Save your Confederate money, boys, the South gon’ rise again
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this scene: Yesterday, in Washington, a group of angry white people—it was billed as the “Million Vet March” but numbered in the hundreds, maybe the thousands, and who knows how many were actual veterans—led by Tea Party-aligned Texas senator Ted Cruz and former half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin, marched on the Lincoln and World War II memorials, tearing down the barricades and demanding that President Obama reopen these sites, which, of course, are closed because of the shutdown that Cruz initiated two weeks ago. As Henry Blodget, the CEO of Business Insider, tweeted:
Do I have this right? The Republicans closed a war memorial so they could heroically break into it?
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This week that attitude has taken us to the precipice of the abyss. And once again, its epicenter is firmly within the Deep South, within a political party that celebrates its own radicalism and ignorance. Check out this interview with Norm Ornstein, a scholar with the quite-conservative American Enterprise Institute who has been critical of congressional Republicans:
But even there, you know, another piece that I wrote a couple of weeks back now on how there are five Republican parties, a House and Senate and presidential one, but also a Southern and non-Southern party. The bottom line was that it’s the House party and the Southern party, which are the dominant forces out there; they are the ones driving the dialogue. And the fact is that in the House party you’ve got people who come from homogeneous echo chambers in their districts and are concerned, most of them, only about primaries. The Southern party has a very different worldview from the rest of the country, and is not moved by broader national opinion. It is much more overtly hostile to Obama, and I suspect that race is a part of it.
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As I write this, there’s new talk of a deal in the Senate to open the government and raise the debt ceiling through January. How the Tea Party faction in the House of Representatives responds, and whether Boehner yet again bends to its will, remains to be seen. However it plays out, until this particular fever is broken, until the attitudes that propelled the South to secede 153 years ago are again placed in check, our democracy is imperiled.
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http://blogs.orlandoweekly.com/index.php/bloggytown/old-confederacy-new-tea-party-government-shutdown/
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