Republicans: Irrational Or Just Delusional

Now that it appears the Republicans are folding on their debt ceiling hostage-taking, Weeper of the House John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner is crying "=sob= The President won't negotiate with us!=sob="

If the right lessons are learned, that's precisely why we won't have a debt ceiling crisis after today.  TNR's Noam Scheiber traces things back to the fiasco of the tea bagger/ Republican-engineered government shutdown and concludes that, by and large, because the Republican caucus is delusional rather than irrational, they were able to figure out that the public wasn't behind them, and wouldn't be behind them in a debt ceiling showdown either:

But the lesson of the shutdown is that engagement and accommodation is worse than useless—it’s counterproductive. When you’re dealing with delusional people, any gesture in their direction will only be interpreted as confirmation that their delusions are true. When Obama agreed to pare tens of billions from his 2011 spending request shortly after the GOP won control of Congress, House Republicans didn’t see it as a sign of good faith, as the White House believed they would. (David Plouffe: “The trust was increased.”) They interpreted it as an admission by the president that the public supported their radical agenda. It’s only through confrontation—doing away with negotiations and inciting voters to communicate which side they support—that you have any chance of breaking through. Going forward, that means there’s no probably difference-splitting approach to, say, getting an immigration bill through the House. If you want immigration reform, let Republicans reject the reasonable-sounding bill that passed the Senate, then force them to pay a brutal price for their unpopular position in 2016.  (our emphasis)

Democrats, the White House in particular, seem to have learned how to deal with potential hostage-takers.  It just took them two years.

Today's Cartoons

(click to enlarge)

(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, via gocomics.com)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via gocomics.com)

Today's Hostage-Taking Quote

President Obama to the Business Roundtable today:

"You have never seen in the history of the United States, the debt ceiling -- or the threat of not raising the debt ceiling -- being used to extort a president or a governing party, and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with budget and have nothing to do with the debt."

With government shutdown a mere 12 days away, the House Crackpot Caucus Rethuglicans are poised to send a spending bill to the Senate that defunds Obamacare.

Yet another example of why we can't have nice things in this country.

Monday Read: Republican Band of Anarchists

From Jonathan Chait in the New York Magazine:

"The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists."

Chait's article is well worth reading, although it will be familiar territory to readers of this blog who by now will have read account after account of the mindless rage fueling the hard right's losing struggle with the realities of 21st century America.  But, hey, let's get it all on the record.

Naturally, Weeper of the House John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner is proud of this procedural extremism and of his caucus' race to the past:

House Speaker John Boehner says Congress "ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal."

The Ohio Republican makes the comments on an interview aired Sunday on CBS "Face the Nation." He was responding to a question about how little Congress is doing these days.

Boehner says Congress "should not be judged by how many new laws we create."  (our emphasis)

Yeah, you keep working on that Obamacare repeal (39 votes so far)!

With raising the debt ceiling later this year looming as the next Republican target for hostage-taking sabotaging government and the economy (the sequestration being the most recent job-killing blunt instrument employed), expect an increasingly desperate Republican Party to pull out all the stops in its anarchistic war on America's future.

Sunday. Krugman. Read It.

The Very Serious People, the "centrists" who bet wrong on linking deficit reduction to the debt ceiling vote, and what they don't understand about the "modern" Rethuglican party, all courtesy of Paul Krugman. Be sure to read the Jonathan Chait piece that PK links to in his blog, too. As Krugman has said before, they're "the cult that's destroying America."

BONUS: Even if our own lazy, cowardly, "both sides do it" media can't or won't call it honestly, the furrin (gasp!) press will.

Even A Blind Squirrel, Cont'd.

The fracture within the Rethuglican / New Confederate Party widened last week over their self-inflicted debt ceiling crisis. On the one hand, you have the traditional big money, big business elite who have funded the Rethug Party for years. They want the debt ceiling lifted. On the other, you have the loony teabagger true believers, far-right extremists who see bringing down the Government as a good thing, and to hell with the economy.

Right wing pundits have been forced to choose sides in the internal war. Blind squirrel and country club Rethug Kathleen Parker finds a nut in today's Kaplan Daily:

"Take names. Remember them. The behavior of certain Republicans who call themselves Tea Party conservatives makes them the most destructive posse of misguided “patriots” we’ve seen in recent memory. If the nation defaults on its financial obligations, the blame belongs to the Tea Party Republicans who fragged their own leader, John Boehner."

Better late than never, but you have to remember that the right wing media was stoking the fires of obstruction from the minute Obama was elected. Any lie and distortion was acceptable in whipping up the low-information teatards, who are clueless that the far right groups that pay for their rallies, buses and signs are actually working against their economic and social interests.

"Snooki Kabuki"

Well, the Senate did it's job last night, killing Orange Boner's tea party manifesto... er debt limit bill... in a bipartisan 59-41 vote. D.L. MacKenzie at Politicus has a nice piece about the "Snooki kabuki" theater the nutters in Orange Boner's House Rethuglican caucus have been performing. (One feels an apology is due to Snooki for this reference, as she can't begin to plumb the House Rethugs' depths of stupidity and venality.)

The Revolt of the Nutters

Weeper of the House John "Orange Boner" Boehner apparently has a revolt on his hands, courtesy of the infantile far right "nutters" that populate his caucus (you reap what you sow, eh?). What an embarrassment if Orange Boner can't even get his own caucus behind him to pass his "irresponsible" (Kaplan Daily) plan to raise the debt limit -- because it isn't irresponsible enough for the nutters! I'd be laughing except for the fact that innocent Americans may be paying for this loathsome posturing.

Quote of the Day

"Republicans need to decide whether they want to be responsible conservatives or whether they will let the Tea Party destroy the House That Lincoln Built in a glorious explosion. Such pyrotechnics may look great to some people on the pages of a novel or in a movie, but they’re rather unpleasant when experienced in real life."-- E.J. Dionne, calling out the destructive "Tea Party" wingnuts in Congress.