...don't talk about 2013.
The beauty of doing mere commentary instead of actual hard news (and by
that I'm not talking about the Brangelina or Kim Kardashian's
well-hidden stretch marks) is you don't have to do a lot of hard research and provide, as Frank Rich used to do at the
NY Times,
a surfeit of corroborating links. And one of the beauties of having a
liberal byline is you can always take it as a rock-solid, absolutely
immovable article of faith that both political parties will do their
damnedest to punch themselves in the face in a never-ending masochistic
orgy of some perverted self-recrimination. They just go about it in
different ways.
Let's take the obvious example of this: The
Republican Party essentially shut down the government for over two
weeks, lost $24 billion, cost 125,000 jobs in October, furloughed
850,000 federal workers who still haven't gotten back pay, nearly drove
us into default in violation of Section Four of the 14th amendment,
nearly crippled our borrowing power and made the Dow Jones Average
plunge nearly 900 points...
...all so they could, for the
43rd consecutive time, unsuccessfully overturn an existing, adjudicated
law called the Affordable Care Act. And they did this at the expense of
whatever little credibility and approval they had with the electorate,
which historically has a dim view of Congress, and much campaign payola
from dependable, longtime Republican donors. The GOP's approval rating,
in contrast to Mr. Obama's steady 51%, has plunged to 8%, prompting John
McCain to say, "We're down to blood relatives and paid staffers." And I
wouldn't even count on the paid staffers, whose bosses tried to deny
them subsidized health care. Democrats, as we now know, need to gain
just 17 seats to retake control of the lower chamber and out of the 230+
Republican Representatives running for re-election, 22 are in
vulnerable districts.
Ted Cruz's coattails have proven
to be as wide as the Rio Grande as many Republicans running for national
and state office (Especially Virginia's AG, Ken Coochie Coochie, who
now finds himself down 17 points to Terry McAuliffe 50-33, which is what
you get when you run on an anti-blowjob platform) are seeing themselves
dropping out of contention faster than Wile E. Coyote falling off a
cliff with an anvil up his ass.
To help sum it all up, a
recent poll showed Republicans were less popular than hemorrhoids and
herpes. Even Tom Donohue, the anti-Santa Claus and CEO of the US Chamber
of Commerce said Ted Cruz should just shut up and sit down. And Cruz
isn't doing himself any favors outside of redneck cities like Houston
when he compares ObamaCare staffers to Nigerian bankers in some of the
most nakedly vicious Republican dog whistle politics since Strom
Thurmond and his segregationist platform in 1948.
Essentially, we can sum up the GOP's antics by comparing it to
Fight Club,
in which Edward Norton's character finds out he's Tyler Durdin and is
caught beating the shit out of himself while Wall Street financial
institutions blow up around him. In order to restore order and make the
delusions go away, he then shoots himself in the head (Far be it for
this scribe to suggest such a drastic and horrible thing to Republicans
except to say no one is responsible for actions taken after bylines go
to press.).
So here we find the Republican Party, bloody and
on their ass after their self-pummeling, just coming to grips with the
fact they were beating themselves up all along while the black guy
saturninely stood back and let them. You'd think that would be the end
of the story and that we could start licking our collective chops and
look forward to another 40+ years of uninterrupted Democratic rule in
the House, right?
Wrong.
The Blue-Clad Cavalry Once Again Comes to the Rescue
During his brief run for President five years ago, Joe Biden said
something alarming. While on the campaign trail, he said to a Republican
audience that the GOP, which had suffered a stinging defeat in the '06
midterms and were about to get their asses kicked back to Jebus Land
again, needed to get back up and fight for what they believed in.
Here's the darker side of my Fight Club
metaphor, the road far less traveled by our useless mainstream media:
The Democratic Party's unfailing penchant for snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory. We've seen it countless times after the Republican
Party took one massive, collective Buster Keaton-class pratfall after
another only to see the Democrats lower a hand to help them up and get,
as gratitude, their balls kicked into Vancouver, British Columbia.
And we're seeing it again now. Now we're hearing about otherwise
reliably-Democratic guys like Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Patty Murray
dangling little strips of red meat to the GOP in order to coax them up
off their shiny pants suit bottoms and those little pieces of red meat
are "reforms" to entitlement programs that has nothing whatsoever to do
with ObamaCare or the debt ceiling, the debt, deficit or anything else
the GOP had almost single-handedly fucked up or tried to.
And then the Democrats wonder who encourages the Republican Party to
take hostages every few months until they can get their way.
About a week ago as the clock's ticking got louder and louder, the
GOP made smaller and smaller demands so they wouldn't have to leave the
shower empty-handed. So the Democrats, after giving them the bird
countless times, finally let them have a consolation prize, a provision
in the health care law that was already in place. Clutching their cheap,
plastic noisemakers in their pudgy little hands, the GOP psychopaths
then ran home and crowed about their great victory over the Obama
administration that had just proved it didn't have to negotiate with
them to any degree.
Now suddenly,
the Democrats are signaling they're reading to cave on Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid cuts for absolutely no reason whatsoever so they
can be seen as negotiating in good faith with a self-professed band of
Fifth Columnists who will stop at nothing to deny a black president
whatever he wants, even if it was originally their idea (such as the
individual mandate)?
Why?
Perhaps we'll never know the answer to this. As unsuccessful as this
latest hostage-taking has been, one that had produced absolutely no
Stockholm Syndrome love, especially among Wall Street types who have had
to forgo that tinting on their third Bentley, this latest proposed and
needless capitulation makes this upcoming battle over the government's
funding on January 15th sound like a blackmail or extortion scheme.
Maybe they found out FDR was banging Stalin during Yalta or maybe they
have film of Kennedy boffing Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Jane
Russell at the same time.
Whatever the Republicans have on the Democrats, it must be a fucking pip.
Because otherwise, to those us necessarily looking up at this latest
clown show in our worm's eye view, this upcoming appeasement strategy to
a party with no political capital whatsoever makes not the slightest bit of sense.