This is why:
Whether congressional Republicans (with their nihilistic cynicism and meanness) and congressional Democrats (milquetoast and directionless for the most part) and the national press corps (worthless down the line) continue to fuck it all up, we will see.
This new senator seems like a decent enough guy; he’s no doubt going to be one of the most liberal members of the Republican senate caucus and certainly we need more moderates like that if our politics are ever to be functional again. But this is still a really big problem, because it emboldens the tea party factions to continue with their nihilistic, loud, rude, and ultimately pointless protests against anything that feels scary to them. It’s a victory for fear and divisiveness.
So our politics are going to get even more shrill, Fox News will ride this wave even more, and people (to wit: 40 million people with no healthcare insurance) will continue to suffer. Ultimately the system, because it is on an unsustainable trend, will either get fixed, or collapse and then get fixed.
Whatever.
Over at Sullivan’s Blog, there’s a bit of a theme going on about how the Republican / Tea Party movement represents, at its very core, nihilism in place of any coherent philosophy. Here’s a reader who can’t stand it any more, and manages to channel my thoughts perfectly:
The past year has been a very difficult one for me, personally and professionally. I’ve been up a lot more than I’ve been down, and I’ve been angry and frustrated with life, as we all are at times. But I can’t remember the last time I felt such overwhelming rage toward a group of people as I have felt toward the Republican Party and the conservative movement since President Obama’s election.
I simply cannot grasp what motivates these people, what compels them to thwart even the smallest attempts to clean up the enormous destruction they wrought under Bush and Cheney. Irresponsible, hateful, mendacious, sleazy, destructive – these words do not even begin to describe them.
I am unemployed and have not found a new job after almost a year of searching. I have a mortgage. I also have a preexisting medical condition, thanks to emergency surgery I had to undergo nearly 18 months ago. My unemployment benefits expire in five months, my COBRA not long after. Like untold millions of Americans, I am preparing for the worst as the economy slogs through its agonizing turnaround.
I voted for Obama with proud but open eyes, knowing full well not just the magnitude of the tasks he faced, but the pure, unrestrained malevolence of his opposition. Health care reform will unquestionably help people like me. And now some low-rent hairdo, whose sole claim to fame is posing naked for some ladies’ magazine way back when, may happily destroy whatever chance this country has at moving in a more just, humane, and morally and fiscally responsible direction.
As you stated, the Republican Party of this new century is shot through with nihilists. Unabashed nihilists. But what leaves me shaking with anger damn near every day since President Obama’s inauguration is the pure smugness and nonchalance of their nihilism.
Palin, McConnell, DeMint, Boehner, Cantor, Rubio, Scott Brown and the rest of the Ailes- and Limbaugh-warped GOP: Would you trust any one of these goons to greet you at Wal-Mart, much less govern our country? The question answers itself. They literally care nothing for America. They have spent the past decade doubling the national debt, running up record deficits, indulging the depradations of Wall Street, expanding Medicare by a trillion dollars while refusing to cover the cost, needlessly and shamelessly cutting taxes by two trillion dollars while again refusing to cover the cost, degrading the Army and Marine Corps to the point where it will take them both at least a decade to recover, jailing and torturing detainees and lying about it, manipulating intelligence in order to invade Iraq out of some sick neocon thirst for vanity and glory. I could go on, but that would take hours, and only make me angrier.
Suffice to say that Republicans lecturing the country about fiscal responsibility, economic recovery, governing – or anything else, for that matter – would be like Mick Jagger lecturing Mother Teresa about excessive promiscuity.
Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were thankfully not present at America’s founding. But their political descendants will certainly be present at America’s demise.
Strong words, yes. Over the top? Not by much if at all. The reader is right; these leaders don’t give a shit about America, only themselves.
I’m listening to a reasonably erudite radio discussion of the merits of the federal case challenging California’s hideous Proposition 8. I don’t know whether the challenge will be successful but I do know that within a decade or two same sex marriage will be legal in all 50 states, and the arguments against it are going to look an awful lot like the old laws against miscegenation.
The best argument that the pro-8 people have – the best they’ve got – is that because there is a pretext for preventing gay marriage (protecting heterosexual marriage), no matter that that pretext doesn’t make any logical sense, that therefore the states should be able to discriminate because the standard that should be applied should be one that is sufficiently lax as to allow discrimination.
