GOP’s head-exploding op-ed: Boehner, McConnell pretend they’ll end gridlock they created

[applegrove]

GOP’s head-exploding op-ed: Boehner, McConnell pretend they’ll end gridlock they created

by Simon Maloy at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/06/gops_head_exploding_op_ed_boehner_mcconnell_pretend_theyll_end_gridlock_they_created/

"SNIP.........................



I tried to read John Boehner’s and Mitch McConnell’s post-victory Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning. I really did. Unfortunately, I only got one paragraph in before my head exploded.

Americans have entrusted Republicans with control of both the House and Senate. We are humbled by this opportunity to help struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks.

It’s that “incapable of performing even basic tasks” bit that left my poor cranium lying in pieces on the floor. What you’re seeing here is the final stage of the Republicans’ long-term strategy for the Obama era. Step one was to make government incapable of performing basic tasks. Step two was to campaign on government dysfunction and lay all the blame for it on President Obama and Harry Reid. Step three is to promise that, after four years of gumming up the works, they’re here to fix the problem they created.

And it worked, so bully for them! But there’s a whole lot of chutzpah wrapped up in the one little phrase. The government shutdown of 2013, the debt-limit fiascoes, the fiscal cliff – everything that comes to mind when you think of the recent inability of government to perform basic functions is attributable to the GOP’s unwillingness to actually let government function, which was motivated by antipathy towards the president and his policies. The inability to pass bills on major issues? The House GOP said out loud and in public that they weren’t going to legislate because it would make them look bad. We all lived through it, we all saw it play out in real time. The fact that Republicans paid no political price for literally preventing the government from functioning last October is galling enough, now they’re claiming to be the antidote to the poison they administered.



.........................SNIP"

[randys1]

1. The hate is coming

[roamer65]

2. Three words for the Orange Oompa Loompa and The Toad.

GO FUCK YOURSELVES.

[meow2u3]

3. Boner and McTurtle remind me of...

arsonists who want to hailed as heroes for putting out the fire they set.

[KingCharlemagne]

7. A very apt metaphor. Sincere hat tip. I still can't get over the irony that

those who shut down the government were actually rewarded for their effrontery. Boggles the mind, it does.

[windje]

10. or like - Chris Christie

picking up the cones and then paying atty Randy Mastro $7 mil of NJ taxpayer money tell you 'you're a good boy!'

[gratuitous]

4. Well of course it worked

You think the billion-dollar advertising industry is a complete fraud? Shovel enough money into publicity, and folks will even believe that "2½ Men" is good television! With the full-time connivance of a major television network and its legion of cable subsidiaries, the billions of dollars spent by the likes of David and Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson was plenty enough to persuade millions of citizens that Republican obstructionism was just a trick of the light, and that if President Obama had only been a little more accommodating, we'd all have pet unicorns farting out fruit-flavored rainbows. So let's hand the keys to the car to the drunk driver who's steered the car off the cliff a half dozen times already; this time it will really be different.

Of course, it won't be different. But will our media bulldogs notice, or say anything about it? Holding your breath is contraindicated.

[underpants]

5. We have met the enemy and they is us.... No HIM!!! We'll fix it!

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Guess what?

There is somebody in the White House eager to play along.

I like Obama, but for 6 years he has been desperately trying to work with the Fucknutz Taliban Party. He will not turn down the opportunity.

[Voice for Peace]

8. I think the next two years may be disastrous for them

They are not bright enough to make it work, or honest
enough to make it good. Expect to see dark things slithering
out from many directions, and appearing on television.

I feel I must hold on to my hat; but that somewhere and
somehow there will be true progress. Maybe it will take
this control of Congress for the ugliness of their policies
to be on display. No more blaming Obama for anything,
but they will keep trying. They are not bright people.

[Martin Eden]

9. GOP Strategy = "a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks"

Mike Lofgren (Republican staffer who quit after 28 years) wrore after the Debt ceiling debacle in 2011:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.