They Built This -- UPDATE

In which I make Four!-Count-'em!-Four!, absolute, mortal-lock predictions about the upcoming mole-rat bad-whiskey bar-fight over how much of the American economy and government the GOP will be permitted to destroy, how much of the middle class they will be permitted to shaft and how many poor, young, sick and elderly Americans they will be permitted to boot-stomp in order to achieve their goal of making the Kenyan Usurper cry.

But first I have to quote a couple of regulars as proxies for all of those recently outcast Conservatives who now make their living running around screaming "OMG!  OMG! Republicans are, like, Craaazy! Amiright?"

From David Frum:

All in all, it's hard to see any positive outcome emerging for Republicans from this confrontation. Yet the party is charging forward anyway. Why?

The short answer is a breakdown in the party's ability to govern itself. It can't think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss.

Republicans who want to fight smarter are called squishes; Republicans who wish to fight less are called RINOs—and both have been hunted pretty near to extinction. Instead of effective opposition, we see those doomed spasms. And out of these spasms, Obamacare looks sturdier than ever—and any hope of negotiating to fix its worst elements seemingly further out of reach than ever.

From Andrew Sullivan:

This is not about Obamacare. It is not even about politics. It is about a form of revolt against the very country they live in.

My predictions?

1. No matter how bad things get, no Conservative will admit to the simple fact that the GOP is performing exactly as they designed and built it to perform.


2. No matter how bad things get, Professional Beltway "Both Siderists" will continue to opine furiously about the intransigence of "both sides" and how "Washington" is broken.  


3. No matter how patently ludicrous Professional Beltway "Both Siderists" claims become, not one of them will suffer any reduction in professional status due to their non-stop lying.  In fact, the most intractable of the Denialists will find their prospects considerably enhanced during whatever brief respite we have between this round of GOP sabotage and the next.


4. Most especially, at no point during the upcoming wingnut mole-rat bad-whiskey bar-fight will anyone like Andrew Sullivan or David Frum or anyone else within shouting distance of a network microphone or national op-ed column bother to point out that, once again, the Left was right about the Right all along.

As if to Sharpie Three-Line Underscore point #4, digby points out (h/t Alert Reader IR) how Your Establishment Media just skips right the fuck over the last several years of spiraling Conservative madness and increasingly frantic warnings from the Left to point out how awful it all is (emphasis added):

Premature anti-freakshow

by digby

I said this on twitter earlier, but  realized I needed to provide some examples. Many of the mainstream pundits who eye-rolled and tut-tutted bloggers and activists for failing to understand the ways of the world are now commonly recycling ideas we were discussing half a decade ago. 

Bill Keller:

What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear. But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ’60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator’s faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman’s vow to “levitate” the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America’s credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

You don't say.

Remember when they all had the vapors over Marcos calling his bookAmerican Taliban? Check out the Village Miss Manners Ruth Marcus calling the same folks "tiny terrorists"?

Ruth Marcus...

I won't even mention those who spilled gallons of ink deriding liberal bloggers for being radical partisans just a few years back who are now lauded as oracles for their columns writing exactly what those liberal radicals were writing at the time.

I guess this is one of those times to remind yourself that nobody is ever rewarded for being the first to be right. I certainly won't hold my breath waiting for an apology.  In the end it's a good thing.  Still you have to wonder what might have happened if the mainstream media and the liberal establishment had paid closer attention before it got to this point. We were running around with our hair on fire and they told us hippies to go take a shower and get a haircut...

For the historically and analogically-impaired, let me risk stating the blindingly obvious by reminding everyone that nobody ever handed the SDS a global economy to use as their personal pinata. 

Nobody ever came within a skajillion miles of electing Abby Hoffman to anything, much less a position of real power within the Worlds Greatest Deliberative Body.

And Vietnam really was an unspeakably awful disaster.

And just for the Hell of it, maybe someone within slapping distance of Mr. Keller can ask him how he always managed to find room on the op-ed pages of the New York Times for the likes of Bill Kristol and David Fucking Brooks, but never someone like digby?