted Cruz neo-fascist Republicans dominating his party is that "constitutional governance," itself, which depends on compromise, is viewed with outright hostility and fury.

Over the weekend Matthew Yglesias, writing at Vox suggested one of the options open to House Republicans now "would be for the House to simply not elect a new speaker. Boehner has made it clear that he remains in office as speaker until a successor is chosen, and if the GOP caucus can't pick a successor, that means Boehner sticks around. Since Boehner is already in office, he doesn't need 218 votes. And since he isn't trying to keep his job, he doesn't need to worry about placating the right. A Boehner-led House would simply do very little. 'Must-pass' measures like the debt ceiling, appropriations bills, and disaster aid would simply be hashed out between the White House and GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, and then Boehner could bring them to the floor, where they would pass with a mix of GOP and Democratic votes... A more creative, but structurally similar, scenario would involve 50 or so House Democrats joining with the bulk of Republicans to elect an orthodox conservative Republican to serve as speaker. In exchange, the GOP caucus would need to agree to buck the Freedom Caucus crowd on must-pass legislation and agree to bring these compromise bills to the floor. Legislative outcomes would be essentially identical to the ones we've been getting, but there would be less posturing and drama, and we would simply skip to the part where McConnell-Obama compromises pass the House despite opposition from many House Republicans."

This is the time when a competent DCCC would come into play-- and elect a Democratic House. Unfortunately, a decade of unbelievably bad leadership from Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel has rendered the DCCC so incapable of winning and so structurally compromised that there's a better chance that the country will wind up with an honest-to-God Stalinist government than there is that the DCCC will come even close to winning back a House, something that should be nearly a sure bet at this point. Pelosi's worst failing was the DCCC and it has been absolutely catastrophic for the Democrats... and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The Republicans could turn the House floor into a real life scene from a chillingly gruesome Hieronymus Bosch painting and Steve Israel and his sock-puppet Ben Ray Luján would lose anyway.

Who Do Republican Congressmembers Hate More, Patients Or Doctors?

In 2011, the Washington Post's Wonkblog brought some clarity to the much-used term, "doc-fix." They made it sound so easy.

Ever since Medicare was created in 1965, the federal government has struggled to decide how much to pay Medicare doctors for their services. Democrats and Republicans alike have drawn up complex formulas with wonky names to set reimbursement levels. The Medicare Economic Index was the formula of choice in the 1970s. That was ousted in the 1990s by the Volume Performance Standard.

In 1997, Congress created a new formula called the Sustainable Growth Rate, or SGR. Using Medicare spending in the 1990s as a baseline, the formula factored in overall economic growth to create the annual Medicare budget. The goal was to control Medicare spending by tethering it to the rest of the economy’s growth. And, for a few years, this worked fine; the equation pretty accurately predicted how much Medicare would cost. But, as health care costs outpaced the economy, it has stopped working, leaving the entitlement with a multi-billion-dollar shortfall.

What’s the doc-fix? When Medicare funding falls short, Congress is left with two options: Cut doctors’ pay or appropriate additional funds. Legislators don’t really like the first one; they worry providers would flee the program if their salaries were slashed. So since 2003, under both Democratic and Republican control, Congress has passed short-term doc-fixes to keep provider payments stable (or, in some cases, give doctors a slight raise). These pay-patches have ranged from a few years to just 30 days. In 2010 alone, Congress has passed five separate doc-fixes, none longer than six months. Last December, Congress passed a one-year doc-fix that cost $19 billion and lasts til the end of 2011.

…Has Congress ever failed to pass a doc-fix? What happens then? Last summer, a doc-fix got held up as part of a larger package of stimulus spending and unemployment benefits, allowing a 21 percent cut in doctor reimbursements to go into effect. Then, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services told providers to hold off on submitting claims for two weeks in hopes that, by then, Congress would come up with a solution. Congress eventually did, but not without many provider complaints on the disruption to cash flow that the uncertainty had caused.

