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How did we get to where a pack of Congressional terrorists can threaten total chaos? One More Time [1]

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Date: 2023-01-20

Charles P. Pierce, author of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

At the risk of belaboring the point, what is happening in Washington today is not something that should be a surprise to anyone. We’ve been here before. A bunch of Republicans are threatening to blow up the country if their demands aren’t met.

Again.

It’s too late to call them extremists — they are now mainstream in the GOP. It’s the entire party that has gone round the twist. Consider these words from Charles P. Pierce, the Cassandra for our times:

..There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government… ...We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show. We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government...

You only need to change a couple of names and a Democratic win to make this seem like it was written today, instead of October 1, 2013 .

..We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert Jim Jordan and Michele Bachmann Marjorie Taylor Greene have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies addressing climate and failing infrastructure is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble. We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons...

Nothing has changed, other than that they openly brag about it. Their base demands it and took up arms over it on January 6.

..This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way."...

From February 6, 2018:

..Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.

The mainstream media is useless/helpless today. They simply have no way to just say that the Republican Party is an existential threat to America. It might be a matter of actual fact (January 6 and its supporters all through the GOP made that clear), but they can’t bring themselves to say so, because it would be ‘partisan’ and would show ‘liberal bias’. They sit there in press conferences with people from Fox ‘News’ and treat them like a legitimate press operation.

It’s like they’re watching a fire burn down the country, but refuse to distinguish between firefighters and arsonists. They’re just two groups otherwise alike who have differences about the appropriate way to deal with fire.

In 2013, Pierce was not cheerful about the prospects going forward — and that was before Trump came down the escalator.

…What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing….

emphasis added

Where do we go from here? Good question. There are signs that enough people are starting to have seen enough of the GOP to reject it: the red wave fizzled in November 2022, Democrats gained seats in the Senate, and barely lost the House. The economy is starting to turn improve as inflation subsides; unemployment is at record lows. The maniacs in the House may get pushback from the oligarchs bankrolling them if they crash the global economy — although the super-rich are not as bright as they’d like to think they are, right Elon?

Anyway, I’m bringing up this blast from the past because A) it’s still one of the most accurate takes on what the Republican Party is, and B) to make those who claim no one could have predicted what we are seeing now explain where the Hell they’ve been for the last 40+ years, when it started.

Only the truly naive can be truly surprised. Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else… ...The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

emphasis added

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/20/2148200/-How-did-we-get-to-where-a-pack-of-Congressional-terrorists-can-threaten-total-chaos-One-More-Time

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