The 2010 elections were the small leaks in the dam…now it is all going to come crashing down and flood downstream.
I have no doubts that many Americans are having buyer’s remorse right now as I am also sure that what they thought they were voting for is entirely different than what they are getting. Many of us saw it coming. It wasn’t hard to decipher, it wasn’t even unreasonable to think the way the left did. We knew from the very beginning of the Obama Presidency when Republicans began to oppose any and everything even if the ideas or legislations had previously been theirs. It was obstructionist and deliberate in its delay tactics, its disingenuous nature and the askew ideology behind it.
But these Republicans got a shot in the arm by a contrived “grass roots” movement they called Tea Party and it spread and grew to include some of the most stupid, uneducated and incompetent morons of our society. They celebrated their triumph, they gloated over how knowledge and science had no merit. They even began to talk about NO GOVERNMENT AT ALL.
Their zeal and radical fanaticism has earned them the name of Teahadists and now we are asking ourselves the question: Have they been elected to govern or to destroy? One is not hard-pressed for the answer as one of their guiding principles is Reagan’s “GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM”.
The Teahadist-Republicans; conservatives and at the same time radical-right, rewarded in the midterms for their strategy of obstruction, are hell-bent on stopping everything and turning back the clock perhaps as far back as the beginning of the Gilded Age
For two years they followed a strategy of blocking everything and blaming the President for not making people's lives better. The strategy succeeded and now they are determined to carry it through to the next election. They blocked an extension of unemployment benefits, somehow got the President over a barrel and blackmailed him so that in order for Obama to help the unemployed he had to agree to an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the very rich. Talk about uncanny gall, talk about immoral and unpatriotic…to give tax cuts to people who don’t need it, get the country into debt to do so and then stick the middle class with the bill.
They are sabotaging everything, from calling for an end to ongoing infrastructure development like high-speed and commuter rail and alternative energy; to the repeal of Health Care Legislation. And now they are going after the Labor Unions. Furthermore they have made it clear that any new efforts to stimulate the economy are out of the question.
They use the JOBS, JOBS, JOBS mantra with the “IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID” and yet they have absolutely no interest in creating jobs…on the contrary, it is their quest to eliminate as many jobs as possible…that way when 2012 comes around they are going to blame President Obama for not improving the unemployment numbers when it is once again their doing that we are in this mess in the first place.
By Dave Johnson
November 28, 2010 -
“Many are starting to worry about the terrible effect these positions will have on the economy, and are calling it deliberate sabotage; and certainly there are a lot of people with buyer’s remorse as is the case in Wisconsin where if elections were held today that asshole Governor would suffer a crushing defeat. Even Conservative Republicans, the moderate kind would not vote for Walker again.
Destroy the Country to Save the Country?
In Planning for the Worst, Matt Yglesias wrote that the White house should plan for "a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage."
Zach Carter writes at CAF, in Ben Bernanke And Conservative Economic Sabotage,
The Republican Party's newfound political assault on Ben Bernanke is a grim reminder of the actual conservative economic agenda for the next two years. The midterm elections taught Republicans a destructive lesson: With Democrats in power, the worse the economy gets, the better Republicans do at the voting booth. Economic sabotage is the essential Republican strategy for winning the White House in 2012. They will block every effort to actually improve the economy they can, and make a big show out of criticizing any economic aid they can't block.
Steve Benen has been writing about this at his Political Animal blog. In NONE DARE CALL IT SABOTAGE, Benen wondered if Republicans are actively sabotaging the economy to help keep Obama from being reelected,
This general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don't improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don't improve. We've gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.
[. . .] If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it's a healthy development in our system of government.
Digby's response to these, Virtuous Sabotage, is that Republicans are "blatantly proclaiming themselves to be virtuous by undermining the national interest in order to win elections." She brings up the media’s complicity in this,
I think it's just another step in the degradation of our societal norms. We are not living in a country anymore in which there is even a consensus about something as immoral as torture, so why should political sabotage be beyond the pale? And the mainstream media, which Benen points out should be charged with bringing some perspective to these issues and calling attention to the fact that the Republican Party is actively working to undermine the national interest, is so deep into their "Church of the Savvy" that they literally laugh at this phenomenon and then proceed to call balls and strikes as if it's a sport to find out who can win with the most cynical strategy.
Obstruction Morphs Into Destruction
But conservatives, watching only FOX, listening only to right-wing radio and reading only far-right blogs have gone beyond just obstruction as a campaign tactic and whipped themselves into an anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Obama frenzy. Obstruction is giving way to demands for destruction. They have raised the rhetoric to such a level that many of their “Tea Party” supporters will only be happy if the government is destroyed and corporate anarchy prevails.
The rhetoric has reached such a level of extremism that it is difficult to describe the things they are saying to people who don’t follow the news. Bloggers, activists and general followers of news will confirm that if you try to tell people what the “baggers” and their elected representatives are saying they think YOU’RE crazy! It does sound extreme when you try to describe the things they are saying.
The Dream: No Government At All
For many of the new breed of conservative government itself is the real target. Many are devotees of Ayn Rand, who denigrates democracy and government as "collectivism" and "statism," and these cult-words echo through the Tea Party. Glenn Beck regularly feeds Randian rhetoric to his audience. Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show last week, was telling his listeners that we don’t need government at all, that things worked much better in the “wild west” before government showed up and ruined the party.
Right now people who pay attention to what conservatives are saying to each other are warning there is every indication that the conservatives are going to force the country to default when the "debt ceiling" comes due for increase early next year. The effect of such a move would extend far beyond “just” a government shutdown; a default by the U.S. threatens the world’s economy more. But if you read their blogs, listen to their radio shows and talk to their supporters it’s apparent that they have talked themselves into a corner on this and any vote to raise the debt ceiling will be seen as total betrayal. Former Senator Alan Simpson, for one, is ecstatic. "The debt limit, when it comes in April or May, will prove who's a hero, and who's a jerk and who's a charlatan and who's a faker," he said recently.
Paul Krugman, in There Will Be Blood, writes about Simpson’s comments, and warns of the seriousness of the consequences if conservatives get their way on the debt limit,
Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.
… Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican.
The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
What Is Endgame?
Sara Robinson, in her widely-read post, None Dare Call It Sedition, warned that the right was getting out of control,
This is sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater.
This long assault has gone into overdrive since Obama's inauguration, as the rhetoric has ratcheted up from overheated to perfervid. We've reached the point where you can't go a week without hearing some prominent right wing leader calling for outright sedition -- an immediate and defiant populist uprising against some legitimate form of government authority.
After describing numerous calls to violence, the more-frequent appearance of weapons at right-wing political rallies, the growth or militias, Robinson writes,
For years now, we've dismissed all of this as crazy talk, the rantings of a loony fringe that will never get enough traction to become a material threat to our democracy. But we're well past the point where it's no longer quaint and funny, or an embarrassing breach of democratic etiquette that polite people should just ignore.
So I want to ask if just getting rid of Obama is the endgame -- or is it turning into more than that? When you throw in that many of the Tea Party right are saying they will shut down the government if they get the chance, and will vote against the debt ceiling -- forcing the government to default and causing economic chaos worldwide -- you have to ask if chaos itself is the goal? Force the country to be ungovernable, angry and unstable with lots of desperate people running around in a general chaos? Breaking society apart so they are the supermen who step in and reform it in an Ayn Randian image? This sounds too much like the Turner Diaries for me.
Or maybe they just aren't thinking things through to the point where they understand the consequences of their increasingly extremist rhetoric and positions.”