Congress has become so dysfunctional-- with so many nihilistic right-wing extremists who would rather cause harm and pain than solve problems-- that Boehner and Cantor realized they would have to trick the dominant psycho-wing of their own party to pass it this year. The Senate needed it fast and Reid asked Boehner to get on the stick… so he waited until enough of his own members were visiting K Street to collect bribes Thursday before having Cantor quickly calling the question and passing it on a voice vote. Right-wing extremists are chewing off their legs in anger at having missed another opportunity for a hostage crisis.

Angry House conservatives denounced the Republican leadership for abruptly ramming through a fix to Medicare doctor payments on Thursday without a full roll call vote.

“Outrageous,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told The Hill after complaining about the maneuver to a colleague. “I think it’s outrageous.”

House Republican leaders had planned to bring up the “doc fix” under a procedure requiring a two-thirds majority to pass, but after a series of closed-door meetings on Thursday morning, they determined they didn’t have the votes to meet that threshold and didn’t want to stay in session long enough to set up a simple majority vote.

So with just a few members on the House floor before a scheduled vote on an unrelated Ukraine measure, Republicans brought up the Medicare bill by voice vote. When no one in the chamber objected, the measure passed.

“Bullshit,” said a visibly annoyed Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) as he emerged from the floor following the Ukraine vote. When Mulvaney was asked to comment about the upcoming GOP budget, he replied: “I can’t talk about the budget because I’m so pissed about the [doc fix].”

Democratic leaders signed off on the move, and rank-and-file members were more amused than anything else.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said he was one of just a handful of Democrats on the floor when the voice vote occurred and that he was surprised when no recorded vote was requested.

“There was a voice vote and you could hear 'nos' all from our side of the aisle,” he said.

He said it was his understanding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) office pushed House leaders to not require a recorded vote because it was necessary to send some form of the doc fix to the upper chamber quickly.

…Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the retiring dean of the House, mused to reporters, “I’ve seen a lot of dumb things, but I’ve never seen anything as comical as this.”

What happens when Boehner and Cantor run out of ways to trick the morons and sociopaths in their caucus. What happens to our country when the people who mean it harm take over for real?

The Republican Party Is Now Distilled Down To A Ransom Note To America

Suicide bomber vests strapped to their chests, congressional Republicans have a message for the American people: "Give us our way, or we'll blow the whole damn thing up!" And by their way, they're talking about a lot more than defunding the Affordable Care Act. Yesterday, the NY Times Editorial Board was aghast at the Republican demands-- and they called it what it is A Republican Ransom Note.

We’ll refrain from deliberately sabotaging the global economy, Speaker John Boehner and the other leaders said, if President Obama allows more oil drilling on federal lands. And drops regulations on greenhouse gases. And builds the Keystone XL oil pipeline. And stops paying for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And makes it harder to sue for medical malpractice. And, of course, halts health care reform for a year.

The list would be laughable if the threat were not so serious. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a default on government debt, shattering the world’s faith in Treasury bonds as an investment vehicle and almost certainly bringing on another economic downturn. Unlike a government shutdown, a default could leave the Treasury without enough money to pay Social Security benefits or the paychecks of troops.

...[T]he absurdity of the list shows just how important it is that Mr. Obama ignore every demand and force the House extremists to decide whether they really want to be responsible for an economic catastrophe. He made a mistake by negotiating in 2011, hoping to reach a grand bargain; that produced the corrosive sequester cuts.

To prevent the House from making every debt-ceiling increase an opportunity to issue extortionist demands for rejected policies they can achieve in no other way, the president has to put an end to the routine creation of emergencies once and for all by simply saying no.

