You may have noticed that almost all recently former Republicans and Very
Savvy Pundits continue to operate under the same delusion: that somewhere,
buried under all those layers of lies, betrayals of alleged First Principles and
treason, there remains a tiny ember of decency, still aglow in hearts of
Republicans.
Which is why this is the face they make every time the Republican party
predictably plumbs some new depth of perfidy.
And why this is the face we on the Left make when they make that
face.
This time around it's about the debt ceiling.
From an exchange between MSNBC contributor, Bulwark founder
and 30-year Hate Radio veteran, Charlie Sykes and obscure Conservative
fundamentalist National Review crank turned New York Times op-ed columnist David French.
The subject is the debt ceiling.
Sykes: Speaking of these strange sort-of reversals in American
politics, I wrote in my newsletter today about the apparent plan of House
Republicans to, uh, play a game of fiscal chicken with, uh, raising the debt
limit.
driftglass: What do you mean "reverals"? The GOP has played
chicken with the debt ceiling since Christ was a corporal.
Sykes: You and I are old enough to remember that this has
been around for a long time. Pre-Trump, right? This goes back to
2011 when it was a complete and utter disaster. A complete
failure. Even hinting at the possibility of debt default will tank the
markets and raise interest rates and yet they keep doing it.
driftglass: Well I'm not as old Mr. Sykes, nor was I ever a star
of Hate Radio like Mr. Sykes was, but I do remember that, long before 2011, a
bomb-throwing "disruptor" and one of Mr. Sykes' heroes (until five minutes
age) named Newt Gingrich, holding the debt ceiling hostage as one of his very
first acts of political terrorism when the GOP took power in the House back in
1995.
It was House Resolution 2586, which was amended by the Republican-controlled
Senate, was passed on November 09, 1995 and was vetoed by president Bill
Clinton. It was a legislative threat by Republicans to blow up the world
economy unless Bill Clinton agreed to the massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security, education, the environment and other social program that
would have been necessary to meet the Republican's draconian balanced budget
requirement that were part of the legislation. H.R. 2586 also would have
significantly crippled the government's ability to regulate the private
sector, and included a bunch of other horribles that have always been on the
GOP's wish list.
From Wikipedia, which is freely available to everyone, including Charlie
Sykes:
Since a budget for the new fiscal year was not approved, on October 1 the
entire federal government operated on a continuing resolution authorizing
interim funding for departments until new budgets were approved. The
continuing resolution was set to expire on November 13 at midnight, at
which time non-essential government services were required to cease
operations in order to prevent expending funds that had not yet been
appropriated. Congress passed a continuing resolution for funding and a
bill to limit debt, which Clinton vetoed as he denounced them as "backdoor
efforts" to cut the budget in a partisan manner.
On November 13, Republican and Democratic leaders, including Vice
President Al Gore, Dick Armey, and Bob Dole, met to try to resolve the
budget and were unable to reach an agreement.
Long story short, the government shut down, an Gingrich thought the public
would flock to his blow-it-all-up revolution.
They did not.
Instead:
We now return to Messers Sykes and French, already in progress:
Sykes: Frankly, David [French] it strikes me now -- I'm
not sure I fully recognized it back in 2011 -- but is there anything less
actually Conservative than talking about reneging on debts you are obligated
to repay, or flirting with the idea of shutting down the government that
you've sworn an oath to run. I mean, there's nothing Conservative
it. I mean, it's radical. Burn it all down. It's Tea
Party/Jacobin. But there's nothing Conservative about even, y'know,
hinting at the possibility of being a deadbeat on the national debt.
French: Well, and it's unconstitutional...
For the record, this kind of "But don't they realize...?!?!" posturing is
all over the ranks of the Very Savvy Pundit class like a rash, because they're all, once
again, surprised that the lunatic with the gun who always pull the trigger
might actually pull this new trigger.
So here, for future reference, I will repeat once again why the Republican
party is once again doing this, why no one has any business being surprised by it, and why Liberal predictions of Republican perfidy have always been so
depressingly accurate, while America;s Very Savvy Pundits have always been so
predictably, egregiously and hilariously wrong.
Because we have never made the mistake of underestimating how deeply
Republicans hate this country.
Here's a small sampling of my observations over the decades.
Me in
2005:
And the rank and file of the GOP ain’t gonna hold Dubya to account for
any-fucking-thing ever, because they are, by-and-large, kinda stupid. And at
a visceral level, most of them really, REALLY hate this country in their own
way as fiercely as any Wahabi Muslim. Listening to professional liars like
Limbaugh or Hume or Coulter year after year has left them with a kind of
Mendacity Melanoma. Riddled with a cancer of lies so bone-deep that they
have developed a life-threatening allergy to anything that has the faintest
whiff of fresh air and Facts.
Also me, also in
2005:
So it's not exactly Big News that Red State Republicans hate this country
and want to see it vivisected and replaced with a Greater Jesusland...
From me in
2009:
Locally and anecdotally, I know maybe one gen-u-ine “Das Capital”-quoting
Marxist. He wears a suit, owns property and cheerfully works with both
unions and conservative company owners in a spirit of pragmatic equanimity;
whatever he reads at night, by day he is in the getting-shit-done business
and is very well-respected.
Now consider what an exponentially ever more degenerate and depraved arc the
Right has been hurtling down during that same period [30 years, then.
40 years by now]. How many Republicans of the First Water are now
anti-science bigots? Bible-thumping idiots? Wreckers? Stooges of the
oligarchs?
How many of them are either racists, or are cravenly willing to pander to
racists in exchange for power?
How many of them hate this country? Really, really hate the complexity of
it? The diversity? The built-in checks and balances? The premeditated
secularism and tolerance burned right into our motherboard?
How many of them applauded as Bill Clinton was slandered and destroyed
because he was in the wrong Party? How many cheered when Newt Gingrich gave
the order for Republicans to grab every microphone in the world and scream
“Liberals are Traitors” in unison year after year?
How many of them sent every dime they could scrape together to Christopathic
hateporn merchants like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?
How many of them creamed their Ronald Reagan Underoos at the thought of the
Cheney Torture Administration flossing their ass-cracks with the United
States Constitution?
Millions of them, that’s how many.
As this country was put up on blocks and stripped down to the rivets,
millions of them applauded. And bellowed. And jizzed themselves blind.
Millions and millions of people who hate this country so much they’ve
seceded from it in everything but name. Hate it so much they invented their
own Wrathful Swine God who has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, but
everything to do with feeding their own rage and ignorance back to them
tarted up in cherry-picked scripture.
Hate the unbearable Liberalism of reality itself so passionately that the
billionaires who underwrite their fascism invented a whole new and
ludicrously biased media which exists solely to externalize and echo back to
the pig people the voices in their heads.
And finally (and appropriately, given the subject) me in
2013:
The Single Virtue of a Government Shutdown: Because every few years
our Mainstream Media allows so much gooey, Brooksian, "Both Sides" gunk to
build up on our nation's cerebral cortex that becomes necessary to slice
through the sheath of Beltway bilge-slinger lies and remind the American
people just how deeply Conservatives hate this country.
I picked these examples specifically because they are all pre-Trump.
All back from the Before Time when men like David French and Charlie Sykes and
hundreds more like them were making a fine, fat living calling people like us
who wrote such things crackpot alarmists.
And so it goes.
Burn The Lifeboats
