Another debt ceiling crisis, twelve years on, brought on by a House in the hands of mental defectives and a press unable to articulate what the debt ceiling is and what default would really mean. It occurs to me we might not get away with this one, because the GOP is too fucking stupid to care whether the hostage dies, and the public is too damn dumb to know who to blame.
The thing that annoys the shit out of me is that the Democrats have given ground every single time. Obama actually negotiated with terrorists, to our cost, and now they are back – to face off with a genial old Washington hand who still believes that we live in a world where bipartisan comity can be achieved in the face of the evidence of the last thirty years. No one who served in the Obama administration can realistically think that the teabaggers and their even more explicitly racist heirs can be good faith partners in a compromise.
But in the end, he’s all we have. Because we had to have a candidate who didn’t frighten Ed Earl Brown. Sure, plague and economic disruption and who knows what, from an administration more corrupt than any in history and probably in thrall to Russia, but if the alternative is a woman? Or someone of color? So because the median voter is ignorant and thick and kind of racist, we had to bring on the safest most unthreatening white man we could expose to the rust belt.
And the thing is, we have to do this because we didn’t excoriate the Republicans who forced an impeachment on Clinton despite being repudiated at the ballot box when they had their finger on the trigger. We didn’t come down like a load of bricks on a Bush who won with fewer votes than his opponent, and then we didn’t do anything to hold his party to account for endless war in Iraq and indifference to economic calamity. We didn’t demand that Mitch McConnell and his minions account for every redneck racist in the party, hang them all around his neck and demand that the GOP answer for every white supremacist the way Democrats had to answer for every minor league rapper or every Berkeley city councilperson. We didn’t treat Texas the way Fox treats California, or Florida the way they regard San Francisco.
In short, no one ever told the Republicans that it’s not okay to rely on the votes of the Klan, that there are consequences for picking a senile reality-TV rapist as your champion, that we live in a society and some things are beyond the pale. Our idiot limp-dick media stuck to all they know how to do, which is sports reporting. And now we live in a nation with cancer too bad to easily remove. All we can do is treat it, slowly and painfully, and hope it’s enough to stave off the advance of the Reaper another month, another year, another two years. And now every election feels like the one where if we lose, we lose forever – but if we win, we have to come back all over again in two years. We have to win every time, or we die. The cancer only has to win once.