Also in yesterday's Times was a piece by Ashley Parker on the Republican Party civil war over the Tea Party attempt to take over the whole kit'n'kaboodle. When you read this, keep in mind that just after it was published, these 25 Republicans voted against Ted Cruz's deranged filibuster that would have shut down the government:

• Lamar Alexander (TN)
• Kelly Ayotte (NH)
• John Barrasso (WY)
• Roy Blunt (MO)
• John Boozman (AR)
• Richard Burr (NC)
• Saxby Chambliss (GA)
• Jeff Chiesa (NJ)
• Dan Coats (IN)
• Tom Coburn (OK)
• Thad Cochran (MS)
• Susan Collins (ME)
• Bob Corker (TN)
• John Cornyn (TX)
• Lindsey Graham (SC)
• John Hoeven (ND)
• Johnny Isakson (SC)
• Mike Johanns (NE)
• Ron Johnson (WI)
• Mark Kirk (IL)
• John McCain (AZ)
• Mitch McConnell (KY)
• Lisa Murkowski (AK)
• John Thune (SD)
• Roger Wicker (MS)

That's not the Senate's Ted Cruz fan club. In the end, Cruz and Lee only persuaded 17 other Republicans to join them in their crackpot quest for glory. Mike Enzi (WY) was too scared of the Cheney daughter's primary challenge to do what he knew was right, the way Barrasso did. There's been chatter on the neo-Nazi fringe of the GOP all week about a primary against Thad Cochran. His vote against Cruz probably clinches it. Probably the most surprising vote was Ron Johnson's leaving his Tea Party brethren to vote with the mainstream conservatives. He must be really scared of losing his seat to a Democrat-- probably Russ Feingold-- in 2016.

Organizations leading the Defund Obamacare movement then turned their attention to the Senate. The Club for Growth, one of the groups leading the charge, on Tuesday issued a “Key Vote Alert” to senators, urging them to vote “no” on a measure that would remove the defunding proposal from a stopgap spending bill.

“This is just a test of if Republicans are for what they say they’re for, and if they’re willing to fight for what they say they’re for,” said Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth, which plans to “score” how lawmakers vote on the bill.

Within the ranks of Republican legislators, the frustration is palpable. House Republican leaders believe that the outside groups are pursuing a strategy that, while politically popular, is tactically unfeasible and could ultimately lead to Republicans being blamed for a government shutdown.

“They’re making a lot of money and they like making a lot of money and they like being players, but they are, in fact, jamming the leaders,” said Steven C. LaTourette, a moderate Republican from Ohio who retired from the House last year and was a close ally of Mr. Boehner. “They seize on an issue and they have litmus tests about who’s a good Republican and who’s pure and who’s not pure.  They used to do that in Salem, Mass., too, but it’s not fair.”

...In the Senate, the influence of outside groups reached a fever pitch during a closed-door meeting of all Republican senators Tuesday, when several members expressed their bitterness, anger and frustration at what they see as an orchestrated effort by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and outside groups to attack colleagues who disagree with their tactics in the fight against Mr. Obama’s health care law.

Many senators are particularly frustrated with the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that has been running ads-- some of which featured Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah-- that attack Republicans who are not supporting their Defund Obamacare movement. The group recently called Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, “turncoats.”

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, referring to outside groups generally, said, “I’d be ashamed to have anything to do with them, to be honest with you.”

For Republicans in the House ready to abandon a more mainstream conservatism for a more radical and fascist orientation, the Chamber of Commerce and a couple hundred of its affiliates, had a little message Friday:

The undersigned 236 organizations urge the House of Representatives and the United States Senate to pass a Continuing Resolution to ensure the uninterrupted funding of the federal government into the next fiscal year and to act expeditiously to raise the nation’s debt limit.

We appreciate fully the importance of restraining federal spending, both discretionary spending and mandatory spending, to reduce federal budget deficits, contain the growth of federal debt, and thereby re-establish fiscal discipline in the near-term and for the long haul. However, with the U.S. economy continuing to underperform, the federal government needs to maintain its normal operations pending a successful outcome of broader budgetary reforms. It is not in the best interest of the employers, employees or the American people to risk a government shutdown that will be economically disruptive and create even more uncertainties for the U.S. economy. Likewise, we respectfully urge the Congress to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner and remove any threat to the full faith and credit of the United States government.

