We have a political party that lives in a world of its own making. In TeaWorld, you get all your news from Fox and from an army of AM radio gasbags and from hundreds of emails with “FW: Fw: FW: fwd: FW:” in the subject line (and red dots on Snopes). In TeaWorld, the President of the United States is an illegitimately-elected, Constitutionally-ineligible Muslim atheist [sic] from Kenya who is determined to drag American into godless socialist Islamist [sic] tyranny. And his new health care scheme will automatically bring about the downfall of the nation and lead to Grandma being chopped into meatloaf to be served as croquettes at interracial gay weddings.
This is what they genuinely believe. This is what their elected officials ran on. And when you put it like that – you lost an election which was improperly stolen from you, you lost another election which was improperly stolen from you, the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of a shiftless Negro just like in the 1950s, and now the country hangs on the precipice of doom if this plan takes effect? Why the hell wouldn’t you shut down the government? If the very survival of your country and your race will be forfeit, why not fight with every last weapon available to you?
The nilhism of the populist 90s – term limits, throw out all incumbents, the rise of Perot as the man-on-horseback alternative because he was rich and thus must be good at things – all of that was a necessary ingredient in the runup to what we have now: the refusal to govern at all. This is the necessary end result of fifty years of conservatism: the desire to break the government for the pure sake of breaking it. It’s nullification, really. It’s John C. Calhoun, it’s the South risen again. It’s the idea that despite an election, despite another election, despite Supreme Court decisions and CBO projections and the misgivings of a plurality of their own elected party, the Teatards are nonetheless entitled to have the world bend to their will, just because.
We should have been fighting to break the stupid a lot earlier. Instead, we propped it up and walked it around and let it sit at the table. Now, matters are worse, and the potential is there for them to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better. The only hope is that at some point, once they’ve killed the hostage, their leverage is completely gone. If there’s actually a debt ceiling-related default, then there’s nothing left to fear; the damage is done. At that point, it’s time for Harry Reid to borrow some testicles and unilaterally do away with the filibuster, and it’s time for the Democrats to insist on a strict party-line vote in both houses of Congress and expel anyone who insists on trying to split the difference with a bunch of redneck insurrectionists.
This is why I recognize no corporeal authority save for His Majesty Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. He was right about a bridge over the bay, he was right about the abomination of “Frisco,” and it looks like he was dead-on about dissolving Congress.