The Asshole Party*

From Brother Charles Pierce:

Senate Republicans Kill a Bill to Expand Veterans' Benefits

WASHINGTON -- It's not until you watch it happen close up that the way things do not get done in the World's Legislative Body becomes well and truly nauseating. This afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought forth a carefully crafted bill to provide $21 billion in new veterans benefits over the next decade. These included medical benefits, education benefits, and job-training. It contained 26 provisions that came from the Republican members of the Veterans Affairs Committee, which Sanders chairs. It was so wide-ranging that it contained a provision that would eliminate a rule prohibiting the Veterans Administration from covering in vitro fertilization on behalf of veterans whose wounds prevent them from conceiving a child in the usual manner. There was a time, and not so long ago, when both parties would fall all over themselves to help America's veterans. How many platitudes are we going to hear on the stump between now and November about America's Heroes and Our Wounded Warriors? This bill was a put up or shut up moment.

It failed.

Badly.

Only two Republicans were willing to vote with Sanders, and the bill died a procedural death. The final straw was an attempt by Republican legislators to hang an amendment onto the bill calling for increased sanctions on Iran. There was also some cheap bullshit thrown around about the budget, most notably by Senator Jefferson Davis Beauregard Sessions of Alabama. There also was, spectacularly, some debate time taken up by, believe it or not, Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!

...

These are not people who can be cajoled or tricked or persuaded into doing the right thing ever.  These are not people who can be compromised with.   These are not people with whom you can have a "debate" in any meaningful sense.  At the end of the day, the GOP is just a party full of loud, bigoted, pig-ignorant assholes, who have been gathered under one roof and weaponized with money and media because, as it turns out, there are just enough loud, bigoted, pig-ignorant assholes wandering the land to wreck the country if they all really put their backs into it.

And some really rich, really terrible people really, really want them to put their backs into it.

As one disreputable pundit has repeatedly pointed out, we have once again become a house divided against itself, and such a structure cannot stand.

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.

* The worst of my typos have been corrected.  Usually I let them go, but I banged this post out very fast and it went up full of really distracting verbal potholes.  Thanks to commmentor Psychoticus Rex for calling this to my attention.