The Republican Party Seems Mighty Fractious, But How Much Does That Matter?

Mike Lee threatens to shut down the government if he's not put in the picture

Republicans are tearing each other apart over a number of issues. In the last few days that's been personified by the increasingly bitter personal exchanges between domestic spying advocate and Establishment whore Chris Christie and Kentucky libertarian/Tea Party isolationist Rand Paul. But an even bigger battle is brewing over a vote-- the "continuing resolution"-- to fund government operations.

Neo-fascist Utah freshman Mike Lee sees a noisy nihilistic battle over this as a way to pump up his name recognition nationally so he can be mentioned as a contender just like fellow right-wing freshmen Cruz, Paul and Rubio. He's circulating a letter insisting that unless Obama halt implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the GOP will shut down the government. Although a number of dull, zombie-like Republicans immediately jumped aboard, McConnell persuaded almost all of them to "unsign" Lee's dangerous letter. The only ones left on board are Rubio, still trying to make up with teabaggers for pushing immigration reform, John Thune and Oklahoma crackpot James Inhofe. Teabaggers in the House led by Indiana radical Marlin Stutzman, have their own similar letter they're circulating to try to force poor, pathetic Boehner to shut the government down; there are already a few dozen signers. Tuesday Bob Corker (R-TN) called the strategy a "silly effort... These people are just taking themselves out of the debate." That's a more diplomatic way of saying what Richard Burr (R-NC) said last week: "The dumbest idea I've ever heard."

The National Review's editor, Ramesh Ponnuru, thinks Lee is wasting everyone's time (and political capital). Earlier this week he wrote that "conservatives on Capitol Hill think they have a chance to strike a mortal blow against President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul this fall. If their plan goes forward, however, it will backfire... Either would be highly unpopular, and each party would blame the other. The public, however, would almost certainly blame Republicans, for five reasons. First, Republicans are less popular than the Democrats and thus all else equal will lose partisan finger-pointing contests. Second, the executive has natural advantages over a group of legislators in a crisis atmosphere. Third, people will be naturally inclined to assume that the more anti-government party must be responsible. Fourth, some Republicans will say that government shutdowns or defaults are just what the country needs, and those quotes will affect the image of all Republicans. And fifth, the news media will surely side with the Democrats."

Other senators who have spoken out against this publicly include John McCain's Maverick personality: "Some of my Republican colleagues are already saying we won't raise the debt limit unless there's repeal of Obamacare. I'd love to repeal Obamacare, but I promise you that's not going to happen on the debt limit. So some would like to set up another one of these shutdown-the-government threats. And most Americans are really tired of those kinds of shenanigans here in Washington." His little sidekick Lindsey asked "How do you fund the military" if we shit down the government? And Inhofe's Oklahoma colleague, Tom Coburn isn't having any of it either: "It's not an achievable strategy. It's creating the false impression that you can do something when you can't. And it's dishonest."

While Rand Paul was on Fox with Hannity last week, he took time away from insinuating Chris Christie doesn't have the self-control to go on a diet so he wouldn't have the self-control to be a disciplined GOP candidate to deride his own craven party caucus. Hannity, who, obviously is all gung-ho on a government shutdown, even if he doesn't understand the issue, managed to work a question into his propagandistic outburst: "What I like about Mike Lee's plan though is he's going to fund the entire rest of the government except for Obamacare. You pass those appropriations. And then it's up to the Democrats. Do they want to shut down the government over Obamacare? I guess they can. But that's their choice. Right? Do you think the Republicans have the courage to do that?

