Sunday Afternoon Reading

The Party of Cruelty was written by James Howard Kunstler last week after the HCR was almost a week ago, but I just saw it yesterday. It is a long read, but a truly excellent retort to the apocalyptic fear and loathing ramped up by repubs — not just during the process, but also afterwards. Fear and loathing that is now being expressed in physical threats and in property destruction aimed against lawmakers who voted for this. Make sure you go over there to read the entire thing:

It was amusing to see the Republican party inveigh against health insurance reform as if they were a synod of Presbyterian necromancers girding the nation for a takeover by the spawn of hell. This was the same gang, by the way, who championed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, then regarded as the most reckless giveaway of public funds in human history. Along the way, they enlisted an army of nay-sayers representing everything dark, disgraceful, and ignorant in the American character. If the Republicans keep going this way, they’ll end up with something worse than Naziism: a party that hates everything but believes in absolutely nothing. […]

[…]I hope that Mr. Obama’s party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest. […]

Democrats won’t go this far to criticize Republicans, but it is really clear that in getting themselves utterly wrapped up in just obstructing everything to score political points, they are not getting any of the people’s business done. And they don’t see this as a problem — which is the sign of folks who were never interested in governing in the first place. Which is the heart of the repeal and replace strategy, right? More political point scoring, no thought to the many solutions now made law and no coherent replacement out there that does anywhere near what this law now does.

But it is clear that republicans no longer have anything to say about real governing goals — and as long as all they’ve got is fear and loathing they won’t.