Monday Reading - Hoisted On Their Own Petards

E.J. Dionne, Jr., and Doyle McManus both write about the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party's descent into anarchy (most evident in their House caucus), and see a common element.  First, McManus:

After his decision to retire, [Speaker John "Mr. Tangerine Man"] Boehner denounced the GOP radicals as “false prophets” who misled their own voters. They “whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know — they know! — are never going to happen,” he said last week.

But don't feel too bad for him: Boehner stood by while that whipping took place.

“Now he's saying the House has been hijacked by radicals, but the pilots of this airline gave the hijackers first-class seats,” Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime Congress-watcher, told me. “They encouraged them, incited them, promised them things. And now the hijackers want what they were promised.”  (our emphasis)

McManus also notes the irony of fellow "leader" Rep. Kevin "I'm Not A Pod Person" McCarthy, one of the "Young Guns" who was elected in 2006, being instrumental in bringing so many of the ultra-right "Freedom Caucus" nihilist freaks into office in 2010 and thereafter, the freaks who just ended his non- illustrious political career.  E. J. Dionne, Jr., picks it up from there:

Let’s go back to 2010 and see what conservative politicians were saying.

“They think if they make government so large and the debt so big it will be impossible to reverse it,” one Republican warned ominously of the Democrats. “Who would have thought America could be going the way it’s going now? With government taking over businesses? With government taking over health care? We’ve always believed in freedom as a country but now we’re starting to understand that we have to fight for it.” The goal: “unshackling the grip that Washington has on so much of our lives.”

The GOP leadership, he said, lost its way. “The Republican base was angry about the way the party had betrayed its principles,”declared this firebrand, referring to the George W. Bush years. “Under Republican leadership in the early 2000s, spending and government got out of control. And as government grew, there were scandals and political compromises.”

The author of these words: Kevin McCarthy in a 2010 book called “Young Guns” he wrote with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. Cantor is gone, defeated by tea partyers in 2014. Ryan has good reason to fear the consequences of trying to lead the crowd he and his colleagues helped bring to Congress.

As we noted before, the struggle going on most visibly in the House (but also among the candidates in the Republican presidential clown car bus) is one between noisy lunatics (the "Freedom Caucus,"  Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Piyush Jindal, etc.) who, as Dionne says, are at least upfront about their dystopian, nihilist agenda, and sub rosa lunatics (a.k.a., the "Governing Caucus," J.E.B.!, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, etc.), who have the same policy goals but prefer to win elections in order to implement them.  The puerile pundit class would still like you to ignore that, but it's increasingly difficult for them to argue that the inmates haven't always been in charge of the Republican asylum.

UPDATE:  Paul Krugman on the search for the best Republican con man to "save the party":

How will the chaos that the crazies, I mean the Freedom Caucus, have wrought in the House get resolved? I have no idea. But as this column went to press, practically the whole Republican establishment was pleading with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to become speaker. He is, everyone says, the only man who can save the day.

What makes Mr. Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got. His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair.

To understand Mr. Ryan’s role in our political-media ecosystem, you need to know two things. First, the modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.  (our emphasis)