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[Thad]

He isn't just a bad Speaker, he's a bad speaker, besides.

WSJ: he may not even have enough votes to get his OWN bill passed.

[Brentai]

If Obama accomplishes nothing else, he will still have my approval just for deliberately DDoSing his own entire government.

[Pacobird]

In a way, I almost welcome default, having been waiting for the other shoe to drop since March 2003.

[Thad]

If Obama accomplishes nothing else, he will still have my approval just for deliberately DDoSing his own entire government.

Sorta.  While I'll grant something probably would have passed by now if he'd capitulated like he usually does, the fault here really lies in the GOP Will Eat Itself thread.  Which is great, because I was starting to think maybe we were wrong and the Republicans were unified after all.

[Brentai]

No, I mean he literally DDoSed the government.  After his call for the nation to open up lines of communication with their representatives, almost every .gov website got slammed or crashed under the load of people sending angry emails.

Sorry, I meant to link an article with that, but I haven't been to my actual computer in days despite it being set up and whatnot.

[Brentai]

It may be idealistic, but my hope - and one that actually seems likely if one assumes the long stretch of the American public being smart and paying attention - is that the rage at this state of affairs ends up directed not at the Republican party as a whole but at the Tea Party specifically.  It's becoming more and more clear that these definitive assholes aren't here to help anybody - they'll vote against their own party, and they'll vote against a plan that gives them exactly what the fuck they said they wanted.  They want this thing to go into the shitter because, surprise people, that's what they said they were going to try and do from day one - take on the name of an event that caused massive sociopolitical strife for everybody involved and promise to "shake things up" in America.  ARE YOU SUFFICIENTLY SHAKEN NOW?

I really am a moderate.  In a perfect world I would agree with the left 50% of the time and the right 50% of the time.  But that's never going to happen until this malignant neoconservative cancer is removed from the system.  Do I have to lose my new house for that to happen?  Fine.  But I reserve the right to wave my second amendment around the very next time someone has the sheer balls to get up on a podium and say the word "God".

[Thad]

The Tea Party really is to blame, and I hope and expect that most of the freshman class will now be one-termers.

But the "moderate" wing of the Republican Party is just as much to blame.  They're the ones who have been spouting this nonsense for the past 25 years; they're the ones who supported Bush's extremism and then pretended Obama's moderation was extreme.  While it's true that they've been willing to "compromise" over the years, their terms tend to be awfully one-sided.

And I'm not talking about REAL moderate Republicans here; it's just that there aren't that damn many of them anymore.  Chafee's out, the Doles are out -- who's left?  Hutchison?

I posted a Taibbi article a couple years back where he said that the basic ideals of the Republican Party are not wrong, that in fact we NEED somebody to keep the government from spending too much money and abusing its power -- it's just that the motherfuckers who gave us the Iraq War have made it abundantly clear that they're not really interested in either of those things.

I think essentially we're saying the same thing, though; the Republican Party is not inherently wrong, but nearly everyone serving under its banner in Congress is.  I can get behind that.

(And, shoe on the other foot, the Democratic Party is not inherently a bunch of ineffective pussies, but nearly everyone serving under ITS banner in Congress is.)

And of course the problem as much as anything is that the definition of "moderate" has been so heavily sidetracked at this point.  Reid's Senate bill is being depicted as a "compromise bill" -- when actually it's pretty much Boehner's original proposal.

[sei]

Reid's Senate bill is being depicted as a "compromise bill" -- when actually it's pretty much Boehner's original proposal.

This is probably a naive question, but how exactly did the country's political dialog come to this?

It seems like "compromise" means "total capitulation," whenever it comes up on the news.

[Thad]

I think it's a development of the post-Fox News, post-GW Bush polarization, but I'm 28 years old so it's possible I'm looking back at my childhood with rose-tinted glasses.  It seems like Clinton drove some hard bargains but I can't think of any offhand (and Lord knows a vocal minority went after him on the flimsiest of pretenses).  I respect Bob Dole a great deal, though I wouldn't have voted for him, and he never had a chance against Clinton precisely because he was a moderate.

[Pacobird]

This is probably a naive question, but how exactly did the country's political dialog come to this?