Rand had a direct enough answer to the windy question. "Frankly, probably not." But that won't stop Mike Lee, who, like I said up top, is just looking to make a splash for himself outside Utah. Yesterday, the NY Times reported on a new poll from Pew showing that Republican voters are at odds with their party's leadership and direction. And there is no consensus about which way to take the struggling party.

No single Republican stood out as the face or voice of the party: 22 percent of respondents volunteered the answer “nobody” when asked who led their party. The most mentioned name, House Speaker John A. Boehner, garnered only 9 percent.

...Among those who said changes in policy standpoints were necessary, the most commonly cited issues were immigration and abortion, followed by gay marriage.

Regarding specific policies, the general sentiment for Republicans was to move further right, particularly on government spending. On immigration, about 4 in 10 Republicans said the party’s position was “about right,” while the same number said Republicans were not conservative enough. On gun policy, most Republicans agreed with their party’s stance.

However, on gay marriage, Republicans were almost evenly scattered, with 33 percent saying the position was about right, 31 percent saying the party’s stand was too conservative, 27 percent saying it was not conservative enough. On abortion, 4 in 10 Republicans said their party’s position was about right, but half of Republicans were divided on whether it should be more moderate or more conservative. (Asking voters whether about their party’s approach to an issue is conservative enough or too conservative has two drawbacks: First, there’s a level of subjectivity-- each person’s definition of conservative can vary-- and second, the question requires the respondent to have knowledge about the party’s stance on the issue.)

What may be most worrisome for Republican leaders is the declining number of Americans who see themselves as Republicans, and the growing ranks of independents. In this most recent Pew poll, just 19 percent identified as Republican, a steady decline from the 30 percent who identified as Republican a decade ago. When those who said they were independent but leaned Republican are included, the total Republicans grow to 37 percent, just slightly down from 42 percent in 2003. Pew’s recent poll found 29 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, roughly the same as the 32 percent who said so in 2003. However, when including leaners, Democrats are holding steadier numbers, with a total 47 percent today, compared to 44 percent in 2003.

Which GOP Blockhead Responded To The Immigration Question By Reading "America The Beautiful" To The Republican Conference?

Michigan closet case Dave Camp has a new angle on thwarting immigration reform

Wednesday, at the House Republicans' closed door strategy session about immigration reform, Boehner and Ryan begged their GOP colleagues to not doom the party to national electoral oblivion by sabotaging the bipartisan efforts in the Senate at a time when record majorities of Americans support comprehensive reform. But bigoted Members in nicely gerrymandered districts in primitive parts of the country where people get all their information from Hate Talk Radio and Fox, are not thinking about national trends or about the fate of their marginalized party outside their own little safe House districts. The quote that came through the closed door was Boehner's whiny warning-- unheeded-- that Republicans would be "in a much weaker position" if they are seen to be killing the immigration bill. Alabama KKK-sympathizer Mo Brooks responded by reading America the Beautiful aloud.

But Boehner is so weak as a Speaker that the two hour meeting resulted in nothing but negativity and a decision to do exactly what he and Ryan begged them to not do. The decision was made to kill widely popular bipartisan immigration reform. One of those hardline backward bigots, Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, seemed satisfied why he talked to reporters when he emerged for a pee break: “There is little consensus in there for doing anything other than border security." Huelskamp later told reporters he would trust Obama as much with border security as he would trust his own daughter with Bill Clinton. The man is obviously demented... but Kansans seem to like 'em like that in the last couple of decades. He and the other hatemongers kept harping on the theme that Obama can't be trusted to enforce the strict border stipulations-- even though Obama's policy is far, far stricter and more effective than anything ever seen at the southern border before.

Arkansas neanderthal Tom Cotton, a right-wing freshman extremist who would like to run for Marc Pryor's Senate seat next year, rushed a demented OpEd to the Wall Street Journal, basically, "it's my way or the highway... and forget citizenship for these lawless colored people."