To me this boils down to equal protection under the law. The argument that the status quo is constitutional depends on making the case that gays are free to marry someone of the opposite sex, even absent love. This argument depends, of course, on people clinging to discredited notions of sexual orientation being a “lifestyle choice” rather than innateness. Twenty years from now this will be laughable but today we take it seriously.
I assume this surprises absolutely nobody:
Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has signed on as a contributor to the Fox News Channel.
The network confirmed that Ms. Palin would appear on the network’s programming on a regular basis as part of a multiyear deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The latest example is the “dean” of the Washington press corps claiming underwear bomber is somehow equivalent to 9/11:
Was Christmas Day 2009 the same kind of wake-up call for Barack Obama that Sept. 11, 2001, had been for George W. Bush?
…
Both presidents had had plenty of warnings in the form of threats and even incidents. But both were caught off guard: Bush reading to a classroom of youngsters; Obama on a family vacation in Hawaii.
…
Many have been looking for a similar shift of tone in his dealings with the dictators in Iran and North Korea and even in his tolerance for the politics-as-usual maneuverings of many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.
The intellectual laziness of the national press is stunning, but even more amazing is that people take the results seriously.
You know all those DC thinktankers that parrot platitudes about standing up for freedom? And how right-wing talking points are always harping on freedom? And the teabaggers constantly stand around and complain and moan about freedom? And Glenn Beck invokes his revolutionary schtick in the name of freedom? It’s all bullshit. Now this is what demanding freedom looks like:
I image the real Boston Tea Party felt somewhat like this, a far cry from the sniveling demogoguery we’ve got today.
Luckily, in America, we don’t have a need for the physical violence that’s called for in Iran. But we do need mental toughness and discipline, and that’s seriously lacking within the DC beltway and media “news” outlets.
A little while back I suggested that the natural analogue to the reactionaries on Fox News and elsewhere was the John Birch Society, but I wondered at the time if I was being completely fair. In the end I left it that way because it seemed more or less right. Now there’s validation: Next year’s Conservative Political Action Conference is actually being co-sponsored by the John Birch Society! The mind reels.
So PolitiFact has been getting some pretty good mileage out of their Lie of the Year which details how Sarah Palin, and subsequently the entire Republican party, argued that health care reform would mean the establishment of “Death Panels” where DC bureaucrats would decide whether to pull the plug and grandma’s life support because she wasn’t adequately contributing to the socialist state.
So while this is self-evidently a falsehood, the back-story and ramifications are even more amazing to me:
These people sicken me.
Update: Speaking of our worthless press corps, here’s a column from a while back from one of the lead opinionmakers over at the Washington Post claiming that he can’t understand simple algebra, and implying that other people don’t need to either. I guess if people understood a little mathematics, then that would be one step on the slippery slope towards understanding micro and macroeconomics, and then they might start understanding economic incentives, and then people might understand why our healthcare system is so perverse, and then they might understand why it needs to be fixed. Can’t have that.
As I was reading this excellent article in the New Republic, it made me wonder:
The next time Republicans are elected to control the federal government, will they still be the people who think government can’t do anything right? And if so, is there any reason to think they’ll even try to do things right?
Here, from a sidebar to that article, are some choice quotes from conservatives decrying “instrusive” government over the years:
“It may be impracticable that our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom should go on.”
—Senator David Hill (D-NY), in 1894, bemoaning the creation of a federal income tax
“Woman suffrage would give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich. Meantime these new voters would become either the purchased or cajoled victims of plausible political manipulators, or the intimidated and helpless voting vassals of imperious employers.”
—Former President Grover Cleveland, in 1905, on why women shouldn’t be able to vote
“[T]he child will become a very dominant factor in the household and might refuse perhaps to do chores before six a.m. or after seven p.m. or to perform any labor.”
—Senator Weldon Heyburn (R-ID), in 1908, on why child labor should remain unregulated
“I fear it may end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European. It will furnish delicious food and add great strength to the political demagogue. It will assist in driving worthy and courageous men from public life. It will discourage and defeat the American trait of thrift. It will go a long way toward destroying American initiative and courage.”
—Senator Daniel O. Hastings (R-DE), in 1935, listing the evils of Social Security
“[I]t would make it practically impossible for any publisher in the United States to accept any food, drug, or cosmetic advertising without facing squarely into the doors of a jail.”
—Federal Trade Commission Chair Ewin L. Davis, in 1935, on the dangers of empowering the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the food, drug, and cosmetic industries