Attack of the 50 Foot Mamzer

The Shrill One makes some excellent points in today's NYT:

...Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

He even locates the source of the dysfunction. Care to take a guess about which Party is primarily responsible for pulling down the temple?

...
The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

The problem -- the real, terrifying problem -- is that there is no one left on the Right to reason with, and there is almost no one left on the Left who dares to say that out loud.

And all because the money for shutting up, going along and selling us all out to the malefactors of great wealth is just too good.

Since the 80s, the "Government is the problem" GOP has made it perfectly clear that their long-term objective is to:

Destroy.

The.

Evil.

Gummint.

By any means necessary.

Win an election, by hook or crook...and Republicans break all land-speed records to loot the place outright and tow the wreck of whatever is left the Impound Lot of History. Lose...and Republicans stand on the Overpass of History lobbing cinder blocks into traffic.

And they can to this because they pay absolutely no penalty for; because their moral imbecile minions actual delight in it and rewards them for it. These millions of jerks -- the Pig People -- who giggle as the world melts. Who smirked as New Orleans drowned. Who reliably whine out the single biggest Big Lie in Modern American political history -- that "Liberals are just as bad" -- when they get cause red-handed gloating over the suffering of the poor and the weak in another fascist circle jerk of orgiastic sadism and misanthropy.

These are the fruits of the 30 years Conservative Base Breeding program designed to produce a crop of berserker wingnuts who regard any Democratic Administration as de facto illegitimate, any Liberal as a dangerous internal enemy to be crushed, and even the most modest attempts to govern responsibly as something (and I am quoting now from a conversation I had recently with an otherwise-pleasant Conservative colleague) straight out "of some Marxist Central Planner's playbook!"

A United State government that has been render so rotted, ineffectual, debt-crippled and idiot-ridden that, outside of occasionally pouring fire on some country on the far side of the Earth, it is incapable of taking any action whatsoever seems like a tragedy and a disaster to people on the Left like Paul Krugman, because they still have a social conscience.

Which is a blessing, but also a terrible blind spot.

Because no matter how many times they say it -- and no matter how many times their actions prove it -- we still seem incapable of comprehending that, for the Right, a government that has been methodically kneecapped to the point of complete dysfunctional -- where a fuckstick like Holy Joe Lieberman is made 30 pieces of silver richer every time he nicks another of democracy's arteries -- smells like Victory.