Resurgence of the religious right dovetailing with a complete collapse of unions as a political entity (with a healthy dollop of abortion/racialized wedge issues).  Libertarian psychopaths are hardly new (we used to call them "landed nobility") but the big shift was when it stopped being a movement of Chiefs with No Indians.

I had some pithy things to say about it but they did not come out anywhere near as witty and insightful as they sounded in my head, so

(also, baby boomers are awful and have always been awful, even when they were hippies)

[Brentai]

Yeah we can pretty much blame this all on the Baby Boomer generation.  There's no clearer example than looking at both Bushes nearly back to back; the former grew up pre-War and learned how to compromise and even take personal setbacks for the greater good, and the latter was born in 1946 and grew up so fucking entitled that he considers the time someone called him a bad name his personal low, not the time he let a major American city get destroyed which  prompted the name calling.

tl;dr: kill your parents.

[Mongrel]

The funny thing is that even if the Boomer generation isn't really to blame, they are totally going to be remembered that way.

[Brentai]

Well, we have a bill.

My favorite part is the reductions committee.  Instead of voting to cut Medicare, we've set up a group of people who we can throw under the bus and blame 100% for inevitably cutting Medicare.

Stay classy, government.

[Mongrel]

I think this is the moment when some Democrats are truly going to start sharpening their knives for Obama. Any great compromise leaves everyone mad. Unfortunately that seems to be the case here (note that I don't actually think this was a compromise. The Teabaggers practically moved the fucking goalposts three counties over while everybody else scrambled to stay in the game).

Over/under on how long it takes before we start seeing a leftist extreme bunch? I suspect we still have to starve and impoverish a few million more folks before comfort levels are sufficiently trashed, but we're well on the way.

[Thad]

My favorite part is the reductions committee.  Instead of voting to cut Medicare, we've set up a group of people who we can throw under the bus and blame 100% for inevitably cutting Medicare.

Depends.  Sometimes Dems on committees are less likely to cave than the party at large.

Course, as I understand it if the committee can't agree it just gets sent back to the full Senate, but that means the committee doesn't get the blame.

I think this is the moment when some Democrats are truly going to start sharpening their knives for Obama.

Eh.  We've had a handful of No votes, and some grousing, but I doubt we'll see anything more than that.  No way will there be a primary challenge.

Any great compromise leaves everyone mad. Unfortunately that seems to be the case here (note that I don't actually think this was a compromise.

Oh, it was a compromise.  Between right-wing Republicans and extreme, far-right Republicans.

Over/under on how long it takes before we start seeing a leftist extreme bunch?

Depends what you mean.  In Congress?  Don't hold your breath.  Kucinich represents the liberal end of the Democratic Party, and Sanders is an avowed socialist, but I don't see either of them representing actual "leftist extremism".

If you're thinking more in terms of liberals supporting a third-party candidate, I don't see that happening either.  Everyone's still gunshy after Nader's scapegoating in 2000, and the last wave of grassroots liberal activism got us Obama.  The grassroots are FUCKING DEMORALIZED right now.

I don't see liberal backlash starting a movement.  I see liberal disappointment dismantling the movement.

[Mongrel]

I don't know if it will go through the Democratic party or not, but as long as the right keep pushing harder and harder, at some point there's going to be some really nasty anti-right-wing backlash.

However, as stated earlier, more grandmothers needs to be Snidely Whiplash'd before the current wave of inertia is broken.

[Thad]

Oh, I still think the Tea Party's going to be smacked down in '12.  But that's not going to make the Republican Establishment more reasonable, help the Democratic Establishment grow spines, or teach Obama how to play poker.

[Mongrel]

Oh, I still think the Tea Party's going to be smacked down in '12.

I don't know about that.

What's that old Mencken quote about nobody ever going broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American consumer? Because at this point the Tea Party still has the best marketing machine out there, no matter that it operates on the other side of reality.

[Thad]

But in the end they can't overcome the fact that they're batshit fucking crazy.  Most people are not impressed with how this thing went down, and while there's plenty of blame to go around most people aren't saying good things about the Tea Party.

And the trouble with running your campaign on "You need to boot that guy who promised to fix everything and then failed to deliver in two years" is, well...

[Royal☭]

The Tea Party was never that popular. They only one because progressives and leftists had no one to vote for, so they didn't vote.