KThug pares what happened on 11/4/14 down to its bare essentials:
...So, lying and fear-mongering and sabotage. Which, let no one forget, are not the Conservative means to any coherent policy ends but have become Conservative ends in and of themselves.
But if Republicans have been so completely wrong about everything, why did voters give them such a big victory?
Part of the answer is that leading Republicans managed to mask their true positions. Perhaps most notably, Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, managed to convey the completely false impression that Kentucky could retain its impressive gains in health coverage even if Obamacare were repealed.
But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.
This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.
Or, as Dr. Krugman's extremely well-paid and critic-proof colleague at the New York Times put it in his imaginative Alternate History of Conservatism:
Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party...
6 comments:
Human nature being something of a reliable guide, we can safely predict that when the obstruction and sabotage that has earned the Republicans what they wanted through the entirety of human memory begins to fail them they will respond with ever greater and more heaping doses of sabotage and obstruction until they are again placated.
This strategy works to slake the lust for blood in vampires, amirite.
As senator Brownback eases back in to his Koch industries Governors seat for a 2nd term after destroying Kansas' economy. When he runs out of Federal Medicaid funds too balance his budget short fall.
Kansans can be proud they are and always were Republican.
The dignity they hold in school closings.
The businesses that took those tax breaks that will need a collapsed bridge to get their goods to market.
When the EPA isn't around to ensure clean rivers and those up stream pollute because it is profitable.
Can't wait to se what happens in the next years drought when Nebraska uses too much water and Kansas isn't satisfied this time with just a lawsuit, but decides to take those 2nd Amendment solutions against Nebraska ranchers and farmers for leaving Kansas dry.
I am positive the republican congress will have be right on the resolve and compromise.
I have to say, voters have wasted 6 years of my life since electing the GOP controlled House and now the senate.
If the 1 percent is more interested in China and India.
Are they done with America?
I mean, do these filthy wealthy corporate titans just had enough of democracy. Have they allowed the imagination of the country to run too far into actually believing that the Constitution actually applies to us?
Isn't this thing of self governing too pesky for the Multi-nationals corporations
Did GW Bush let it slip out when he supposedly joked that, running this country would be a heck of a lot easier if it were a dictatorship"?
Then I read somewhere that about one third of Americans voted.
Just a bit too pesky indeed.
Dr. Krugman is the only mainstream media columnist to speak truth. At least there is one that does.
//If the 1 percent is more interested in China and India.//
Oh, yes. They are screwing them as well. They helped elect a rabid mass murderer as the prime minister in India.
//Dr. Krugman is the only mainstream media columnist to speak truth. At least there is one that does.//
He has been reading driftglass.
@CM at 9:01AM
Indeed! Mr. Glass deserves a bigger forum.
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