A Reverse Braveheart

Just how crazy, insane, and irrational does the Republican House have to be to get the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal to write a scathing denunciation of it? Read the editorial, it is devastating:

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible. […]

After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago, and the chances of Mr. McConnell becoming Majority Leader in 2013 are declining.

At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.

It is amazing that the GOP decided to assist President Obama in his campaign narrative that GOP is only interested in protecting the rich and obstructing the President, all the while the middle class needs help in a sluggish economy. He has been doing good in that regard this fall, as recent polls released yesterday showed. But now he gets an amazing assist in having his opposition actually perform the role he would have them play, and to perfection.

At a Republican House caucus meeting yesterday night, some fool compared Boehner to William Wallace and that this latest obstruction was a “Braveheart moment.” And this fool was not being ironic. Dana Milbank called out the irony:

“Braveheart” is a conspicuously poor choice for the House GOP.

For one thing, the Republicans are, if anything, in a reverse-“Braveheart” position: In this fight, they are the nobles putting down the overtaxed peasants. For another, the Scots they are emulating were defeated and slaughtered, and Wallace was captured (possibly betrayed by his own side), then drawn and quartered.