America Will Continue To Pay A Price Thanks To Radical Republicans

American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norm Ornstein writes in The Atlantic about the forces that led to John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner's ouster as Speaker:

... Since 1994, when Newt Gingrich led his party tribe from 40 years of wandering in the desert of the minority to the promised land of House majority, Republicans have become more stridently anti-government and anti-Washington. They have also, when in the majority, become less interested in trying to find policy solutions across party lines. Their desire to act like a parliamentary majority, maintaining rigid discipline and working only internally, became known as the “Hastert Rule” under Gingrich’s successor.

Perfect party discipline continued when Republicans, in the minority, faced Barack Obama in his first two years—unity that translated into reflexive opposition to everything Obama wanted to do. It was part of a broader strategy to delegitimize Obama and Democrats; to cultivate anger and unhappiness as Gingrich had done in 1994 in the midterm elections in 2010; and to seize back majority status, undo the Obama program, and cut government dramatically.

Ornstein goes on to describe the predictable frustrations of this bunch of radical ideologues, and the prospects for Boehner's successor (spoiler alert:  bad to worse).  Continuing to be spurred on by a base that gets its civics lessons from numbnut AM hate radio and Fox "News," and protected in safely gerrymandered seats, the nihilist Republicans' fever isn't likely to break in the foreseeable future.  Good read, though.

BONUS:  Paul Krugman on a party gone mad.

Vandals, Doing What Vandals Do

Today's read is from center-right political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (!) Norm Ornstein, who decries the "contemptible" behavior of Rethuglicans in trying to sabotage implementation of Obamacare:

... [T]o do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away.

As usual, please read the entire piece. 

If one steps back from all the rhetoric and noise and looks at what's going on here in the simplest terms possible, they would see a party trying its utmost to keep fellow Americans from getting basic health insurance and, therefore, basic health care.  And, as Ornstein notes, that same party also wants to benefit from causing this misery for others.

The "Socialist" Smear

Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute may be getting the David Frum treatment soon if Rethug donors see his op/ed in today's Kaplan Daily. In it, he dissects and then dismisses all of the crackpot epithets being hurled against President Obama. Specifically calling out the likes of Oxycontin Rush Limpballs, Winky You Betcha, Michael "Wiener" Savage, and Newt "Poot" Gingrich, Ornstein reviews the Obama record on foreign and domestic issues and pronounces him "a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center." (We somewhat sadly concur with that assessment.)

Poot, in particular, is quoted at the recent confab of Confederate Rethugs as having called Obama "the most radical president in American history." Ornstein asks,

"The most radical president in American history? Does Newt Gingrich, a PhD in history, really believe that [expletive]?"