[T]he Senate immigration bill undermines the rule of law without solving the country's illegal-immigration problem, and it will harm American workers. The House of Representatives will reject any proposal with the Senate bill's irreparably flawed structure, which is best described as: legalization first, enforcement later . . . maybe.

Boehner tried put on a happy face after he lost. "The American people want our border secured, our laws enforced, and the problems in our immigration system fixed to strengthen our economy. But they don’t trust a Democratic-controlled Washington, and they’re alarmed by the president’s ongoing insistence on enacting a single, massive, Obamacare-like bill rather than pursuing a step-by-step, common-sense approach to actually fix the problem. The president has also demonstrated he is willing to unilaterally delay or ignore significant portions of laws he himself has signed, raising concerns among Americans that this administration cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill like the one passed by the Senate."

Writing for New York, Jonathan Chait, a conservative-consensus pundit, took note of the GOP's shocking decent into nihilism:

One of the novel developments in conservative thought during the Obama years is a burgeoning hatred not merely for government but for lawmaking. Before the Obama era, the ends of crafting laws divided the parties, but the means did not. The process of corralling votes, placating hold-outs, and hammering out compromises was not something either side especially loved-- you’ve heard the classic line about watching the sausage get made-- but also not something that one side disliked more than the other. But a hatred for lawmaking has emerged in the Obama years, first as a Republican tactic, and then as an apparently genuine belief system.

The distrust for lawmaking is the main argument — wait, “argument” is too strong; maybe premise?-- of a rare joint op-ed by Rich Lowry and William Kristol, editors of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Lowry and Kristol urge House Republicans to kill immigration reform, because passing it would involve legislating, and legislating is bad.

So the strategies they decided on are to stall, delay, obfuscate and threaten to make the government default if they can't get their way. And House Ways and Means Committee Chairman-- and closet case-- Dave Camp (R-MI) declared that the Senate immigration bill is unconstitutional anyway because it's a revenue bill and revenue bills have to start in the House. So there!

This is as good a time as any to mention that despite Obama beating McCain in Camp's Michigan district, Steve Israel took him off the table and refused to recruit or back a candidate against him-- or any of Boehner's vulnerable committee chairmen. That leads to this kind of irresponsible rhetoric... and to this:

Nihilism... Republican Style

Perhaps you read Greg Sargent's excellent piece for the Washington Post Tuesday about increasingly reckless and aggressive GOP nihilism in Congress. The Republicans are no longer a legitimate opposition party, "instead opting for a kind of post-policy nihilism in which sabotaging the Obama agenda has become its only guiding governing light." He goes on to ask Republicans in Washington an important question that few in the corporate media ever consider:

What’s the line between fighting for your ideology and ensuring that the government that pays your salaries actually works — or even attempts to work? At some point, governing has to take place, but when does that begin? We know what opponents will say in response to this: These are bad laws, and we have to do whatever it takes to stop them. But at what point does an election have a governing consequence?

...[I]t goes well beyond Obamacare implementation and the relentless blockading of Obama nominees for the explicit purpose of preventing democratically-created agencies from functioning. We’ve slowly crossed over into something a bit different. It’s now become accepted as normal that Republicans will threaten explicitly to allow harm to the country to get what they want, and will allow untold numbers of Americans to be hurt rather than even enter into negotiations over the sort of compromises that lie at the heart of basic governing.

Sargent points to the sequester that the GOP have used to slow down the economy, halt job growth and wreck countless lives across the country. And he points to the crazy demands they're about to spring on the country of what they want-- like the toxic Ryan budget-- in return for not bankrupting the country when the debt ceiling vote comes up again.

And there's so much he didn't mention. Like how Boehner and Cantor, having failed miserably to have passed a Farm Bill two years in a row-- primarily because enough of their own caucus wants to see poor people starve to death-- have now decided to not just reduce food stamps but to remove the program from the bill entirely. Let them eat... Republicans?