Over the Edge

This isn’t new, you know. A quick look at Michael Lind’s infamous 1995 New Republic article, which anticipated my own thesis and prospective dissertation, will tell you this was largely inevitable.  But I just finished a timely re-read of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm – the history of the Goldwater movement of 1964 and how it came to be – and it’s all there.  Paranoia about a “different” President, albeit Catholic rather than black.  Fear of creeping socialism in the form of government health programs – then, the very same Medicare that Teabaggers now defend virulently against the menace of “government health care” and now, the very same individual-mandate program that Heritage pushed in 1994 as an alternative to the Clinton plan. Plus ca change…

So as we sit and watch and wait, we look again at Texas.  Texas, which gave us Dallas, hotbed of right-wing extremism and deathtrap for Kennedy.  Texas, which gave George W. Bush a leg up to becoming President.  Texas, which now gives us Rafael “Ted” Cruz, the Pied Piper of the teahadists, singing a fifty-year-old tune about socialism and imminent doom with a healthy leavening of sub rosa racism.  And meanwhile, they have the weakest Speaker of the House in generations so scared that he will ride the atom bomb all the way down to default rather than risk their wrath.

Congressional government + Parliamentary politics = constitutional crisis.  This was inevitable from the day the GOP was left with only partial control of Congress during a Democratic administration.  It’s also the existence proof of false equivalence, because as much as CNN and NPR want to talk about coming to a compromise, there’s one side that puts its wingnuts in office.  Count how many Congressmen were elected on the back of Occupy Wall Street and balance that against the number of Teabag mental defectives currently refusing to honor the full faith and credit of the American government, and you’ll know who to blame tomorrow morning when things come crashing to the ground.

The only question now is this: when the time comes, will the Village, and the political media, and the public at large – will they finally have the balls to call a spade a spade and lay the blame where it belongs?  Because if the usual plague-on-both-your-houses, false equivalence, both-sides-do-it bullshit persists, you’ll know once and for all that Washington really is rigged for Republicans – even when they only control enough of the government to chuck bombs.

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